Em uma entrevista que o site IncGamers fez com alguns membros da Blizzard, entre eles Rob Pardo, sênior VP do setor de design, o mesmo liberou um detalhe surpreendente. De acordo com Rob não existe intenção de dar suporte a LAN para o Starcraft II, sendo possível jogar no modo multiplayer apenas pela Battle.net.
Essa notícia já foi confirmada e deverá frustrar muita gente, até porque o sucesso gerado pela versão original do Starcraft foi justamente o fato do modo LAN.
Vale destacar que será possível jogar multiplayer em uma rede internet como em uma Lan-House, mas com obrigatoriedade de todos se logarem na Battle.net, sendo obrigatório uma conexão com a internet e cópia original do game.
COMPUTEX 2009: Taiwanese sources close to both AMD and Nvidia have confirmed that AMD will be first to market with DirectX 11 capable graphics cards and they're currently expected to arrive in October of this year – right in line with Windows 7's expected release.
The sources said that AMD is "essentially ready" to release the new family of GPUs – and has been for some time – but the company is waiting for the problems with TSMC's 40nm process to be ironed out.
The new family of GPUs – with the flagship rumoured to be called RV870 (although not confirmed by our sources) – will follow the same strategy that AMD employed with the Radeon HD 3000 and 4000 series. This means we can expect AMD to double up and use a pair of its fastest GPUs to create a dual-GPU flagship product of a similar ilk to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which dominated the high-end for many months.
Nvidia, on the other hand, is expected to release another big GPU, but it is unlikely to be a conservative effort like GT200 – we're told the focus will very much be on maximising performance and efficiency when switching between graphics and general computing tasks (i.e. using the Compute Shader). It's unclear whether it'll be enough of a brute to match the performance of two smaller Radeon GPUs on a single board though.
With that said, another sources said that GT300 had taped out but Nvidia is being quite cagey about a release timeframe. It has been manufactured on TSMC's 40nm node, which AMD has been having a lot of trouble with as RV740 chips are in "very short supply." If the problems with the process aren't ironed out, it could affect both companies which wouldn't be good for us consumers.
BioShock 2 has now been officially dated by Take-Two, with Europe getting the game a few days ahead of the US and other territories apparently.
The release date was announced during a company conference call to discuss the financial results of the second quarter, which Kotaku was privy to. Take-Two CEO Ben Feder announced the release date, though the officially listed release date is still just 'to be announced'.
BioShock 2 will launch in North America on November 3rd, while us Europeans can look forward to getting the game a few days earlier on October 30th.
BioShock 2 is expected to launch on the Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 - though it hasn't yet been established if the release will be at all staggered across platforms. The original BioShock launched first on the Xbox 360 and PC, with a PlayStation 3 release coming later, but with a few extra features.
Kotaku tried to esablish if the same might be true with the sequel, asking if the official 'TBA' release date listed might indicate a timed exclusive. The first response came from Take-Two's Chief Financial Officer, who claimed that the publisher was still working out the right timings for the different platforms. Company chairman Strauss Zelnick later corrected the issue though, saying that gamers shouldn't read too much into all that.
