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Comments: 453 +- Games: StarCraft II Delayed Until 2010 on Wednesday August 05 2009, @04:08PM
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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."
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Duke Nuked 'em? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just sayin'.
Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget they've been bought out, so they're not the Blizzard they used to be. It could be that "Blizzard" is working on some DRM which has really been disguised as Battle.net (i.e. you have to connect to it to verify your installation). Watch your step "Blizzard", because it wont be hard for hackers to offer the LAN support you were so quick to deny your fans, nor will it be difficult to set up a pirate server that out-competes the "wonderful experience" battle.net might have in store.
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not really (1984 style ReWrite) (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Quote of a future A.C.
If you don't like it don't by it blah blah blah.
I'm not going to buy it. Please direct your attention here, thanks...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1301629&cid=28690039&art_pos=1 [slashdot.org]
Re:Not really (1984 style ReWrite) (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
Blizzard right now reminds me of Sony three years ago. Drunk with success, and making every wrong decision.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
No, its not a valid point. LAN Parties were not and are not just so people without good 'Net connections can play an unlaggy game. The entire point to a LAN party is the *social* experience it entails. Talking to people over Ventrilo is one thing. Getting drunk while Evil Dead is playing on a projector and you and your friends do something ridiculous in-game makes it all more entertaining.
Shit, I don't even remember most of what happened in the GAMES during a LAN party. I remember more interesting stuff, such as a pair of friends arguing over whether or not pants are facist or hooking up with the girl all of your friends wanted to date but always got shut down because of that ridiculous friend zone that you mysteriously were immune to. Or the commentary we decided to add MST3K style to some B movies while we wind down for the night.
I don't know, maybe I'm weird and had parties that happened to have video games in them rather than "LAN parties" but to my friends and I, they were LAN parties and they were awesome and if it wasn't StarCraft or Command & Conquerer it was a cheap FPS everyone had. Blizzard flat out has made a *stupid* call that serves *no* purpose. It costs them *nothing* to implement LAN play and in fact this very well could *increase* the chances their game gets pirated, because the pirated game will eventually have LAN play. Blizzard issued a challenge and the crackers of the world are going to take it up.
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Re:Not really (Score:4)
You say that until at 6pm one evening your ISP suddenly starts throttling your net connection to "imrpove" customer service. And you either lag out of a game, or get your arse kicked because you can no longer defend your self.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I know people this has happened too.
Was already skipping Starcraft 2 due to the multiple releases they're planning to gouge the consumer. I would not be at all surprised to find Battlenet is mandatory. The sad thing is there ARE still people out there with no constant access to the internet. Where my mother-in-law lives, your option is dialup. LIMITED dialup. You get 100 hours a month. Over that you're charged something like $3 an hour!
I wonder what the situation would be for servicemen overseas?
But of cour
Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
It was playable at PAX last year. It didn't look like it was starved for dev resources- graphics were good (some stand in art still), it looked stable (I saw no crashes), and the game was fun. If it was anyone but Blizzard it would already be released, it was that polished last year. It will come out, and it won't be rushed.
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Re:Not really (Score:5, Funny)
it'll be rushed
Really? Is that one of your primary concerns about the game? That it won't have spent enough time under development?
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LAN play (Score:5, Insightful)
So not only are they removing the ability to play LAN games, it's actually delayed the release of the game.
Re:LAN play (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When Sid Meyer put out SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000. ... 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.
Who the hell is this Sid Meyer person, and what does he have to do with Will Wright's Sim series?
Re:LAN play (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:LAN play (Score:5, Funny)
Little known fact: In the late 1980s, Will Wright secretly wrote a program called SimGameDesignGuru which accurately simulated a visionary computer games designer.
It's too bad he forgot to turn off disasters while Spore was under development. Zing!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More minerals? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More minerals? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
*sniff* (Score:4, Insightful)
This is bad news...for Diablo fans =(
In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
External factors delay the release of the game, not the game's state itself. Furthermore, they will continue to develop the game until those external requirements are met.
Dare we hope for the first truly polished, and moderately bug-free game release in a decade?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, it's only been like 7 years since they released Warcraft III.
Seriously. This is Blizzard; they annoy me sometimes, but they're noted for their relatively bug-free releases...The "buggiest" game they ever released was WoW, and the "bug" there was that a zillion people wanted to play, and repeatedly crashed all the servers.
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on.
Well, that's true. But it's mostly because game complexity has exploded (some publishers/devs pushing games out the doors too early haven't helped either). A modern game (including engine and support library) can now clock in at over a million lines of code. That's a million chances for programmers to get something wrong. And don't forget that plenty of bugs are asset-related - meaning caused by artists perhaps doing something they shouldn't.
In the world of PC gaming, you also have to take into consideration the fact that there are nearly unlimited configuration options for computers. Many people will also blame games when their own systems are malfunctioning (you have no idea how many driver-specific workaround our graphics programmer creates). In crash reports that we get sent to us, we flag users systems that have failed an internal mathematical stress-test, and tend to ignore those. When a computer figures that 1 + 1 = 3, it's pretty hard for a program NOT to crash horribly at some point.
I'm not trying to make excuses for developers who don't properly test and fix their code before release. I know there's plenty of that too, and there's no excuse for shipping a game in that state. But honestly, with the massive scope of modern games, it's unbelievably hard to test the coverage of a feature change you may have worked on across the entire game world.
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.
Do you seriously believe there were no bugs in those products? Take off the rose-colored classes, my friend. Just because you didn't see any bugs didn't mean they weren't there. We didn't have the great coalescer of information called the Internet back then, so it probably seems that way to you. I absolutely guarantee you that there were plenty of bugs in those products.
Anyone who has spent countless hours creating boot disks and configuring autoexec.bat and config.sys for specific games will remember this well from the DOS / early Windows days. And god help you trying to get audio to work if you didn't have a SoundBlaster card (or one of the popular alternatives). Remember the pain of early networked games, anyone? It was a challenge just getting some of those games to run at all.
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Why not "polish and refine"... (Score:5, Interesting)
by unremoving LAN play?
shocked, just shocked (Score:3, Funny)
This does not bode well... (Score:5, Funny)
South Korea just exploded with rage. This just might push them over the edge and they will finally take out North Korea.
GIVE US LAN BACK (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GIVE US LAN BACK (Score:5, Funny)
One of the best Starcraft LAN-play memories I have:
Myself and a small group of friends started doing LAN parties back before they became popular. I can remember spending half the time setting up the network with Windows 95 PCs, making sure everyone had the right TCP stack on their computers, and double checking coaxial terminators for the token ring network we were setting up. All this just to network Doom.
Fast forward a few years and we were playing Starcraft into the wee hours of the night/morning. One time we were doing a "big game hunters" round which went particularly long. I fell asleep and woke to see half of my base destroyed with enemy units just sitting there. I looked up and noticed that the player who attacked me had fallen asleep before finishing the attack. I retaliated but fell asleep before I was able to finish off all of his bases.
Put LAN-play back in Blizzard.
Parent
Re:GIVE US LAN BACK (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of people who seem to think that posting on Slashdot, and modding the posts, is the way to get Blizzard to make changes. The venue you're looking for is here:
http://forums.battle.net/board.html?forumId=12009&sid=3000 [battle.net]
Parent
Re:GIVE US LAN BACK (Score:5, Informative)
Last time in this discussion -
Here's how it works for pretty much every console and PC game out there:
Each client sends up their external and internal IP address. the internal IP can be used for routing if the external IP matches. i.e. if you and your buddy hook up halo and play each other behind the same NAT, you do your matchmaking on XBL but your game packets never leave the network. You can sniff packets on your home network yourself to verify this. So unless Starcraft has suddenly become a client server game then your bandwidth is unaffected.
Parent
Heh. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish I could say it was a surprise. Blizzard never releases games on time. I try not to look forward to them.
Of course, this could all just be a marketing scam. They announce the game, wait 18 months, give a delivery date 9 months in the future, and then push it back 3 months at a time until people are frothing with the need for the game, and then release it.
I mean hell, they announced Diablo 3 more than a year ago, and they haven't even bothered to put up the first, tentative, never-to-be-kept release date yet.
suitspeak translation (Score:3, Interesting)
The suit-speak translation is: "Hey. We actually talked to the network guys about two days before we were going to push this out the door and told them what they requirements were and they downed a 2 liter of Dew, gave us some funny looks, then laughed maniacally and twisted in their office chairs, chanting 'More power, more power, more power...' Also, the legal department said the brain implants into the engineers were rejected and they refused to further refine our new hideous DRM. In light of these developments, we're going to release some screenshots and do a hand wave."
WoW (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as the WoW content patches and expansion packs keep the millions of players paying $12/month they're going to do what they can to keep those player playing.
LAN (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone complaining about LAN play seems to be slightly misunderstanding the situation. Yes, by what they've said you will need a connection to play the official way but once you're in game you are only using the LAN connection. They essentially are forcing you to use battlenet as a matchmaking service, even for local games. If everyone is playing from the same room then the connection doesn't go over the internet at all.
And I'm sure some inventive hacker will create a battlenet emulator that will provide true LAN play without an internet connection.
closer..... (Score:5, Funny)
No LAN? OMG!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been a Blizzard fan since 1995. Blizzard has had hit after hit, and they've always clearly had their pulse on the community, always designed the games that gamers want. Aside from the bnetd thing, they've done a great job catering to their target audience (one could argue that the bnetd "hackers" / digital rights advocates are not part of their audience).
What has Blizzard said about "no LAN play"?
I see this as requiring an internet connection and valid licenses for each seat. Each person at a LAN party will need to log in and authenticate their license. When the game begins, each computer will start sending traffic to the IPs each computer self-reports -- which will be on the same LAN. Each seat will see sub-millisecond pings, so no increased lag will be introduced to level the field.
I expect the next generation of battle.net will support uPNP, and be more NAT friendly than the current one. I expect VOIP. I hope to see better competition selection, including finding games that are low latency, and blacklist / whitelist (or at least plugin) support. I don't expect to see any kind of LAN support, but if their ladder can see all the players of a LAN competing with each other and provide scoring to make subsequent battle.net public games more interesting, I think that's a really big win.
I expect such network authentication means that piracy will be much more difficult and that any cracks that work will have little value. I also expect this to royally blow up in their faces if they fuck it up. I'll tolerate logging in, I won't tolerate anything short of a perfect authentication scheme. They have had a great reputation for battle.net reliability for the last 10 years.
Re:Worth the wait. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Good luck on that. They announced SCII in may 2007, and it's still a minimum of 4 months out.
They didn't announce D3 until July '08...I'd be surprised if they started looking for Diablo beta testers before the end of the year.
Re:Worth the wait. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Worth the wait. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Worth the wait. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would Blizzard need to receive packets other than those sent in logging onto Battle.net, creating a game, joining it, starting it, and then transmitting the endgame results back to it? There aren't any games out there that make the player host that would need to contact the master server with as much data as it needs to send the actual server (you). I'm sure that 50-100ms latency to Battle.net's server is going to be a dealbreaker when joining a game takes 1/10th of a second longer (even when the game itself is fine)
Regardless, this is all speculation. People need to stop freaking out and wait until the game comes out until you complain. I know you people love to assume that "requiring an online server" is akin to "they want to force you to name your firstborn child Raynor," but nobody actually KNOWS anything except Blizzard. We'll also know soon enough... the Beta will start at least a few months before the game is released.
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Re:Worth the wait. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Worth the wait. (Score:4, Informative)
Um... what? I was deployed to Iraq (an airbase) and Japan (Iwakuni,Japan) and didn't see WoW played at either location. We couldn't get the Internet in our barracks room in Japan, we had to go to the public leisure room to surf the Internet.
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Re:The 1990s Called... (Score:5, Funny)
This would be devastating news if it was still the 1990s...
That's true, a release date of 2010 would be over 10 years away!
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Re:Just build in multiplayer over lan. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More than likely they'll vote that this whole LAN thing is being way overblown and they'll laugh at everyone who decided to not buy the game.
Either that or they'll laugh at you for buying the game anyway.