It's possible
StarCraft II will have a workaround to allow play on a
Local Area Network following the uproar over
previous indications
that Blizzard's RTS sequel will not include LAN support.
Kotaku brought this up with Rob Pardo, and he seemed amused at the idea that
people will still consider this an issue when the game is released, indicating
that in cases where no 'net connection is available, there may still be ways to
play: "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." Likewise,
Shacknews raised the
possibility in a conversation with Battle.net developer Greg Canessa work on a
solution to support low latency/high bandwidth situations where they asked
if such a solution could provide "pseudo-LAN" support with Battle.Net
authentication for local games: "Something like that," he told them.
"Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or
periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to
facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things
that we're working on." They also confirm with Jay Wilson that
Diablo III
will deal with LANs the same way StarCraft II does, so it should support any
such programming created for StarCraft II.