StarCraft II Delayed Until 2010

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."

Re:LAN play

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Not really

[PotatoFarmer]

Don't forget that Blizzard is notorious for delaying games until they feel they're done. 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).

Re:Worth the wait.

[Toonol]

You're going from under 10 millisecond pings for an internal network, to an external site that very possibly (depending on internet weather) could have pings of a 50-100 milliseconds or more. It doesn't matter what the size of the pipe into your basement is; occasionally you get hangups and stalls when your leave your local network.

Re:Not really (1984 style ReWrite)

[ae1294]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lan Parties" might be a thing of the past, but tournaments are a huge part of Starcraft.

Re:Not really

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:GIVE US LAN BACK

[badboy_tw2002]

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.

Re:Not really

[Xaositecte]

I wonder what the situation would be for servicemen overseas?

Depends where you're stationed.

I was in Germany, and they had one (shitty) ISP that was allowed to operate on base, broadband was ~$100 a month. Once you got to move off it was as good as anyone living in Germany. Generally inferior to the places I've lived in the states, but acceptable.

Off in the desert, the bigger bases have things like cyber-cafes that work for this sort of thing. People will play WoW on their off-hours quite frequently, so the bandwidth wasn't all that bad.

On the smaller bases, you're pretty much SoL, but you've usually got bigger things on your mind at that point.

Re:Worth the wait.

[ZiakII]

A huge number of people in the military play WOW from Iraq, so I suspect the OP is lying anyway to try to make a point.

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.

Re:A $200 video game? I'll pass

[Chris Burke]

Your point doesn't make sense to me gameplay wise (value for money) , since playing with or against 3 of your 'spawned' friends wouldn't be much fun:

You're the only one who was interested enough to lay down $50 for the game, and played the single player campaign (to practice) and play regularly on Battle.Net with random strangers. The rest of your spawned party will most certainly suck at it since it's a deep game, and they had no interest in paying for StarCraft2.

Yeah because nobody ever got good at a game that they personally didn't own.

Oh wait, that happened all the time. To me.

If you have friends who come over regularly in order to play games, then it makes perfect sense.