This past weekend saw Blizzard hosting its annual Blizzcon conference. The event has quickly become one of the biggest annual gaming expos in the world due to the massive popularity of the likes of World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft.
One of the biggest pieces of news to emerge from the event was that Blizzard will be releasing StarCraft II with ‘pseudo-LAN’ functionality. The announcement comes following a massive upset created when the developer announced a few months ago that the game would ship without LAN. The primary reason given for the omission of LAN support was piracy, and Blizzard stated that they want to make sure that the only way to play StarCraft II will be through the new Battle.net which will be released alongside the game.
The announcement created such a backlash from fans of the series that a petition was created. The petition is currently sitting on 121 362 signatures.
Battlenet.net developer Greg Canessa announced at the conference that Blizzard is “working on solutions with regard to things we can do to maintain connectivity to Battle.net in some way, but also provide a great quality connection between players”.
Shacknews asked Canessa if Blizzard would introduce LAN functionality with the requirement that the PC is still connected to the internet and is able to authenticate the game with Battle.net.
“Something like that,” he replied. “Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don’t know if it’s once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection … those are the things that we’re working on,” responded Canessa.
While the developer is at least attempting to address the LAN issue, players will still be required to be connected to the internet in order to LAN, which may not be a good enough compromise to win back the majority of angry gamers.
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