Lack of LAN in StarCraft 2 is "no big deal"

Blizzard may be facing a fair bit of backlash over the removal of a LAN multiplayer option in StarCraft 2, but Blizzard's VP of Game Design, Rob Pardo, reckons that it isn't actually a big deal.

Speaking to Kotaku out at GamesCom 2009, Pardo said that he thinks the number of people who will actually be affected by the removal of LAN support is fairly small.

Blizzard has opted to remove LAN support in order to sync the game completely in with the online Battle.net system used by Blizzard games. In short that means that, if you can't get online, there's no way to play StarCraft 2 multiplayer.

"Everyone is going to give us flack until it's out. None of us is going to know how big a deal it is until it's out," said Pardo. "We believe that it's really not that big of a deal - that most people are not really going to notice that it's missing."

"There's a few legitimate cases that we're going to try and address over time. Location-based tournaments, or let's say I'm in a dorm with a firewall or something like that, hopefully there's a way to determine that and maybe start a peer-to-peer game."

The comments haven't stopped the backlash though, obviously and if anything Blizzard fans are annoyed that these instances are going to be addressed over time rather than available at launch, by the looks of things. Let us know your thoughts in the forums.