StarCraft II: Delays From WoW & No LAN – So What?

If you pay attention to StarCraft II related news, you probably read a couple of things the media has spun into negatives.  Here’s why they may be positives.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not a Blizzard apologist.  I’ll be the first person to pipe up about the dangers of playing World of Warcraft.  However, the media does have a way of taking words and then filtering them so the proper message riles up a readership.  Let’s start with the easy one: StarCraft II was delayed due to World of Warcraft development.

• Blame WoW For Starcraft II’s Late, Late Release

That was the headline from one popular online gaming website.  But a quote from the story’s original webpage?

“One of the reasons that StarCraft II had some delays very early on in development is because a fair amount of the design team went onto World of Warcraft for a year to really help finish that game off.” – Rob Pardo, Blizzard’s VP of Game Design

I bolded the important emphasis.  The delay due to WoW was only one year.  So it’s been 11 years since StarCraft, 6 years since development started on StarCraft II, and you’re going to focus on the 1 year they had to give World of Warcraft extra effort as the reason for StarCraft II‘s late release?  Does anyone else see the problem here?  I don’t see the need to raise the ire of StarCraft fans against WoW fans; great job doing it anyway.  So what should the loyal StarCraft fan see when they read such a headline?

• StarCraft II Delayed Another Year – Ends Up Better Than Before

Why not give thought to the amount of extra money that Blizzard could then spend on StarCraft II development thanks to WoW?  Give thought to the fact that the extra time could be used to further the engine, further the map maker, and further the gameplay balancing act that the Real-Time Strategy genre requires.  Yes, Blizzard is awesome at patching games, but even they couldn’t get StarCraft II from where it would be a year earlier to where it will be when we see it at release through patches alone.  It sucks we don’t have our hands on it right this instant but like all things in life, patience will pay off and we’ll be buying the best StarCraft II Blizzard can manage.

Now for the other headline:

• No LAN In StarCraft II Confirmed

CONFIRMED. Yeah, that’s an authoritative headline!  Go ahead and take a look at the the original interview.

Hmm, see anything out of the ordinary?  Anything that might leave behind clues that Local Area Network play may be included after all?  Let’s quote the article:

We got quite different answers about local area networking (LAN), where both Dustin or Sigaty said they were still discussing it, however, Pardo knew immediately: “we don’t have any plans to support LAN,” he said and clarified “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.

Strange… Two of the dudes wanted to talk about it, but Mr. Pardo outright shut it down.  Later, Mr. Pardo “CONFIRMED” what he said earlier, with the article reading:

IncGamers also got a clarification from Blizzard, shortly after the interview, saying the choice of excluding a LAN feature “is because of the planned technology to be incorporated into Battle.net,” a topic they will reveal more about at a later date.

Okay.  So basically, they can’t talk about new features that Battle.net has, but one of them will replace the “LAN” feature.  Can someone tell me why we’re freaking out here?  Essentially, Dustin and Sigaty know of a feature in Battle.net but they couldn’t talk about it, so Rob Pardo simply stepped in and shut down any talk about a separate LAN feature.  What will replace it?

The best guess I have is a kind of offline Battle.net that can intermittently connect to a central server in order to keep track of records, users, and patches.  Think of it as a LAN Center mode, so you can always walk in and play the latest patch using your screen name without having to worry about the online latency Battle.net naturally brings into the picture.  This is a positive! LAN Centers are notorious for running old versions of whatever games they are hosting.

So just imagine some mode where your offline version of Battle.net can connect to a central server in order to authenticate your game and then go back offline and let you play with your friends via LAN.  It wouldn’t be called LAN, it would be called Local Battle.net(work).  Plus, it’s a pretty standard (think Steam) way of fighting piracy nowadays.  Besides, you can’t honestly believe someone is going to play this game via LAN without having some kind of intermittent access to an Internet connection.

So there you have it.  Two pieces of “bad news” quickly dismissed and, in some cases, brought into a positive light.  Was that so hard, video game websites?  Was it?!