If you haven’t heard yet, Rob Pardo, Senior VP of Game Design at Blizzard, has confirmed that Starcraft II will not support LAN play. Yeah, you heard that right. Even though LAN play has been the pillar upon which Starcraft stood for years, it won’t be included in the sequel.

In an interview with Inc Gamers, Pardo said, “we don’t have any plans to support LAN.” When asked directly for clarification, he said, “We will not support it.” Furthermore, in a follow up with Blizzard, they were told that the exclusion of LAN play, “is because of the planned technology to be incorporated into Battle.net,” a topic they will reveal more about at a later date.

As you can well imagine, the Starcraft community isn’t happy. Starcraft II has already received its share of attention, once it was revealed that it would be released in three parts. Blizzard has assured gamers that each parts of the release will be a full-fledged game, and the furor has died down. Unfortunately, Blizzard is now in the center of a storm again, and this time it’s LAN gamers stirring things up.

UPDATE: A new statement from Blizzard appears after the break.

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Blizzard Community Manager Zarhym confirmed that the company’s unannounced MMO project is based on a new IP  which has nothing to do with World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, or Diablo III.

Zarhym’s comment is part of an answer to a thread on the WoW forums that accuses Blizzard of laying aside future expansions for the popular MMO. He answers the challenge and gives an explanation of how the development process works in response to the thread “Blizzard going the way of SOE?”

Quote:
“I’ve heard that they are focusing on other projects. If this is true you can expect more of this, and less customer service/content. At this point they can just sit back and add some new arena/pvp gear every4-6 months and that’s it.”

Zarhym:
“This a common misconception. Such a misconception requires nothing but assumptions and misinformation to hold water. We have completely independent art and development teams for each project on which Blizzard Entertainment is working. Sure, people switch positions and may move to other projects from time to time. This is common practice in any company, whether or not the company develops games. But if a position is vacated, it is filled. You may have seen earlier this year that Jeff Kaplan, former game director for World of Warcraft, announced he would be leaving his position to begin work on the new, unannounced MMO. Tom Chilton stepped up to fill his role on the World of Warcraft development team. We’re never short on talent and our teams are constantly growing. There’s absolutely no reason or evidence to support the theory that we’ve shifted focus away from the Warcraft franchise. I’m surrounded by employees in this building working hard every day that can attest to this, were they not too busy working on a prioritized list of new content for this game to speak directly. ”

The Poster goes on to insinuate that there can’t be a new MMO because it hasn’t been advertised yet.
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WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne is debuting as the official game for World Cyber Games 2009. Gamers will battle one-on-one for the world of Azeroth in this real time strategy. WCG has announced the official tournament rules and regulations including changes for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Starcraft: Brood War, TrackMania Nations Forever, and FIFA ‘09. This year’s Grand Final is scheduled for November 11-15, in Chengdu, China.
This year’s full lineup is listed in official press release following the break.

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Considering it was announced long before Diablo III, you’d think Starcraft II would be the next new game releasing from Blizzard, right? Not so, according to the latest rumor. An anonymous source apparently tipped off BattleForums, saying that the development of the Starcraft sequel has been postponed for the most part until Diablo III is ready for launch. They’ve even shifted around the teams as such:

[Starcraft 2] is still being worked on, but only by a minuscule amount of people compared to what [Blizzard] put on the Diablo 3 team.

Personally, I’ll be happy with either game, though I do wonder if this means we’ll have to wait even longer for a new Blizzard title. It’s also kind of strange that Blizzard would do this now, since everything I’ve seen of Starcraft II lately makes it look like it could be finished any day now. We’ll have to see how this all plays out.

Via BattleForums

Blizzard announced a few minutes ago that they are offering up some of their gaming soundtracks via iTunes.

This follows in the footsteps of the Diablo III Overture, which was recently released as a Discovery Download and is free until Tuesday, September 9. At least in the U.S. – visitors to this site have reported that it was not free in other countries, but hopefully Apple has fixed that by now.

Much of this music was originally available only in collector’s editions of the games, or at special events such as the company’s BlizzCon. Each set will cost the usual in your area.

Here is what is currently being offered up in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan:

• StarCraft Original Soundtrack
• Diablo II Original Soundtrack
• Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Original Soundtrack
• World of Warcraft Original Soundtrack
• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Original Soundtrack
• World of Warcraft: Taverns of Azeroth Original Soundtrack

The albums have been placed on a new Blizzard Entertainment hub page within the iTunes store. This page also hosts content such as the BlizzCast podcast and trailers and gameplay footage from upcoming games, with more material to be added in the months ahead.

via: Press Release

Over at the Official World of Warcraft website, Blizzard has posted a reminder that the finals for both World of Warcraft and Warcraft III tournaments are scheduled for this weekend September 6-7. Attendees will be given the opportunity to demo WoW: Wrath of the Lich King and Starcraft 2.

If you’re near the the Hard Rock Cafe in Boston, Massachusetts in the US or the Circulo Bellas artes, Salon de columnas in Madrid, Spain admission is free. Check out the latest World of Warcraft news for the fine print on the tournaments.

The WoW PvP tournaments for Taiwan and Korea are over. There was no mention in the news of gamers being invited to demo the Wrath of the Lich King or Starcraft 2. Of course I can imagine the chaos that would have created in Korea. Starcraft is huge there. As it is, I can envision many gamers who don’t care about WoW or Warcraft III showing up this weekend for an opportunity to get their hands on a Starcraft 2 demo.

For the past few years, achievements have been all the rage on Xbox 360. The recent PS3 v2.4 firmware update added in support for trophies, Sony’s answer to achievements, and PlayStation Home has promised to make trophies a big deal.

So imagine the possibility of achievements in World of Warcraft; a scenario we learned would become reality with the game’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. As it turns out, there’s more to Blizzard’s plans for achievements than just tacking on some goals to their insanely popular MMO — Diablo III and Starcraft II will be getting in on the achievement love, too.

“Eventually, our plans are for the Achievement system to become an account-based system,” WoW lead designer Jeff Kaplan told MTV Multiplayer.

With these new Blizzard Accounts, you’ll be able to earn points to add to your “Blizzard Level,” which Kaplan admitted is “basically a gamerscore” when the subject of Xbox Live’s system came up.

“For now the points are just a WoW character score. As we graduate to that Blizzard Account system, which is right on the horizon, it will switch over to a Blizzard Level.”

He added, “Your WoW score would be just one factor that will go into your Blizzard Level. And rather than call it a ’score,’ we just wanted it to be like you’re leveling up on Blizzard games… You’ll have this Blizzard identity, and you’ll be able to see things like ‘Oh, this guy was great at Diablo III, but he never played Starcraft and he was mediocre in WoW.’ That sort of thing.”

Sounds great, but wouldn’t it be better if this were plugged into Live where you could track achievements and points across a larger spectrum than just the latest Blizzard titles?

With any sort of service like GFW Live, support from developers is the number one hurdle to overcome. If you don’t have any games on your service, then it’s worthless. Obviously, things coming out of Microsoft like Halo are going to support Live, but that doesn’t nearly mean as much to PC gamers as Half-Life (with Steam) does.

So just how much work does Microsoft do in trying to gain developer support? 1UP asked Games for Windows head Kevin Unangst, who explained what the process is like.

Are you aggressively courting these companies, or are you simply throwing it out there and saying, “here’s our solution. If you like it, we’re here?”

We evangelize our technologies. We have a sizable team that goes out and does that, and it’s an important part of our success in terms of encouraging developers to adopt those technologies. Frankly, as a result of that outreach with the existing product and the offering of Games for Windows, we learned a lot and learned what developers want. Another example of where we’ve changed is that, there’s about a third less technical requirements for games to support Games for Windows Live, in terms of the tests that they have to go through when they’re connecting to our Live network. We took a number of those requirements off to make it even easier, essentially, for those games to add Live.

And we’ve actually heard a lot from happy developers who say, “I know that on the console, achievements drive a lot of sales and interest in my game.” So I think you’re going to see, not only multiplayer games, but also a lot of single-player games that may be great games that you play in a single-player mode that’ll want to add access to the friends list and potentially downloadable content and just awarding achievements in a PC game. I play on both platforms and there are games that I prefer, even though I’m a predominantly PC gamer, that I want to play on the console because I can get achievements that I can send back to my Gamertag. I think all of those things are true and are more interesting to developers now, and we continue to evangelize all those scenarios.

Dawn of War II and Fallout 3 are major games to support GFW, and while they’re certainly a start, Microsoft needs more than that. I can’t imagine a scenario where they’d convince Blizzard to do it (they have Battle.net, after all), but think about Starcraft II supporting GFW Live. Now that would be a killer app.

Anyone interested in diving into any of Blizzard’s games can pick them up at a discounted price today at Amazon.com. The Gold Box Deal of the Day is the World of Warcraft Battlechest, which hacks $13 off the usual $40 price tag down to $27.

The Lightning Deal (which are side deals that last only a few hours each) as of this writing is the Diablo Battlechest, which also has $13 taken off the usual $40 price. $27 is a damn good price for either of the Battlechests, even if Diablo is pretty dated. After the announcement of Diablo III, I hopped back in for a few days and still had a great time, even if certain things (like resolution support as high as 800×600 — whoo!) annoyed me a bit.

Looking at the descriptions for the three Lightning Deals that Amazon still has in store, it looks like Burning Crusade, Warcraft III, and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Looks like a good way to stock up on a backlog of Blizzard games, even if a few will be missing. Starcraft, anyone?

You can watch for those deals to pop up throughout the day right here.

Apparently Blizzard has another unannounced game in the making according to a recent session during last weekend’s Blizzard Invitational.

According to the video posted above, Rob Pardo not only talks a bit about Diablo III, but also mentions a separate development team working on an as of yet unannounced project and that the recent job listing for a next-gen MMO had nothing to do with WoW.

The speculation that this could be the much rumored StarCraft MMO is sure to get more heated with arcane comments such as these, but then again it could be a completely new franchise which would be interesting as well.

“The idea of a new franchise is very intriguing to employees of the company,” explains Blizzard COO Paul Sams [Actiontrip]. “Are we ever going to release a new one? I would absolutely say we will at some point. I just don’t know when that day will be quite yet.”

The video posted above, has English subtitles for a reason according to the email sent to us from Onlinewleten, it was so loud in the background. Enjoy the trailer.

Thanks: Onlinewelen