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Friday, July 10, 2009

This is the way you'll play our game

3:15 PM / Games / No Comments

Blizzard Entertainment recently confirmed that their two upcoming games, Starcraft II and Diablo III, will not support local area network (LAN) games. Instead, players who want to play the games' multiplayer mode will have to connect to the company's Battle.net online gaming service, even if the person they want to play against is sitting right next to them - at, say, a LAN party or university halls of residence.

The reason? Apparently, it's that old chestnut, piracy. Blizzard is concerned that, in the unmoderated realm of LAN play, it will be easy to crack the games and for multiple individuals to then play together using a single copy, resulting in sales suffering. Permit me an eye roll. Yes, piracy is an issue, but it always will be, and the ability to play via LAN has not prevented the original Starcraft (whose only form of copy protection was a simple 13-digit CD key) from selling over 11 million copies worldwide and still being in the US Top 20 charts eleven years after its release. I bet most publishers wish their sales "suffered" this much.

Alas, these days piracy seems to be the grand old catch-all excuse used by developers to explain any unpopular decisions they make. It provided EA with justification for an insidious form of DRM that limited the number of times a player could install their games (and was ultimately abandoned in the wake of a sustained backlash), and now it seems Blizzard is using it to justify the removal of an extremely popular mode of play.

Starcraft II

It's not ultimately the end of the world - Battle.net is a free service and one that has had a considerable amount of money sunk into it in order to improve the service and play experience. Furthermore, if I had to choose between being forced to connect to Battle.net in order to play multiplayer games and having to put up with EA-style DRM, I'd choose the former any day of the week. And - or so say Blizzard's PR people - the new Battle.net 2.0 will be, like, super-amazing (although they remain tight-lipped on just what the amazing new features will consist of). That's all well and good, but people like choice. And not everyone has an internet connection good enough to ensure lag-free play. You want everyone to play on Battle.net? Fine - do so by making it the greatest, most amazing online gaming service anyone has ever seen, not by forcing people to use it by removing other legitimate forms of multiplayer.

Don't get me wrong. I'll still be first in line to pick up my copies of Starcraft II and Diablo III the day they are released. However, I have fond memories of playing these games' predecessors via LAN (legitimate copies, I might add), and, with that mode removed, I can't help feeling that an essential part of their DNA has been lost.

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