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StarCraft II Delayed Until 2010
Blizzard has just announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty won't be released this year. From their announcement: "Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game. The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward. This extra development time will be critical to help us realize our vision for the service. ... As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we'll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series' legacy in the first half of 2010."
So not only are they removing the ability to play LAN games, it's actually delayed the release of the game.
This is bad news...for Diablo fans =(
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
External factors delay the release of the game, not the game's state itself. Furthermore, they will continue to develop the game until those external requirements are met.
Dare we hope for the first truly polished, and moderately bug-free game release in a decade?
We really don't need battlenet. I've seen how that works with DRM on music. And games are bit to expensive to throw away when blizz decides to go bankrubt or that holding battlenet online becomes to expensive.
LAN PLAY is one of the things that helped make SC1 awesome, either 12 carriers coming down on an in-room opponent's settlement with "...what the...WHAT THE HELL...OH GOD" to early game 'ling rush with "..YOU CHEEP BASTARD THATS NOT FUNNY"....LAN play was amazing. Now if I'm going to have an 8 man LAN in my garage, it's all gotta go through battlenet, sucking up my bandwidth? Screw you blizzard. You've got another 2 quarters now, give us LAN play.
I wish I could say it was a surprise. Blizzard never releases games on time. I try not to look forward to them.
Of course, this could all just be a marketing scam. They announce the game, wait 18 months, give a delivery date 9 months in the future, and then push it back 3 months at a time until people are frothing with the need for the game, and then release it.
I mean hell, they announced Diablo 3 more than a year ago, and they haven't even bothered to put up the first, tentative, never-to-be-kept release date yet.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Don't forget they've been bought out, so they're not the Blizzard they used to be. It could be that "Blizzard" is working on some DRM which has really been disguised as Battle.net (i.e. you have to connect to it to verify your installation). Watch your step "Blizzard", because it wont be hard for hackers to offer the LAN support you were so quick to deny your fans, nor will it be difficult to set up a pirate server that out-competes the "wonderful experience" battle.net might have in store.
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They don't want to release SC2 or D3 (which will net them $60 per copy with no additional fees) as long as their cash cow (WoW) is reaping profits.
As long as the WoW content patches and expansion packs keep the millions of players paying $12/month they're going to do what they can to keep those player playing.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
It's no use, they require more vespene gas.
More than likely they'll vote that this whole LAN thing is being way overblown and they'll laugh at everyone who decided to not buy the game.
Either that or they'll laugh at you for buying the game anyway.
Everyone complaining about LAN play seems to be slightly misunderstanding the situation. Yes, by what they've said you will need a connection to play the official way but once you're in game you are only using the LAN connection. They essentially are forcing you to use battlenet as a matchmaking service, even for local games. If everyone is playing from the same room then the connection doesn't go over the internet at all.
And I'm sure some inventive hacker will create a battlenet emulator that will provide true LAN play without an internet connection.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Current Battle.net games are ALL peer-to-peer. If you play Starcraft 1 with a friend over Battle.net but are on a LAN it works fine without lag.
Why would Blizzard need to receive packets other than those sent in logging onto Battle.net, creating a game, joining it, starting it, and then transmitting the endgame results back to it? There aren't any games out there that make the player host that would need to contact the master server with as much data as it needs to send the actual server (you). I'm sure that 50-100ms latency to Battle.net's server is going to be a dealbreaker when joining a game takes 1/10th of a second longer (even when the game itself is fine)
Regardless, this is all speculation. People need to stop freaking out and wait until the game comes out until you complain. I know you people love to assume that "requiring an online server" is akin to "they want to force you to name your firstborn child Raynor," but nobody actually KNOWS anything except Blizzard. We'll also know soon enough... the Beta will start at least a few months before the game is released.
I've been a Blizzard fan since 1995. Blizzard has had hit after hit, and they've always clearly had their pulse on the community, always designed the games that gamers want. Aside from the bnetd thing, they've done a great job catering to their target audience (one could argue that the bnetd "hackers" / digital rights advocates are not part of their audience).
What has Blizzard said about "no LAN play"?
I see this as requiring an internet connection and valid licenses for each seat. Each person at a LAN party will need to log in and authenticate their license. When the game begins, each computer will start sending traffic to the IPs each computer self-reports -- which will be on the same LAN. Each seat will see sub-millisecond pings, so no increased lag will be introduced to level the field.
I expect the next generation of battle.net will support uPNP, and be more NAT friendly than the current one. I expect VOIP. I hope to see better competition selection, including finding games that are low latency, and blacklist / whitelist (or at least plugin) support. I don't expect to see any kind of LAN support, but if their ladder can see all the players of a LAN competing with each other and provide scoring to make subsequent battle.net public games more interesting, I think that's a really big win.
I expect such network authentication means that piracy will be much more difficult and that any cracks that work will have little value. I also expect this to royally blow up in their faces if they fuck it up. I'll tolerate logging in, I won't tolerate anything short of a perfect authentication scheme. They have had a great reputation for battle.net reliability for the last 10 years.
The solution is simple then. Spawn more overlords.