SANTA MONICA, California—Before giving us a world-premiere look at StarCraft Remastered's gameplay, the franchise's holders at Blizzard rattled off a few major rules for how the game would be made. "Blend classic with modern." "Community's voice." One of the buzz phrases made Blizzard Classic Games Producer Pete Stilwell laugh: "Don't be disruptive." "That's how I was told to say, 'Don't fuck it up,'" he said.

Stilwell had already set that PR guidance aflame when he loudly declared his development team's mantra of preserving original games' systems and mechanics at all costs. "We're not here to change classics from a gameplay perspective," Stilwell said. "We're not here to fuck with that. We say, 'don't fuck it up,' all the time. Do not ruin this game."

The Blizzard Classic team appears to have pulled that off with a game that, for better or for worse, plays, feels, and, in a few cases, looks just like the 1998 version. StarCraft Remastered's announced price, $14.99/£12.99, reflects that aesthetic, as it has mostly been built to slap new paint on old mechanics. But executing that "plays exactly the same" mission—while making the new game (launching August 14 on PC and Mac) look demonstrably improved over the original and sneaking a few changes in—wasn't a complete breeze.

“No code and no art assets”

For starters, Blizzard was missing a few things. Little stuff.

"We had no code and no art assets," Blizzard 3D Art Director Brian Sousa confirmed to Ars Technica. The 2017 project's entire art pipeline was "eyeballed," Sousa said, with recovered concept artwork, sketches, and original boxes and manuals used as reference materials. Not all code was missing, as Blizzard has been issuing patches to the original game's code base for nearly 20 years. Also, a member of the sound team thankfully had backups of the original sound and voice recordings, which are now reprocessed in higher-fidelity 44,100Hz format.

In Sousa's eyes, Blizzard Classic's art team may have been better off starting from scratch to redraw every single sprite in the game. "We were green at 3D modeling," he said of the game's original development team (of which he was a member, as his Blizzard tenure dates back to 1993). Sousa described a different era in which game art teams had just begun using 3D modeling software. "We knew our work would be drawn over, anyway."

Sousa found that making the original game's art look "faithful" meant preserving serious issues with perspective. "Shadows are in the wrong places, and lighting is different across the board," he said. "But we wanted to make sure that going into StarCraft Remastered, that [players] recognize everything instantly." As a result, the HD and 4K modes' default presentation sometimes looks flat and awkward, which is more exposed without the blurrier, 640x480 pixel resolution of the original.

Blizzard Classic already announced that StarCraft Remastered will include a "make game look old" button, which I tested roughly every 20 seconds in my session. The default key binding, F5, will switch the game's graphics from new to old and back again at any time. What Blizzard hadn't made clear until this week's event is that there's another on-the-fly visual toggle, currently mapped to F7: a combination of real-time lighting and environmental effects.

Turning this on adds seven graphical passes on top of the engine, based on whichever sprites are currently live: a depth map, a brightness map, an emissive map (solely for "glowing" objects), a normal map, a specular map, and an ambient occlusion bake. Toggling these adds a little bit of GPU overhead, as do optional lighting maps on pools and "heat waves" on lava. The result won't make you believe you've gotten a truly realistic coat of paint, but it does help the older-engine medicine go down a little smoother. "It gives this 2.5-D feel," Sousa says.

(Sadly, Blizzard confirmed that a slightly older build of SC:R was at the event, and some of this extra-pass graphical oomph resulted in blown-out, inaccurate lighting and colors on certain units, particularly those in the Zerg tree. Sousa admitted that these effects are still being fine-tuned. But he also said that there's no reason to expect that they won't make the August 14 deadline.)

Pros and widescreen

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The other weird thing I noticed when tapping F5 was a jarring ratio switch from the original game's 4:3 ratio to modern monitors' 16:9. Wider monitors will be supported, as well, though Blizzard didn't confirm whether these will work beyond 21:9. When going to a wider ratio, StarCraft Remastered does not gray out or block your expanded view in any way.

"We did a lot of research and asked a lot of people about 16:9 versus 4:3," Sousa said to Ars. "We thought that was going to be the biggest problem, right? But the pros we asked about it, they all said it doesn’t really matter."

Stilwell confirmed that Blizzard's SC:R development began "18 months ago" with trips to South Korea to recruit the original game's professional players as consultants and testers. "We've been there 10 times in the past year alone," Stilwell said. The community was adamant that various issues remain untouched and even "broken" in any remaster, with the game's "automatic pathfinding" cited as the biggest example (meaning, if you tell an SCV to walk to a distant point, it will still likely take a circuitous and even incorrect route there). However, the Korean community wanted to make sure that its preferred matchmaking solutions, including Fish, be made compatible with SC:R.

As a result, Blizzard decided not to release its 1.17 patch to the original StarCraft: Brood War because its "anti-cheat" systems targeted Fish and other Korean matchmaking services. "We took a lick," Stilwell said. The game is now expanding with more language support, including its first Korean translation for the single-player campaign. Single-player mode will also receive "comic book interstitials," and these will add more visuals to the text-heavy briefings between missions. However, Blizzard wasn't ready to reveal these, and I'm anxious about the vague descriptions I heard from various staffers about how exactly they'll look.

A very interesting freebie

What I did see was a crap-ton of faithful gameplay, matched with spruced-up assets all bound by the original game's animation rates and silhouettes. SC:R hasn't magically been upgraded with bonus animation frames, and the massive boost to fidelity makes its units' runs and turns look a little herky-jerkier. (This is also why the "unit preview" window still runs at 15 frames per second, which looks a little weird in 4K.)

Sousa was happy to discover that the original code had one useful tweak up its sleeve, at least: support for more unit animation angles. Every direction a unit turns has to be redrawn, and most of the original game's units only had nine rotational angles drawn in (with seven of those flipped as mirror images to save on memory, for a total of 16 visible angles).

But some of the game's units had as many as 17 angles drawn in, reaching a total of 32 visible angles. Sousa was able to bake that support in for all units. He pointed to the long, thin Vulture bike unit on the Terran army as an example of a unit that benefits from the visual tweak this time, and, sure enough, when the bike has to turn, it no longer looks like it's weirdly warping around.

Ghost? Blizzard dodged questions about what other older titles might get the remaster treatment, other than to hint that we should probably expect more. "Classic is hiring to be a permanent team at Blizzard," Stilwell said. "Not just, 'let’s get these up on Battle.net and walk away.'" (Yes, Blizzard dodged questions about what other older titles might get the remaster treatment, other than to hint that we should probably expect more. "Classic is hiring to be a permanent team at Blizzard," Stilwell said. "Not just, 'let’s get these up on Battle.net and walk away.'" (Yes, Blizzard still calls it Battle.net .) Since I had Sousa's ear, and I knew he worked on a certain unpublished '90s game, I pushed pretty hard on one request: what about StarCraft: Ghost? "It's always a possibility!" he said before pausing. "Well, I wish it was a possibility. Ghost was a fun game. We had the multiplayer almost done. It was cool to have your ghost [facing off against] a Hydralisk. Seeing the difference in scale—everything was really cool. But the game was indefinitely shelved. Some of the levels were really neat. There'd be full-size Goliath and Siege Tanks running around, and you'd hide behind them." Sousa remembered that Ghost had been in development long enough to run into a newer slew of consoles. "[Blizzard] felt like [Ghost] wasn’t 'next-gen' enough," Sousa said. "Then we didn't wanna put out a last-gen game. It was one of those games that we wish we would've continued on. But Blizzard stands behind its games, and at that point we didn't feel like it was a Blizzard-quality title."

I also got to mess around with the updated "spectator" mode, which allowed me to zoom my camera way, way out on a 4K screen and essentially watch a much larger canvas of 1080p assets. However, this mode was buggy in the build that Blizzard brought to Santa Monica, and it had myriad completely broken UI elements. Blizzard says this mode will be ready at SC:R's launch.

The other thing I couldn't test was SC:R's editor mode, and Blizzard Classic staffers have implied that changes and revamps to that mode won't really come to light until a later patch. In particular, the team wants to fix visual glitches with the editor's ramps before releasing something to the playerbase. The game will have leaderboards and worldwide rankings at launch, and some images at the event hinted at "collections" and "seasons" coming to the online modes. But Blizzard Classic wasn't ready to explain exactly how those will work.

Other odds and ends: SC:R will boot from within Blizzard's official launcher, as opposed to the standalone EXE that StarCraft: Brood War currently operates from. The beta version I played weighed in as a 4.53GB install, but I cannot confirm whether that file size included any single-player content, which was unselectable from the main menu. Running the "remastered" version in menus brings up entirely new background art. LAN support remains entirely unchanged.

The code base is so faithful that its eventual 1.19 version will support match replays from Brood War's 1.16 version, which came out in 2009. And the biggest lesson Blizzard gleaned from April's 1.18 patch, which made the original SD version free to all players around the world, was that it had broken support for players who exceeded 300 actions-per-minute (APM). Blizzard's in-house QA team was rarely exceeding 250 APM and missed this one, which is no small bug for a game whose top players exceed 300 APM routinely. (To that end, one toggle in the menus will alert players if they drop below a certain APM count, but this wasn't working in the beta we played.)

Lastly, I have to confess: I'm just not that good at StarCraft. I'm a lapsed player who still has his original jewel cases of the '90s CDs (both original and Brood War). But I never played much online. As a teen, I fell for StarCraft as a solo RTS, and I was bummed to not get my hands on the touched-up campaign. Instead, I was pounded into the dirt by a Blizzard QA tester, which, at the very least, meant I could watch my own piddly bases be raided by massive, beautifully rendered armies. (I typed "gg" at the hands of Zerg rushes, Terran nuclear launches, and everything in between.)

Blizzard is fine with me not being its target audience—or, at least, its target player. Blizzard knows that its best StarCraft players have shifted back to SC1, and this update is meant to pay off in the broadcasting world—to make this ancient game look as sexy as possible without angering the people who keep it relevant. And while the update has its visual quirks, I really do look forward to watching more high-level SC:R play. I want to see what broadcasters do with its additional wealth of pixels. Viewers get that bonus for free, and that, more than Brood War SD, might be the most interesting freebie to come out of this project.