Not long ago, Blizzard Entertainment’s Rob Pardo said, flatly, that uber-RTS StarCraft II would not support LAN. His words ignited a firestorm of keystrokes from an oddly vocal — and Internet-equipped — group of purists who clacked disapproval of the move in whatever corner of the Internet they were alerted to the grave, grave news. Those folks can relax and put the pitchforks down: Blizzard plans to incorporate some kind of LAN support for the title.
How? Call it … essentially-LAN. Speaking with Shacknews, Battle.Net developer Greg Canessa echoed leader producer Chris Sigaty’s confirmation that Blizzard is working on some kind of feature that can replicate the speed and reliability of LAN while users are still connected to Battle.Net (therefore authenticating their disc). If the concept comes to fruition, an Internet connection will still be required to play — but there’s no need for a new petition.
Canessa explains, “We are working on solutions with regard to things we can do to maintain connectivity to Battle.net in some way, but also provide a great quality connection between players.”
When asked if this solution would be like a “pseudo-LAN,” Canessa agreed, saying “Something like that,” before continuing. “Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don’t know if it’s once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection … those are the things that we’re working on.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this works, for sure. If it doesn’t pan out, we’ll be sure to tell you about the new petition.
