Latest news reports that the upcoming Real Time Stategy Game Starcraft II won’t have LAN support. Basically, you’ll have to play it over Battle.net, Blizzard’s online gaming system. Article on Gamespot.
An interesting move, to be sure. Now, there are a couple of reasons for this, they claim.
The first is to improve the quality of the game. Many are skeptical, but, frankly, I think this is 100% truth. Anyone who’s had to design any game, or even just GM a game, understands that understanding how people play a game is important in designing and improving it. I played Warcraft III extensively, and I noticed that Blizzard was very good at observing the trends from data collected through Battle.net, and making balance changes based on the actual statistics. It will also mean that Blizzard will be able to see stats for competitive games, which otherwise would be on a LAN.
The second reason is to reduce piracy. Now, it’s true that online systems do work wonders for piracy prevention (Steam (used in Half-Life 2 and related games) is the perfect example). However, even if it is fully integrated like Steam, I’m guessing it won’t be that hard to make a mod or crack to make the game LAN. I mean, there were programs for Warcraft III that allowed you to make a simulated LAN to play over the internet, this is just the other way around. I honestly don’t think this will have a serious effect on piracy: people are pretty clever at breaking things.
Either way, it’ll be very interesting to see how these changes change the way people play the game, both socially and competitively.
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The trailers shows that sequel will be at least as good as original was. But this delaying of game launch seems to be more matter of monetization strategy, not development issues.