StarCraft II Confirmed to Release with BattleNet 2.0 in First Half of 2010

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Special Features

New Games Frontier

As all you know the reason why Starcraft 2 delayed, is all because some plan for Battlenet 2 changed. Now Bilzzard finally confirmed the date, will be one day in 2010 Q2. It is in Activision Blizzard's Q3 financial conference call, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime stated that the long-waited StarCraft II is currently targeted to release in the first half of 2010. This means the title will come out no later than Q2 2010. The president also told in the conference that the development team is now hard working for the beta. However, the beta launch date is still uncertain. As to another title players are very concerned about, Diablo III was not said to be part of their 2010 schedule.

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About BattleNet 2.0 (Source: PlanetDiablo.com)

Battle.net 2.0 is the second iteration of Blizzard Entertainment's free for use online gaming service for its computer games, launched on March 19, 2009. Providing a unified account for World of Warcraft and all future games, the service's coming features will provide social networking tools and more. The service also expands account access and management to its web site, where one has on-demand download access to classic games one has added by product key.

The original Battle.net service launched in 1997 with the original Diablo as one of the in-game options for multiplayer, offering a few simple functions with its IRC-style chatrooms next to options for creating or joining game instances. Since then, it expanded to support StarCraft, WarCraft II: Battle.net Edition, Diablo II, and WarCraft III with a variety of features customized for each game. StarCraft introduced player rankings and game filters, as well as copy protection by product key. Diablo II introduced Battle.net Realms for storing character data online and thus making it rather difficult to modify character data for cheating purposes, a critical problem for the original game. Warcraft III added anonymous matchmaking so that players could quickly and easily get into the game.

World of Warcraft remains a separate, paid service but one can merge their classic account into the new unified Battle.net 2.0 account system to provide a single username and password for this and future games. Previous games, however, will retain their Classic Battle.net accounts and at this time cannot be used with the new accounts system.

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Features

Battle.net 2.0 offers a number of new features, though considerable functionality is yet to premier.

• Unified Account
  One login for World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2, Diablo III, and future games as well as Blizzard's online store.
  
  
• Web-Based Account Access
  Create and manage your account on the Battle.net web site.
  
  
• Classic Games On-Demand
  Add games like StarCraft and Diablo II to your account on the Battle.net web site by product key (CD key) to get access to download them for reinstall, anytime.
  
  
• Opt-in to Beta Tests
  Set yourself to automatically be entered to win access to beta tests.

Though they are not currently revealed or enabled, Blizzard Entertainment plans to add cross-game communication tools. It's not official but it's likely that the company will choose to emulate some already popular features of Valve Software's Steam digital distribution and multi-player matchmaking service, which offers such social networking and gaming features as player profiles, achievements, forums, buddy lists, and instant messaging.

Unlike Steam, the new Battle.net 2.0 does not yet have its own application running on users' machines to manage such features. For now the service will be available on the web site and in-game only.

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