Blizzard unveils the new look Battle.net at BlizzCon 2009. Atomic gets the low-down from Project Manager Greg Canessa, plus all new pics!
For all intents and purposes, it might have seemed as though Blizzard had forgotten about the Battle.net system. But, as we've now heard at BlizzCon, the company has very big plans for it - and those plans will affect players in every one of its franchise games. Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard, Rob Pardo, hosted the Battle.net Panel and subsequent Q&A session on what they have in store.
Originally launched in 1996 battle.net shipped with Diablo and integrated a matchmaking service into the game. That service was further developed with the release of StarCraft, Diablo II and Warcraft III. Pardo described some of the lessons developers learned from Warcraft III; it was great at matchmaking, easy to play with friends, random teams had a lot of success and the icon systems and character avatars were popular.
But, and there's always a 'but'; the chat channels were disorganised, the single player experience was divorced from the connectivity, new players were demoralised by constantly being beaten by experienced players and the ladder system really only served those elites. Blizzard says it wants the upcoming changes to eliminate those annoying aspects of competitive gaming. In the future we should see new features including persistent characters, the ability to connect with friends across games, while still being able to play as a guest in offline mode.
The upgraded battle.net will serve as your portal into every Blizzard game - previously you would need an account for each of your games; StarCraft, Diablo whatever your poison happens to be. In the future a single battle.net account will serve as your portal into the Blizzard game experience - a single log-in and focus point for players. Project manager Greg Cannessa , formerly of XBox Live, said they want battle.net to be the world's premiere portal for gaming. "Battle.net will be that common destination where all Blizzard gamers will hang out - it will be the link between al l of them. And in driving that consistent set of features into each of the games, it will have a consistent experience across whatever Blizzard game you happen to be playing."
In fact World of Warcraft players have been aware for some time that something was up with Battle.net and that a new direction was on the cards. Earlier this year players were offered the option of merging their World of Warcraft account into a Battle.net account. It's not compulsory as yet, but there have been hints that compulsory merging isn't too far away; Grunty, the in-game WoW pet available to BlizzCon attendees can only be activated by Battle.net account holders.
Canessa's hopes for the new battle.net are extremely innovative to say the least. "Our vision is nothing short of creating the world's premiere online gaming destination for Blizzard games, we want to create something in a very similar fashion to what XBox Live service has done. We want to create a rich, detailed online game system service that services social networking as well as competition, cooperative play and so forth."
The Battle.net panel showed us just some of what developers want to do with the system including community connectivity across all games starting with a single online portal for every franchise as well as functionality inspired by social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and other games vehicles such as Xbox Live.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009