Starcraft II: No Lan and Tech tree revealed
Well, in a very surprsing move, it seems that Blizzard has confirmed that there is NO LAN in Starcraft II. This was confirmed in a interview with Rob Pardo, the senior VP of game design at Blizzard Entertainment. Rob Pardo stated that:
“we don’t have any plans to support LAN,” he said and clarified “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.
Blizzard dropped LAN support for Starcraft II because they will be incorporating unknown features into Battle.net that will better serve their customers. I see it as a way for Blizzard to try and crack down HARD on piracy. So instead of being able to pirate and play the LAN mode over the internet with hamachi (or at a friends house); you will need a valid key to play anything. That is exactly the route that Company of Heroes took. When the game first came out you only needed an account (tied to a valid cd key) to play multilayer and pirates played over Hamachi. When Opposing Fronts came out, Relic changed everything so you had to sign in to do ANYTHING (single player, lan, etc).
No LAN in Starcraft II has fans up in arms and somebody started a petition (worthless since it doesn't even verify your email). I figure that no lan in Starcraft II isn't such a bad thing. Yes it sucks when you go to a friends house, and the port forwarding might be a bitch. It does also suck for all of the LAN Centers out there; I know that trying to get ports forwarded for 24 machines is a PITA.
On the flipside of the no lan for Starcraft II is the fact that the tech trees have been posted online! (Thanks to Giant Bomb). Even though the beta for Starcraft II is a few months off, you can start studying up the tech trees to prepare to kick some ass. Here are the screenshots of the Protoss, Terran and Zerg Starcraft II tech trees:
Starcraft II Protoss Tech Tree
Starcraft II Terran Tech Tree
Starcraft II Zerg Tech Tree