StarCraft: IncGamers reports that Australian and New Zealand gamers will not be able to play with other English speaking fans.
It has been known for some time that StarCraft II will be region locked for online play. European and North American friends will not be able to play with each other, following the WoW model. The reason for this is to keep latency down, one of the problems with the original Battle.net.
From 7 April Colelctor’s Edition press release: “Blizzard Entertainment also announced today that both the standard edition and Collector’s Edition of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will give players from Australia and New Zealand access to play on servers based in Southeast Asia, alongside gamers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. This local datacenter will offer players in the region improved latency for a high-quality gameplay and connectivity experience.”
One of the reasons the latency desperately needs to be resolved is Blizzard’s decision to disallow offline play using direct connections or LAN – a decision hundreds of thousands of fans have disagreed with (offline single player is still allowed after one online registration).
While it makes sense from a technical point of view to limit the servers to decently adjacent regions for performance, all the social features that Blizzard has been very excited about unveiling in the new version of Battle.net are now rendered useless for our Australasian cousins. Australian and New Zealand fans will of course be most affected, effectively cut off from all three major regions of StarCraft players: North America, Europe and Korea.
The silver lining here is that Blizzard has mentioned a possible content patch for StarCraft II and Battle.net that will allow players to connect to their friends across the world. With any luck, this will be a feature within the next few months after release, which is anticipated for June this year. Hopefully, it won’t be a subscription-based service, like the Russians will have to conenct to Europe.
On a related note, don’t miss our big StarCraft II beta key giveaway.
