Battle.net Becoming More Like Xbox Live, Causes Starcraft II Delay

Nicholas "bapenguin" Puleo August 6th, 2009 at 7:52 AM

If you haven't heard, Starcraft II was officially delayed yesterday by Blizzard. Nobody was really surprised, though many were disappointed. The game was moved into 2010 for a release, and the reasons it was delayed may surprise you.

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty wasn't delayed due to technical issues with the game itself, but rather due to technical and maturation issues with Blizzard's new version of Battle.net, their online gaming service. We'll let the master of the underworld, Bobby Kotick, explain:

The company's vision for Battle.net is a "true online destination platform," and Kotick expects it to "become the foundation for connecting tens of millions [of players] in the Blizzard community in a social gaming network across all Blizzard's future games."

So what exactly does that mean? Cross game invites, global friends lists and logins across all game, social tools (aka voicechat, clans, groups) - it sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's Xbox Live. Though Live seems to have evolved even further past those stages.

With Starcraft II moving into 2010, it would appear everyone's favorite colorful and cooperative based Action/RPG, Diablo III, is also in jeopardy of a delay. That's not the case though.

"We haven't announced any release dates on any future title. And I'll also reiterate that the [move of] StarCraft into next year does not impact the schedule," said Morhaime, who then, with a slight laugh, added: "And so it would be correct to conclude that you could expect two releases of Blizzard next year. But I will not make any conclusion as to what those titles will be."

Well...perhaps it won't be Diablo III. We'll keep our unicorns crossed.

Tags: pc diablo industry news battle.net starcraft

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7 Total Reader Comments

Biohzrd451 at 04:33 AM on 8.6.2009

Blizzard seems to really have gone downhill. Removing Lan play? Making Starcraft II into episodes? It just doesn't make any sense. I love the first Starcraft played it all through Highschool but man did they ever put me off from getting the sequel.

Lun4tic at 07:30 AM on 8.6.2009

Sounds a lot like Steam as well.

HobocidalManiac at 07:59 AM on 8.6.2009

Can't they just use Steam so I can get my butt kicked at this game faster? I don't know why I'm so excited for a game I'm terrible at.

Arttemis at 11:30 AM on 8.6.2009

As long as this doesn't charge a subscription fee to play online...

I've always been pleasantly rewarded for patiently waiting on Blizzard's products. I'd hate for them to degrade in quality (not just bureaucracy in removing LAN and breaking games into full-price episodes) with the Activision merger.

Mrxknown_JG at 12:22 PM on 8.6.2009

I didn't see anything about making Starcraft II into episodes, maybe that was covered elsewhere. Seems odd tho..

ong_elvin at 03:00 PM on 8.6.2009

SC2 is to be released in three episodes, each with one campaign. Each episode's campaign will be for a different race. The first episode's campaign will be the Terran one.

All three games will be fully playable in multiplayer though, and all three races accessible. Basically, they are all simultaneously base games and expansion packs.

Sabre at 03:13 PM on 8.6.2009

I never got why people love SC so much. It was just a RTS to me. The original allegedly didn't have LAN, but they won't add it now so pirates can't play multiplayer or something equally silly.