As Blizzard winds up to launch StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm later this year, it's also preparing to finally roll out some features fans have been asking for since before SC2: Wings of Liberty launched back in 2010. These include resuming multiplayer matches from replays, playing in other global regions, and watching replays together with other folks.

These features and more should be patched in "at or around the launch of Heart of the Swarm," production director Chris Sigaty wrote in a blog post.

Resuming from replays will help tournaments go smoother, as SC2's lack of a LAN mode means that problems with a Internet or Battle.net connections can spoil a match. Rather than starting over from scratch or having judges rule on whether to award the win to one player, they'll be able to pick up where they left off.

Global play will let you, as you can probably guess, play on other regional servers around the world, rather than being limited to your home region. Multiplayer replay viewing is a feature from the original StarCraft but cut from the sequel, for when you fancy watching a replay with some chums and discuss the game together. Multilanguage support, a clan/group system, and unranked matchmaking are also in the works.