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."

Comments

LAN play

[Anonymous Coward]

So not only are they removing the ability to play LAN games, it's actually delayed the release of the game.

In other words...

[Kokuyo]

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?

Re:In other words...

[Dutch Gun]

If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on.

Well, that's true. But it's mostly because game complexity has exploded (some publishers/devs pushing games out the doors too early haven't helped either). A modern game (including engine and support library) can now clock in at over a million lines of code. That's a million chances for programmers to get something wrong. And don't forget that plenty of bugs are asset-related - meaning caused by artists perhaps doing something they shouldn't.

In the world of PC gaming, you also have to take into consideration the fact that there are nearly unlimited configuration options for computers. Many people will also blame games when their own systems are malfunctioning (you have no idea how many driver-specific workaround our graphics programmer creates). In crash reports that we get sent to us, we flag users systems that have failed an internal mathematical stress-test, and tend to ignore those. When a computer figures that 1 + 1 = 3, it's pretty hard for a program NOT to crash horribly at some point.

I'm not trying to make excuses for developers who don't properly test and fix their code before release. I know there's plenty of that too, and there's no excuse for shipping a game in that state. But honestly, with the massive scope of modern games, it's unbelievably hard to test the coverage of a feature change you may have worked on across the entire game world.

Back in the day, you installed a game and it worked. The graphics sucked, the game play was horrible, but it worked. How many bugs were there in Wing Commander, or Mech Warrior, or the original Civilization, or Sim City? There weren't any because there wasn't any way to fix them if there were, so the publishers made sure that they were bug free.

Do you seriously believe there were no bugs in those products? Take off the rose-colored classes, my friend. Just because you didn't see any bugs didn't mean they weren't there. We didn't have the great coalescer of information called the Internet back then, so it probably seems that way to you. I absolutely guarantee you that there were plenty of bugs in those products.

Anyone who has spent countless hours creating boot disks and configuring autoexec.bat and config.sys for specific games will remember this well from the DOS / early Windows days. And god help you trying to get audio to work if you didn't have a SoundBlaster card (or one of the popular alternatives). Remember the pain of early networked games, anyone? It was a challenge just getting some of those games to run at all.

GIVE US LAN BACK

[jpedlow]

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.

Re:GIVE US LAN BACK

[amicusNYCL]

There are a lot of people who seem to think that posting on Slashdot, and modding the posts, is the way to get Blizzard to make changes. The venue you're looking for is here:

http://forums.battle.net/board.html?forumId=12009&sid=3000

Not really

[Hojima]

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.

Re:Not really

[Cowmonaut]

No, its not a valid point. LAN Parties were not and are not just so people without good 'Net connections can play an unlaggy game. The entire point to a LAN party is the *social* experience it entails. Talking to people over Ventrilo is one thing. Getting drunk while Evil Dead is playing on a projector and you and your friends do something ridiculous in-game makes it all more entertaining.

Shit, I don't even remember most of what happened in the GAMES during a LAN party. I remember more interesting stuff, such as a pair of friends arguing over whether or not pants are facist or hooking up with the girl all of your friends wanted to date but always got shut down because of that ridiculous friend zone that you mysteriously were immune to. Or the commentary we decided to add MST3K style to some B movies while we wind down for the night.

I don't know, maybe I'm weird and had parties that happened to have video games in them rather than "LAN parties" but to my friends and I, they were LAN parties and they were awesome and if it wasn't StarCraft or Command & Conquerer it was a cheap FPS everyone had. Blizzard flat out has made a *stupid* call that serves *no* purpose. It costs them *nothing* to implement LAN play and in fact this very well could *increase* the chances their game gets pirated, because the pirated game will eventually have LAN play. Blizzard issued a challenge and the crackers of the world are going to take it up.

Re:More minerals?

[oenone.ablaze]

It's no use, they require more vespene gas.

Re:Just build in multiplayer over lan.

[cthulu_mt]

At that point you're just refusing to use Battlenet out of stubborness.

LAN

[sqrt(2)]

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.

Re:Worth the wait.

[TheSambassador]

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.

No LAN? OMG!!!

[chrysrobyn]

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"?

"we don't have any plans to support LAN," he said and clarified "we will not support it." The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.

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.