Were you really expecting to play Starcraft II this year? Activision Blizzard announced last night that the long awaited RTS game would be arriving in 2010. It looks set to be joined by Diablo III even if the hugely anticipated fantasy adventure wasn't mentioned by name. Company boss Bobby Kotick was giving nothing away.
It would be correct to conclude that you could expect two releases of Blizzard next year, but I would not make any conclusion on what those titles are going to be.
Blizzard's online gaming service Battle.net is due an upgrade as well, with Xbox Live mentioned as a benchmark. As Kotick explained.
Battle.net will become the foundation for connecting the tens of millions of members of the Blizzard community in a social gaming network across all Blizzard's future games. To put Battle.net into context, it will be a service similar to Xbox Live, and it will leverage the technologies, infrastructure and expertise that Blizzard has developed over the last decade in myltiplayer play and social networking. This will begin with World of Warcraft and StarCraft II.
But it's not just Blizzard. Kotick also announced that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had shifted nearly 14 million copies worldwide. Impressive figures for sure but will gamers be so keen on the more expensive sequel? Judging by pre-order figures - Kotick announced that Modern Warfare 2 has had more pre-orders than any game in their history - and anecdotal mentions from friends I'm guessing so.
Elsewhere a new Spider-Man and Bond game were announced – given the quality of the last few Bond titles are you really that excited? – while the skateboard peripheral based Tony Hawk Ride was confirmed for 2009 release in the US, UK and Germany only.
What do you think then? Is it a good lineup from Activision Blizzard? And did anyone really think Starcraft II would launch ths year?
