In the long battle between Blizzard's standards and the calendar year, the calendar again came out the loser today with the announcement that the studio's anticipated RTS sequel StarCraft II has been delayed into the first half of 2010.

Blizzard attributed the delay to needing additional time to produce the new version of Battle.net, its online gaming service. Though few details are available on the new portal, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick likened it to Xbox Live in its combination of gameplay and social networking features.

Despite the delay of StarCraft II into 2010, Blizzard says the release of Diablo III will not be affected by the shift.

IINM the game has been delayed and expected to release on H1 2010

Yea,keep asking about the release date.

No one,other than Blizzard themselves know

WTH with the gigantic robot at the end of the video!!? not fair for protos/zerg

"You don't technically have to (login), but you'll want to. You can play in offline mode if you want - I just don't think you're going to want to. You'll be giving up lots and lots of features, and why would you want to be giving up features?"

We covered the features exhaustively in the original post, but perhaps we didn't draw your attention to the button on the above screenshot labeled "Play As Guest."

Shack: Maybe something where you connect once to Battle.net, but from that point on you'd only connect every now and then, and the connection would essentially act as a zero-ping LAN?

Greg Canessa: Something like that. 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, so that it'll facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection between two players. Those are the types of things that we're working on. So we understand and acknowledge and sympathize. I think part of this LAN thing was that people saw that out of context, without understanding what we were doing with the service. And hopefully now that people understand this huge service we're building.

Shack: And you couldn't possibly be abandoning the competitive leagues of StarCraft II.

Greg Canessa: Right, and we have solutions for location-based tournaments and other things. We just haven't announced the specifics for a lot of things. But we're working on it.

Shack: Thanks Greg.

Why the hell are you people talking Shakespeare in a games forum?