StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder has revealed a little bit of Blizzard’s progress on the new Battle.net service, which seems very far away from completion.
He can’t say much at all because it ”might be a lie,” they’re still feverishly workin on it. It’s ”kind of up in the air” and Browder wishes ”it wasn’t, but it kind of is.” More fuel to the LAN fire.
”I can’t tell you a whole lot because in reality, anything I say might be a lie. We’re still working on it, and it’s kind of up in the air. I kind of wish it wasn’t, but it kind of is,” Browder tells Shacknews in an interview.
”What you saw today is not where we’re going,” he said, referring to a sneak peek of the new Battle.net Shacknews saw at Blizz HQ last week.
”It’s a version that we have that has a lot of problems that we don’t like. It was never meant to be the final version, but we’re getting further and further away from that being close to the final version. We’re trying to do more and more stuff.”
”We’re hoping to have support for casual leagues, support for professional leagues, hardcore leagues. Hoping to do a lot more with friends, more with replay sharing,” he explained.
Blizzard has promised that gamers won’t be disappointed with Battle.net, and have emphasised their plans and ambitions for the service. Team Blizz has taken flak from the community after the announcement of no LAN support broke.
”A lot of it you can probably guess, but what makes ship, what doesn’t, what comes in later patches–what we decide to do with it exactly does depend,” added the StarCraft II man.
”There’s just a lot more work to do. I could probably show you a full flow of Battle.net today, but I guarantee tomorrow it would be a little different. So work is going on on that, but at the same time the design is “wheeeeeeeee!” And where it’s at in the schedule is also sort of free-form right now.” I’m sure Blizzard will get their act together in time to save the prom.
