Blizzard: StarCraft II and Diablo III Are Getting LAN-Like “Solutions”

Posted 08/25/2009 at 1:21am | by Nathan Grayson

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LAN? You still use that? People gathered together and sat around the old LAN, like, back in the days of vee-see-arrrrs and stuff, right? That’s old news, man. But how about that new thing Blizzard’s got cooking? It lets you play multiplayer games with a blazing connection, as if the Internet isn’t even involved. It’s crazy. What will these developers think of next?

"We are working on solutions with regard to things we can do to maintain connectivity to Battle.net in some way, but also provide a great quality connection between players," said Battle.net developer Greg Canessa.

The plan, it would seem, is for the game to authenticate with Blizzard’s server before switching into LAN mode.

"Something like that," Canessa replied when asked about such a solution. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection… those are the things that we're working on."

So then, can we never talk about LAN in Blizzard games ever again? With this solution, Blizzard’s happy and you’re happy. Unless, of course, you’re a pirate, in which case, it looks like your luck's finally run out.