Kotaku sat down with Blizzardâs executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo this weekend to talk Battle.net, but we couldnât resist touching on the subject of the lack of LAN in StarCraft II.
Pardo was in good spirits when we spoke to him yesterday afternoon when I touched on the controversial subject, which has spawned a wave of forum rage and countless petitions calling for the reinstatement of feature. âYouâre the first person who asked me about that this weekend,â he joked. When I asked if the company was still receiving flack over the decision, his good humor continued. âOnly from you guys. Only from the press. Everyone else has accepted it.â
https://lastchance.cc/no-lan-play-for-starcraft-ii-453113794%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Once I finished giggling, Rob got down to brass tacks.
âEveryone is going to give us flack until itâs out. None of us is going to know how big a deal it is until itâs out. We believe that itâs really not that big of a deal â that most people are not really going to notice that itâs missing. Thereâs a lot of people out there I think that are just afraid that theyâre suddenly not going to be able to connect to the internet tonight and they wonât be able to play. I actually think that case is extremely rare, and I think weâre going to be okay.â
And what of the rare cases where no direct-connection option wouldnât be okay?
âThereâs a few legitimate cases that weâre going to try and address over time. Location-based tournaments, or letâs say Iâm in a dorm with a firewall or something like that, hopefully thereâs a way to determine that and maybe start a peer-to-peer game.â
So it really doesnât seem like that big of a deal, but as Pardo said, we wonât really know until the game comes out.
