One of the most anticipated games of the year, Starcraft 2 - Wings of Liberty, has finally been released to the masses. This latest installment of Blizzard’s award winning Starcraft franchise comes after 12 long years since its predecessor. No doubt a well developed game, Starcraft 2, like all other PC games to be released so far, is not perfect – judging by the mails we have received , there seem to be at least some people who are having trouble getting the game to run. As usual, here’s our routine troubleshooting article for Starcraft 2 – we hope to address common issues players around the globe seem to be having with this immensely popular title. Note that this article is a work in progress – more fixes will be added as they are discovered and note that some of the mentioned solutions may not work for all hardware configurations.

Cannot install StarCraft 2 or can’t load the game

Some folks have run into various issues when trying to get the game to launch. It some times won’t install, the installer will exit with an error or may hang during the installation process. Even if you do get the game to install, sometimes you will have trouble trying to launch it. The game will simply do nothing after the main exe is clicked. Here’s a workaround you can try to solve similar issues:

  1. Create a new folder in your hard disk drive.
  2. Go to computer->Organize->Folder and search options->View and make sure ‘Show hidden files and folders’ is selected.
  3. Copy all files from the Starcraft 2 DVD (either from mounted  image or physical drive in tray. If you are using Daemon Tools and can’t see all files, try opening the image with WinRAR) in to the folder you just created.
  4. Run the SC2 installer from the copy in hard disk drive.

Note that on certain hardware configurations, the installer will take a long time to complete.

Save issues – Cannot load savegames

The games save system does not appear to be working for some. From what I have seen, this issue is common on various pirated copies of SC2 that are floating around in file sharing networks. There is however a workaround for the saved games loading issues.

  1. Navigate to your Documents directory and locate the Starcraft 2 subdirectory.
  2. Navigate to the save directory.
  3. Here you will see a list of saved games files. Double click on any of these files and the game should launch and start loading the particular save you clicked on (SC2 save files which have .SC2Save extension are associated with the game executable).

Unable to create a Battle.net account

I’m not sure if this is fixed yet but Blizzard’s online registration pages for Battle.net seemed to experience issues a while ago. The last step in reg process appeared to be broken and apparently some people have got random errors when trying to submit. If you encounter such issues, the problem is really at Blizzard’s end and you’ll have to wait for a fix. However, you can try to bypass the issue by filling all fields in the last page, including fields that are not marked mandatory and submitting the form again.  

No single player campaign or skirmish mode, black screen errors, etc

Again, these problems are commonly seen in the leaked, pirated version of the game that’s floating around. The release by group LIBERTY does not actually circumvent the copy protection built into the game. It appears to use a built in function in the Starcraft 2 patching framework to launch the game, bypassing the authentication screen. This is not a great approach and may be a cause for unstable behavior.

If you are a pirate playing the leaked build (single player), you still need to have a very stable connection to Battle.net servers. If you don’t have internet connectivity, if your internet connection is unstable or if you have blocked access to battle.net by any means, the game might crash or black screen issues will materialize.

Note: this article is a work in progress. More fixes will be added as they are discovered.

Note: Please do not post links to torrents or cracks here

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8 Comments

  1. TNH // 8/02/2010 05:39:00 AM  

    I just found this fix for the issue of the installer not launching, i.e. I would mount the image, browse to the installer.exe file, launch it, and stare at the little hourglass/perpetual circle until nothing happened (in the task manager the installer.exe process starts, but then suddenly ends).

    What I found the problem was is that I had renamed the dvd, and for some reason this makes the installer mess up, maybe because it's pc and mac compatible and can't figure out what platform it's on. So, all you have to do is open the StarCraft 2 .iso in UltraISO or a similar program and rename the dvd to "SC2-L100-D1". If you still need help you can look at how mine looks in UltraISO here: http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/8483/sc2fix.png

    Remember you can always change the name that Windows displays on the dvd drive by adding a "Label=" entry to the autorun.inf file

  2. Unknown // 8/12/2010 04:17:00 PM  

    I have an easy fix for the black screen of death after minimazing and then maximazing SC2 -- surprisingly common issus, ecspecialy when people accidentaly hit thew Win key.


    At first it seemed that only people with AMD cards complaint about it (I fall here as well) and i thought there must be a driver issues, and there is a good posibility there is a driver issue, but at least it is easy to fix.

    As a matter of fact all you have to do is to go to Options and change your settings to Fullscreen (windowed). It won't change anything of your gaming experience, except that will make minimazing/maximazing and alt-tab switching painless and fast as stimmed firebat :xD

    * Tested on both pirated and legit versions.

  3. Zen // 9/05/2010 09:50:00 AM  

    I copied the files from the CD to the HD and the resulting file size was too small. And things are missing when run it. The Source (DVD image) has 7gigs but the copied file was 2mb.. any idea?

  4. Unknown // 4/10/2011 09:30:00 PM  

    you have to make sure that hidden files are visible
    tools - folder options - view - show hidden files, folders and drives
    hope this helps

  5. Anonymous // 12/21/2011 06:59:00 PM  

    thanks you halped me alot :D

  6. Anonymous // 12/21/2011 06:59:00 PM  
    This comment has been removed by the author.
  7. Anonymous // 12/21/2011 06:59:00 PM  
    This comment has been removed by the author.
  8. Anonymous // 12/21/2011 07:00:00 PM  
    This comment has been removed by the author.