This week in news recapping: Halo Motion Controls, purchased Pirates, and Blizzard-related rumblings.

LAN-Si! No LAN Support In Starcraft 2

You heard right: there’s no LAN support for Starcraft 2, according to the peeps at Blizzard. The one feature that kept Starcraft alive in Korea, cybercafes, and etcetera, has been abolished because of this:

“We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.”

Yeah, I appreciate the length they’re going through to curb piracy, but you’re also killing off the LAN-gaming culture that’s still existing in Asia. Next thing you know, they’ll be a petition somewhere down the line. Oh wait.

A New Halo Game Might Have Motion Controls

Look, as long as it doesn’t require me to cosplay into a rather uncomfortable UNSC outfit complete with a Master Chief helmet, I’m down with the prospect of pretend gunplay without a use of the joystick.

Epic Opening In South Korea

Epic Games has recently opened a new studio in South Korea, according to Triangle Business Journal. If you’re not sure who Epic Games are, you haven’t been gaming long, as they’ve created the Unreal Tournament franchise and the three-million-served Gears of War franchise. The new branch,  called Epic Games Korea, will be selling and supporting the latest Unreal game engine (Unreal Engine 3) to any avid developer willing to license it for their own games.

The studio will be led by one Ray Park, a former business and strategy development manager of Massive Inc. Analytic gamers might recognize the company as a lead Microsoft in-game advertising network in Korea. So, will we be seeing a new Counterstrike-like game that’s sure to look good? Or a fancier-looking DOTA? After all, that’s all the rage these days with our neighbors up north.

WoW Players Can Now Change Their Alignment

No, I don’t mean that in a sexual way. Now, Blizzard gives you the chance to switch sides, something that couldn’t be done since the popular MMO’s inception. Gamers can now switch from Horde to Alliance or vice versa, with a few rules attached of course. Sayeth the official site’s forums:

“We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.

As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the faction-change service in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience on the realms, and there will be some rules involved with when and how the service can be used. The number of variables involved increases the complexity of implementing this service, but we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out. We’ll go into much more detail on all of this here at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because this type of functionality requires extensive internal testing well in advance of release, you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward.”

More power to the people who play a game with a subscription fee, I guess. I’m not sure how this would affect hardcore gamers of WoW though, who practically bitched about the game getting too easy until some dungeon called Ulduhar came in or something like that.

Blue Omega Damned To Heck

So long, we hardly knew you. No really, we don't.

Several developers at Blue Omega recently confirmed to newshub Kotaku that the entire development team got the axe. Oh wait, context: Blue Omega developed the recent third-person shooter Damnation.  According to reports, the usual drama ensued between the team and their publishers Codemasters: lawsuits aplenty due to Blue Omega peeps taken off from their own game, disputes between the company and their subcontracted studios, shoddy work and milestones which led to poor sales.

Yeah, as much as I want to be objective on this, it doesn’t change the fact that the game blew chunks (according to the many reviewers out there). Still, I wish the former Blue Omega workers the best of luck in looking for bigger and better things.

Pirate Bay Bought By Swedish Game Company

Anyone who calls their torrent site using the word "pirate" is seriously asking for it.

The infamous bittorrent site used by all (you know who you are) called “The Pirate Bay” has been bought over by a Swedish software company called Global Gaming Factory.

What does this mean? Not only do they get a spiffy logo, but the torrent site will be turning into a legal site for…..something. Hans Pandeya, CEO of Global Gaming Factory, was vague about the fate of “The Pirate Bay”, stating that he “would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” *coughNapstercough*