This will probably be an easy question answered in record time. Does anyone know whether StarCraft 2 will be available on Steam, and if so when it will be released there? I haven’t been following StarCraft 2 very much, admittedly, but some of the guys in my office are playing in the beta and are saying they want to buy the game and do some inter-office multi-play-age. I’m good with that, but I’d prefer if the game was on Steam (which I already have on my work laptop), so was wondering if it’s going to be available there.
None of Blizzard’s other games are on Steam, nor are any of them listed as “coming soon”, and I’ve heard no indications from any source that it will be. So I think it’s safe to say “no”.
Damn…I was afraid of that when I didn’t see any of their other games on Steam. Oh well…thanks for the quick answer, even if it wasn’t what I was hoping to hear.
Blizzard has their own store and digital download service integrated into battle.net. You could get it directly from them in a manner largely indistinguishable from Steam. You’ll have to make a battle.net account to play Starcraft 2 either way.
I’ll probably have to punch another bloody hole through the firewall for Blizzards site is all. Ah well…c’est la vie. You are right, I forgot about battle.net…been a while since I played a Blizzard game other than WoW. I suppose I might as well get it done though, since I intend to get Diablo 3 whenever they get around to finishing that one as well…
I’m pretty sure Blizz’s downloaders use the same ports as the WoW patcher. So if you’re still using WoW you shouldn’t need to punch any new holes in your firewall.
I am rather confused by the pricing. Is SC2 free to play offline, but you have to pay a monthly subscription to play on the ladder? When I google this “Starcraft 2 pricing”, all I got are pages from Amazon and the very helpful “Pricing hsa not yet been determined” in the FAQ.
Some countries (Rusland, Brazil I think) get a cheaper game, but a monthly fee to play online. They still get the option to buy the full game with free internet play (single player is part 1 of 3 as each has the campaign of one race, although the amount of missions is supposed to be comparable to a full game. Online has all three races playable).
Then there is that the online play will be region locked: the Battle.net 2.0 account is locked to a specifc server. If you want to play on the European or Asian server you have to buy a game for that region as well.
There are some hints that Blizzard will offer for-pay extra online features (change account nick name (you only get one per Battle.net account compared to unlimited before - which does prevent ‘smurfing’ new players as an expert player), custom tournements, uploading more than ~10MB of custom maps (no longer hosted by yourself, need to upload to BNet which then hosts it), etc).
Read this post if you want a complete doom and gloom story. The Facebook integration is for free though ;).
That sounds worrisome, to me… In Starcraft, there were a number of “illegal” maps floating around, which couldn’t be made in the editor (things like starting location being directly next to mineral patches). I’m guessing that the reason they want to host maps themselves is to be able to crack down on things like that… Except the thing is, those maps were actually pretty fun, and it’s hard to say they hurt Blizzard in any way.
While we’re at it, will there be any non-Battle.net multiplayer options? Or at least, do computers talk directly to each other once they’ve connected via Bnet? LANs often have much better speeds than connections to the outside world.
They don’t care if you want to play $$$ FASTEST MONEY MAP. The SC1 editor was aimed at producing just standard gameplay maps, which is why it followed standard gameplay rules like that. SC2’s editor is decidedly not.
The map publishing is intended to be make it easier to get maps and keep them all updated to the same version. You just type the name of the map into the search field when you want to play it and bam, the latest version of it is automatically pulled off bnet. You don’t need to go to a website, you don’t need to find someone else with it, you just need the name and it’s all handled automagically.
I think the gloom & doom about the file size restrictions is a bit silly. My entire cache of all the SC2 ladder maps is just 3.5 mb total. 50mb total / 10mb per map leaves an awful lot of room for stuffing maps full of fluff, and that’s just for one user. Nothing stopping you from having your friends publish your stuff with you if you want to pack in entire Rick Astley mp3s.
A connection to battle.net is required at all times, even for single player (ugh). Once the games are started, I think it’s directly between players like their previous games, but I haven’t had the chance to try it out local with anyone yet.