In one of the most serious WTF moments I’ve ever had as a gamer, Blizzard today announced that StarCraft 2 will not support direct LAN play.
http://au.gamespot.com/news/6212765.html
Not only will you need to buy 3 (yes 3) separate products to get the whole StarCraft 2 experience (want to play Zerg, buy the Zerg product, want to play Protoss, sorry you need to buy the Protoss edition), you won’t be able to set up a direct LAN connection.
In those few spare moments I have in life, I play RTS games with my brother in law. We set up an ad-hoc wireless network with our laptops and go hammer and tong at one another. When a new game comes out, like Red Alert 3 or Supreme Commander, I always buy 2 copies so that we can get down to business straight away. The problem with my brother in law’s place is that while he has a great amount of space for gaming, he only has an old dial-up Internet connection – which we don’t connect to anyway when we are playing over an ad-hoc wireless network.
Certainly looks like we won’t be able to play StarCraft II over an ad-hoc network (can you imagine trying to play across the room by making a connection over a shared dialup connection?). Luckily there are a host of other great RTS games that we can spend our money on. Even Dawn Of War II, which has its own multiplayer setup joys, allows direct LAN play