Blizzard has indicated that the Australian gamers will only be able to play against its Southeastern Asian counterparts. Typically, Australian gamers were able to play against gamers from America and Europe without being locked into any certain region. Australia has always faced obstacle as they relate well to Europeans and Americans but are separated by big distance and time zone.
According to Blizzard, the move was made to ensure better connectivity and improved latency. However, the gamers in Australia are claiming that the overall ping is better when connected to US or European servers due to better infrastructure in those regions. Worse yet, Blizzard has no plan to install a local server on the island nation. Perhaps only way to get around this issue might be to purchase a US or European version of the game. However, I’m not sure if Blizzard will filter the IP to automatically connect the Aussie gamers to the Southeast Asian servers.
As with any online matches, FPS or RTS, cheating and hacking has been the biggest concern for the game companies. Seeking to protect the integrity of their games, Blizzard is set to launch the new version of their match making service, Battle.net. The recent lawsuit brought against a hacking group known as Starcrack is evidence of Blizzard actively cracking down on any assault on their intellectual property. Starcrack tried to release a single player campaign based on the Starcraft 2 beta client. The original Starcraft had its share of cheaters and hackers playing on the Battle.net. With the release of new Battle.net, Blizzard is hoping to stay one step ahead of the cheating on the Battle.net. This is especially important in Korea as match making might have to go through Battle.net if something can’t be worked out.
Recently, Blizzard announced standard version and collector’s version for their upcoming Starcraft 2 release. Blizzard’s VP of creative development Chris Metzen has indicated that the expansions could see collector’s edition as well. As if splitting up three games to make more profit was not enough, Blizzard is looking to release higher priced version of the impending Zerg and Protoss expansions. This seems like another money grab by the publisher Activision who is embroiled in melting of Infinity Ward. We just hope that the expansions won’t be priced too high.
Most of the games get boring if there is endless iteration to achieve certain goal. However, Blizzard said the secret behind the success of their games is the endless iteration. On the surface, this seems absurd as you would not want to do the same thing over and over in a game. However, when you look closely at Blizzard games, most of them are repetitive. This holds true for the mega successful World of Warcraft where you do nothing but level up and get new items until new sets of items are released. Also, Diablo 1 and 2 are all about repetition. This can be somewhat true for Starcraft where the missions don’t vary too much and online play is basically same. The lead designer Kevin Martens said in an interview that the iteration is the key to the success.
This will also apply to the upcoming Starcraft 2 as well as Diablo 3. Both games won’t vary too much from their predecessor games. The key to having successful games with iteration design is simple. Make a fun game where you want to do things over and over. It has proven true for all the games released by Blizzard. You don’t mind doing same things over and over when it is fun. Starcraft 2 will certainly have updated graphics and new units. But, the core attraction, the strong game play, will not be changed.
To the dismay of many StarCraft fans, Blizzard has once again delayed the release of StarCraft to next year. Blizzard is well known for pushing back the release date for their games. Almost every single release has been delayed once or twice before arriving at the retailers. However, the anticipation for the StarCraft 2 has been higher than any game released by Blizzard.
This has been somewhat frustrating for most Blizzard fans. Blizzard has not released any new game in last 5 years or so except for World of Warcraft expansion sets. Even the eagerly anticipated Diablo 3 is not due until next year or more. Usually, Blizzard has stuck to two year cycle for their new releases. This delay could be attributed to the wildly successful MMO, World of Warcraft. Even with the long release cycles, Blizzard has enjoyed great success with their releases. This has saved Blizzard from any financial difficulties faced by other developers that release a terrible game on a long release cycles. Even with the delay, Blizzard expects StarCraft 2 to do very well at retailers across the World.
While Blizzard has maintained that separate teams are working on separate games, it is clear that the cash cow World of Warcraft is garnering more attention than the other franchise games. Even so, the financial windfall from WOW should enable them to accelerate the development of StarCraft2. While nobody wants to see half finished game release followed by patch every 12 hours, it would be nice to see the game released earlier than expected.