14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard is one of the most popular video game developers out there, having gained a huge number of loyal users by releasing quality titles and supporting them many years after their release. It has also made fans well aware that their voice will be heard and that they will have the most important say in every upcoming project.
But it seems that Blizzard forgot this when it announced that the future StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty title would not support Local Area Networks for its multiplayer mode and that everything would be done through the Battle.net online service. While this won't be mandatory for singleplayer modes, things haven't gone down well with many fans who petitioned the large corporation but heard no response.
Talking with Kotaku at last week's BlizzCon, the executive vice president of game design, Rob Pardo, revealed that the lack of LAN support wouldn't be such a big deal and that everyone would accept it once it was launched.
“Everyone is going to give us flack until it's out,” Pardo said. “None of us is going to know how big a deal it is until it's out. We believe that it's really not that big of a deal - that most people are not really going to notice that it's missing. There's a lot of people out there I think that are just afraid that they're suddenly not going to be able to connect to the internet tonight and they won't be able to play. I actually think that case is extremely rare, and I think we're going to be okay.”
He also revealed that his company was indeed working on a few solutions for people who found themselves without an Internet connection or for large-scale conventions. “There's a few legitimate cases that we're going to try and address over time. Location-based tournaments, or let's say I'm in a dorm with a firewall or something like that, hopefully there's a way to determine that and maybe start a peer-to-peer game.”
So there might be a few chances for people to play online without using Battle.Net but we won't know for sure until the game will be released next year. Until then, enjoy the screenshots and videos that the company revealed recently.