Blizzard Entertainment announced Tuesday a "spawning" feature for Starcraft 2 that will give Starter Edition(free Battle.net version) or Wings of Liberty owners a temporary upgrade to Heart of the Swarm account by partying up with a friend.
The spawning feature was available years ago for Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness and the original Starcraft: Brood War as long the player had the original retail disc.
Users who have the Starter Edition of Starcraft 2 can join a friend who owns Wings of Liberty and experience some of the features of that account. If the group are joined by an owner of Heart of the Swarm, they'll be upgraded to that level.
Spawned players will have access to all vs. A.I. modes including team games, ranked and unranked team ladder matches, all custom game maps and the complete arcade.
Of course there are limitations.
Those who have spawned can not access the single-player campaign, social features like clans and groups and only one race is playable. The only race that will be available is the Terran as of the announcement though Blizzard's production director Chris Sigaty told GameSpot in an interview that all three races will be playable till Sunday.
According to Sigaty, the reason for implementing came through many people not knowing about the Starter Edition and improvements in technology.
"And Starter Edition is something that we've actually had for a while, but we have done, being self-critical, a poor job of making people aware of," said Sigaty. "Now that we've had the bandwidth to do this, it just felt like the right time now that we've finally had a little bit of air to breathe into this feature."
Released in March, Heart of the Swarm is the second part of a planned StarCraft 2 trilogy and went on to sell 1.1 million copies worldwide in the first 48 hours.
Watch Blizzard's spawning explanation by community manager Cloaken video below.