Cloud play and more for Battle.net

By Oli Welsh Published 22 August, 2009

Pardo blows open Blizzard's Live.

Blizzard design chief Rob Pardo explained the features of the new Battle.net that would ship with StarCraft II at a BlizzCon panel today. The Xbox Live-style service features unified friends lists, chat, achievements and identities across Blizzard games, "cloud" play so you can access your StarCraft II save from any computer, and a league and tournament matchmaking system for players of all skill levels.

Players will log in to StarCraft II as if it were an MMO – although it will be possible to play offline, you'll have to do so as a guest.

You'll be able to access your friends list at any point, whether playing camapaign or multiplayer, and it will be unified across all Blizzard games, starting with World of Warcraft. "Toasts" will notify you of when friends log in and score achievements, and you'll be able to send out speech-bubble "shouts" to invite friends to play with you. There will be an instant-messenger style chat system, with separate windows for personal, party and clan chats.

Battle.net will allow you to group your friends' various characters and aliases together in a Facebook-style Real ID, probably under their real name, for easy identification. This will sit on top of, rather than supercede, traditional character-to-character friendships.

"Cloud play" will permit StarCraft II players to pick up their Campaign games and multiplayer profile from any computer they have the game installed on, without physically moving files from one machine to another. Your profile will track achievements, stats, match histories and so on across multiple characters and Blizzard games. StarCraft II achievements will unlock avatars, and decals which can actually be applied to your in-game units.

There will also be a friendly matchmaking system for all StarCraft II players. It will divide players into leagues from Practice – with certain anti-rush rules and map sets, and a slower game speed, to allow new players to get accustomed – through Copper to Platinum and then Pro leagues. Within a league, you'll compete with 100 other players in a "division" over the course of a season. Do well, and you can enter a tournament to see who wins the league.

Browsing for games will also be much improved, with grouping and filtering systems in place.

Watch out for more detail on StarCraft II and Battle.net in a full hands-on preview from BlizzCon soon.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (17) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Pirotic #1 3 years ago

    I've been a big fan of the current battle.net system, and really like the sound of the new one. Sure, they've taken a risk by making account play online-only but considering what they can then do because of that, cloud-saves etc. I'm all for it.

  • Hantheman #2 3 years ago

    It's just the way things are gonig. Online or out.

  • mingster #3 3 years ago

    sounds awesome..
    And the logon thing is the way things will be for PC games soon.
    Its no big deal (unless you are a pirate)
    Edited by 1 at 22/08/09 @ 09:48

  • peak_performance #4 3 years ago

    There's no requirement to login, I'm assuming that saves are just saved on the local drive instead of online. They have said that it will be fully playable offline but without achievements and other stuff, I can buy that.

  • zoidberg #5 3 years ago

    They could've done this through Steam and not wasted the time doing Battle.net shit.
    They wouldn't have pushed back Starcraft II and, more importantly, they'll do a hash of it, have fewer servers than needed at launch from underestimating the demand and the service won't work for the first week.

    Valve has gone through that and Steam is now reliable. Too bad Blizzard wants its own cake.

  • sonicgoo #6 3 years ago

    Zoidberg: Blizzard and Valve are two different companies. Why would Blizzard want to drive their customers to Valve's shop?

  • Skywise #7 3 years ago

    Steam is great when it works, but when it breaks down it's horrible. A Steam update didn't work on my PC and I had to uninstall ALL Steam games before I could upgrade Steam again. If I can, I avoid Steam except for the amazing Valve games :-)

  • Trikk #8 3 years ago

    I'll definitely give out my real name to random people on the Internet.

  • hiddenranbir #9 3 years ago

    All this talk of "cloud" and all it is doing is keeping a gamesave and config file?

  • Sharzam #10 3 years ago

    Am i old fashioned in not being a fan of cloud computing ? i just dont like the idea of stuff being stored on a server thousands of miles away. Even if its just save games (which i doubt) i would still rather have them on my pc, so i can do what i want with them.

  • Bazfrag #11 3 years ago

    Just keep it free.

  • Varsity #12 3 years ago

    I'm just happy to see Steam getting some competition. Blizzard undoubtedly plan to open their service up to third parties eventually if they're going to these lengths for it.

  • SlipstreamDrifter #13 3 years ago

    many of you folk that aren't too happy about the always online aspect forget that the game is most popular in a country were they describe their net connections as being 0.1gb rather than other places were they describe their net connections as up to 8mg.
    blizzard are adding in features that its biggest market wants which is south Korea.
    Edited by 1 at 22/08/09 @ 22:01

  • thefinn #14 3 years ago

    "Players will log in to StarCraft II as if it were an MMO – although it will be possible to play offline, you'll have to do so as a guest."

    Sorry if I'm being obtuse, but what the **** does that actually mean? "Guest" sounds uncomfortably close to "Sure, you can play all you like. You just can't save your game without logging in properly".

  • sonicgoo #15 3 years ago

    thefinn: you can still save your game. You just won't be able to play your saved game on another pc, since it's only on the first one.

  • Silvervein #16 3 years ago

    As long as I don't have to install some programs (battlenet whatever) to play starcraft, I'm ok. They make enough noise with their online stuff for a herd of birds announcing sunrise on tatooine, but when it comes down to details, like the lag, matchmaking and so on, they don't say much.
    Besides. They might be adding stuff for south koreans, but I don't live there and I don't care about online things. So if they try to pull online login for an offline game, I'll just wait for pirate patch.

  • Eisenstein #17 3 years ago

    @thefinn: You can play the game, but you won't have the perks of BN: Achievements, Friend's List, Savegames anywhere etc.