StarCraft II Delayed Until 2010 453
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."
Why not "polish and refine"... (Score:5, Interesting)
by unremoving LAN play?
Re:Worth the wait. (Score:5, Interesting)
Starcraft Ghost all over again? (Score:2, Interesting)
I really hope SCII doesn't go the way of Starcraft Ghost... I also wonder how much of the problem is Blizzard simply putting every game but WOW on the back burner until they exhaust the franchise...
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."
Re:Just build in multiplayer over lan. (Score:2, Interesting)
Battle.net is kinda critical in this gaming environment. Yes single player is important and lan play is too, but without being able to compete in some organized way online lan functions are kinda pointless. Not everyone has a house capable of holding 5v5 games unless you want to have smelly gamers packed in like sardines, and I don't like playing against the same 5 twits every time I want to play. Good skills come from being challenged by a wide variety of people.
I guess we just have to wait. Too bad I'm going to have to buy the game 3 times to play all 3 types of races and get all the game content.
Re:Worth the wait. (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:In other words... (Score:2, Interesting)
Since when have Blizzard releases been full of bugs? The *one* reason my friends and I buy everything they ship is because they release only decent, near bugfree games. Okay, you can dislike the content. But it is solid content, even if not your cup of tea.
Remember, releasing games that need several patches before you can play without crashing was common use before Blizzard demonstrated that releasing good games (even with internet patching available) is a sound business policy. The same with MMO's. Every beta I participated in before WoW, was a bugfest of biblical proportions. Enter WoW, with a nigh bugfree beta. *sold*.
I mean, upon its release EVE Online had a tutorial that left you floating in space, all lost and lonely, if you made a "wrong" move. The freaking *starting tutorial* just *killed* you when you made a mistake. Also, the day before they released the game they implemented a massive patch, that reactivated lots of already fixed bugs again - a clear hint about problems with their sourcecode control system. This was a few weeks before the WoW beta. It was such a relief to play a *stable* game for a change, I was sold on WoW right then and there.
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...
Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
Blizzard right now reminds me of Sony three years ago. Drunk with success, and making every wrong decision.
Re:Not really (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: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.
Blizzard being Blizzard (Score:1, Interesting)
God forbid a video game studio act responsibly and deliver what they promise instead of a game where walls are just suggestions and clipping isn't a cheat. You so-called fans that are disappointed need to look at falling video game quality and thank Blizzard for sticking to their guns as they have in past years. Delay it, by all means if that means I get my money's worth. It's going to eat my soul as all the other Blizzard games have, I might as well have a good user experience while it happens.
And quit bitching about LAN play. You don't need it unless you own a cyber cafe.
Re:Not really (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 course Blizz and the like don't give a shit about people who live in rural areas. They make the misguided assumption that piracy costs them X number of sales and figure they'll make more money by "ending" piracy and probably assume people who live in small towns aren't gamers. Too busy raising barns or something...
You know given how much the industry claims to lose to piracy, and how all those nasty pirated copies are lost sales, you'd assume the first uncopyable game would be the biggest selling games ever.
Oh, but wait, we've had that. With Starforce. Early Starforce protected games were uncrackable leaving actually buying the title as the only option. And oh, surprise surprise, they sold about the same as everything else.
I realise that's going off topic, but if Battlenet is mandatory, I feel sorry for the folk in situations where they can't use it. And even if Battlenet doesn't do that, you know that sooner rather than later, being online permanently will become the norm for PC titles to "crush piracy". (Translation: So we can control every little thing, and pull stunts like Sony did with Wipeout HD.)
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...
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.
Re:Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
Generally yes, that's how it works. You are right about when matchmaking is down or your IP is down that you're screwed, but once the game starts you're pretty much on your own. There might be client anti-cheat stuff going on (like with Punkbuster) and the connection will have to be maintained with BNET, but the game data itself will be intranetwork. Given the amount of bandwidth it would suck up I doubt they want the cost of all those game packets when they can just look at the results reported after the game to see if someone is cheating.
(IAANABEBIDNEAABGC - I Am Not A Blizzard Employee But I Do Network Engineering At A Big Game Company)
Re:Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no longer in uniform, but I can tell you what the situation will be - keep playing Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, or get other games that don't require internet access. I got out a few months back, shortly after the announcement that neither SC2 nor D2 would have LAN support. Coming along with the various console games that disallow direct-link or LAN play, it had generated a lot of ill will for various software companies.
Re:LAN (Score:3, Interesting)
It's obvious to gamers that it's a bad move, from a business perspective, especially to people unfamiliar with the technical side of things, it looks like a smart thing to do. Multiplayer is the biggest selling point of Starcraft so they figure by locking it down more people will be forced to buy the game. They're taking two huge risks with this. The first, is thinking that whatever scheme they are using to enforce this restriction is actually going to work and remain effective, and the second is that they will make more money from people buying the game because they can't play for free. The reality is that LAN play WILL happen with or without Blizzard's approval, and a lot of people who would have bought this game aren't going to.
Re:Not really (1984 style ReWrite) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not really (1984 style ReWrite) (Score:3, Interesting)
Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.
Past performance is no indication of future gains as all those commercials go...
It is an indication, it's just not a guarantee. I do realize how pedantic that sounds, but really, we're not supposed to try to learn from history?
Re:A $200 video game? I'll pass (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Your spawned install gameplay would give you about $4 worth of crappy rush gameplay against 3 n00bs for that $50 dollar game. Oh the fun to be had!
If you want to play with/against people who also love StarCraft I guarantee they have their own copy that will make the $200 price argument obsolete anyway.
Re:GIVE US LAN BACK (Score:3, Interesting)
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that Blizzard will give up what could be the closest thing that will ever exist to uncrackable DRM because some people on the Internet are unhappy about Blizzard's approach to getting that DRM.
Newsflash: Blizzard will change their approach if and only if SC2 becomes a miserable failure, and it can unquestionably be traced to their requirement for LAN.