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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."
by unremoving LAN play?
Just give me Diablo 3 in the meantime.
Battle.net will be an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward
Well Blizzard, I think you just died. It's amazing. As a kid on a Mac there was a heyday when in a few short years Blizzard put out Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo II. When Bungie put out the Marathon series, the Myth series, and then Oni. When Sid Meyer put out SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000. And then they all shuttered up, sold-out, and then died of money-poisoning.
Bungie's awesome demo of Halo got it swallowed up by MS, and a decade later there are no more Mac games of any repute. Blizzard had rumors of another Starcraft and everyone looked forward to a new Warcraft and Diablo - but the money-leech WoW came out and stopped those promising ideas cold. Sid, who's always had interesting ideas got caught up in that The Sims, that other massive money making scheme, and put out nothing of interest again until, like salt on a wound, a castrated Spore.
WTF. I think the only exception to these innovative Mac gaming companies going corporate at the expense of their initial fans is Ambrosia Software of Escape Velocity fame. Oh the days...
This is also a good opportunity for a competitor. Starcraft massively dominates competitive gaming in the RTS genre. Nothing else comes close. I suspect Blizzard's ridiculous stripping out of the LAN play feature is partly to ensure no large Starcraft 2 event can happen without Blizzard's active participation and/or approval.
Blizzard right now reminds me of Sony three years ago. Drunk with success, and making every wrong decision.
OR... The simple fact LAN Parties of Out of date. Sorry. Why don't you bitch about the lack of Null Modem features that has been around for years.
Back in dem days, Of StarCraft I most people had dial up, so Lan Parties were a good idea.... Now it is not. It is not evil, It is just removing a features that only a small portion of people will use.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are you talking about the same WoW beta that other people played? I avoided the beta but I had a lot of friends who played it. I'm a casual WoW player (down to about 8 hours a week) and I still come across unresolved bugs in it. The most common one involves getting attacked by monsters that you can't attack and they are invisible (odds are they're stuck in some piece of terrain nearby). The only way to deal with it is to flee. Another common bug involves coming across monsters that are evasion bugged. They are standing there, you can target and attack them, but every strike results in an Evaded message.
I'm not saying that the bugs are major bugs because they aren't. They aren't system crashing bugs, or even game wrecking bugs. On the other hand, they are persistent. I've been playing WoW since a few months before Burning Crusade came out, and the same two bugs that I mentioned above were present back then.
If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on. I remember as a kid, I only ever once played a game that required me to contact the manufacture to obtain new disks with a more recent version of the game. 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.
Who knows, maybe the extra time will give them a chance to rethink the idiotic exclusion of LAN play (though I'm not holding my breath on that one).
Probably not going by the following from TFA.
The Spin -
"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."
Should Be Read As -
The upgraded Battle.net is a required anti-consumer aspect of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of our plan to build control of obsolescence into all of our games moving forward.
Please Note: We have always been at war with eurasia...
You're putting this into your little world without considering what it means for others. How about this for an example: I'm in the military, and when I deploy I ----cannot connect to Battle.net ---. It's simply not possible for me to do without running running into legal or security issues out in the field. Instead of playing a 4/6/8 player LAN game when winding down for the night, I can't bring this game with me.
So freaking out about no LAN play is a perfectly valid thing for me to do. SC1 and D2 are still hugely popular for downrange geeks.
Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.