After almost 12 years of the release for the original StarCraft launch, Blizzard Entertainment has announced the sequel’s release date. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will be released worldwide for the PC on July 27 but only in retail; however it will be available direct from Blizzard shortly after retails release.

Mike Morhaime , CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, talked about the excitement  and enthusiasm the company is feeling, in a press release on Monday. “We’ve been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we’re excited that the time for that is almost here,” Mike Morhaime said.

“Thanks to our beta testers, we’re making great progress on the final stages of development, and we’ll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new battle.net in just a few short months.”

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is the sequel to Blizzard Entertainment’s 1998 hit StarCraft, which has been labeled by players and critics worldwide as one of the best real-time strategy games of all time. With vibrant new 3D-graphics Blizzard Entertainment hopes this one will be just as big of a hit as the first.

After many, many years Starcraft 2 has finally reached it’s gamers. To an extent, anyway. The BETA of Starcraft 2 went open to select Battle .NET users today. The highly anticipated game is the next to be released from Blizzard, a company which has had its resources focused on the highly popular World Of Warcraft since the early 2000′s. The BETA is 1.6GB and has the following system requirements:

* Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1/Windows 7
* 2.2 Ghz Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon processor
* 1 GB system RAM/1.5 GB for Vista and Windows 7
* 128 MB NVidia GeForce 6600 GT/ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video card
* 1024×768 minimum display resolution
* 4 GB free hard space (Beta)
* Broadband connection