Recently Blizzard announced that Starcraft II will not feature LAN support due to security and piracy issues when the first instalment, Terrans: Wings of Liberty is released later this year. Instead the developer revealed that it intends to make Battle.net the exclusive multiplayer platform for all of its games.
It seems unlikely then that fans will be able to enjoy LAN support in Diablo III. Diablo and Diablo II both featured LAN support; buyers could play on Battle.net without an additional fee.
The ability to use Battle.net free of charge on original games will be carried over in Starcraft II. It is almost a certainty that this will be echoed in Diablo III.
In response to a comment on the Blizzard Community that lack of LAN support hurts legitimate buyers and that the game would simply be reverse engineered by pirates do enable LAN support anyway community Manager ‘Bashiok’ disagreed.
“More so than overbearing/invasive anti-piracy measures that would affect everyone who buys the game regardless of how they’re going to play it instead of just those that may want a LAN feature? I would doubt it.”
“I don’t know a lot about it, Diablo III isn’t really facing the brunt of the Battle.net 2.0 features just yet, but I think that removing LAN in an attempt to avoid more severe anti-piracy measures is pretty cool. We’re saying ‘Hey, we’re pretty sure you’re going to love our game. The multiplayer is really the best part though. In order to get in on that that we’d just like to make sure you bought the game. Cool?’”
These comments were later removed from the website.
Although the argument that removing LAN support will hinder piracy may hold water, the decision is likely to leave a bad taste in the mouths of legitimate buyers.
Update
After publishing this article we discovered that Blizzard confirmed last year that Diablo 3 would definitely not support LAN play.
We are not sure how we missed this one, profuse apologies all around.
Loading ...
