The outage of the Playstation Network earlier this year kept Playstation 3 gamers from playing online with their friends for a number of weeks. That kind of situation has led developer Naughty Dog to add LAN multiplayer support for its upcoming Playstation 3 exclusive title Uncharted 3. Industry Gamers reports that according to the game"s director Justin Richmond, the development team had to add LAN support to Uncharted 3 in order to continue development of the game"s multiplayer mode while the Playstation Network was down in late April and early May.
According to Richmond, "As a developer, one of the things is, you want to keep playing the game. And so, actually, one of the positive outshoots from [the PSN hack] was that we got LAN. So our programmers sat down and said, "OK, how can we continue to work?" And so they hooked up the LAN gameplay mode and now we"re shipping with that. So lemons to lemonade." The game itself, one of the most anticipated games of 2011, is due to be released on November 1.
While having offline LAN support for multiplayer games used to be a given, especially for PC titles, more and more games are dumping traditional LAN gaming support in favor of online multiplayer. Many StarCraft fans were upset when Blizzard announced that it had decided to not offer LAN support for the RTS game"s sequel, StarCraft II. Instead gamers have to play multiplayer matches via Blizzard"s online Battle.net service. Despite issues with some pro gaming tournaments experiencing lag while playing the game via Battle.net Blizzard has still not added LAN support for StarCraft II.