07.05
So, Blizzard is working on Starcraft II, which, if it is as awesome as the first Starcraft, will be quite awesome.
However, it appears that blizzard has chosen to make it not as awesome. They have removed LAN support for a game that was made popular with LAN play. Their reason behind this, they say that they want to add acheivements and community features that would only work if you were connected to their servers. The real reason, probably either a bullshit piracy prevention scheme or a crappy way to add advertising to the game. I think that Blizzard needs to realize that not all games have to be WOW. Some games are great when played by yourself or just with friends.
Ignoring problems that people have had with Battle.net in the past, what happens to the LAN party now? What will happen when a grouple of people all want to play using one connection? What if you are playing where there isn’t a connection? Sure playing online is nice, but it will never replace the LAN party.
I don’t even see what the problem here is. I can earn achievements offline with my XBox360, and it just updates when next I connect. Why doesn’t Blizzard just make it work that way. Likewise, if I’m on a LAN with friends, I’m not going to need to worry about any community chats or anything, because everybody I am talking to is withing talking distance.
This really seems like a bad move on their part, but I guess only time will tell if this actually hurts their sales, and if it does, they’ll just blame it on piracy…