Kotaku sat down with Blizzard's executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo this weekend to talk Battle.net, but we couldn't resist touching on the subject of the lack of LAN in StarCraft II.
Pardo was in good spirits when we spoke to him yesterday afternoon when I touched on the controversial subject, which has spawned a wave of forum rage and countless petitions calling for the reinstatement of feature. "You're the first person who asked me about that this weekend," he joked. When I asked if the company was still receiving flack over the decision, his good humor continued. "Only from you guys. Only from the press. Everyone else has accepted it."
Once I finished giggling, Rob got down to brass tacks.
"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. 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 lot of people out there I think that are just afraid that they're suddenly not going to be able to connect to the internet tonight and they won't be able to play. I actually think that case is extremely rare, and I think we're going to be okay."
And what of the rare cases where no direct-connection option wouldn't be okay?
"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."
So it really doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but as Pardo said, we won't really know until the game comes out.