And as I understand it the central savegame bit is meant as a neat little feature so that you can continue your campaign on your work computer without having to drag around a CD-RW (you dirty little IT man, stop playing SC2 on your $50/hr paid time!).
Yes, one of my friends pointed this out last night and it is kinda handy to be able to resume a game from anywhere. I had some co-op experiences with some friends last night in a party and I have even MORE concerns about the lack of LAN play:
-We (3) were playing Stacraft 2 while another (1) was browsing the web and another (1) was playing Lord of the Rings online. We were abusing the work FIOS connection to do it, which is supposed to get 25 up and 25 down. After a half hour of game play the person browsing the web was starting to get lots of time out errors. The person play LOTRO was lagging out of the game, but there was no noticeable loss in our Starcraft game aside from some AI related lag spikes. However, we reset the modem and the router to recover performance for the other (which worked). BUT! We had to keep doing this every half hour. Prior to loading up SC2 we had been playing Battlefield 1942 across the LAN with no lag (4) and one person was playing LOTRO for about 5 hours with no performance related issues on the network. This was disturbing to see to say the least.
-Finding friends is a bit tricky unless you know the information before hand, maybe this is a good thing, I don't know. However, the fact that I can't isolate my friends from my other friends is NOT COOL. I would very much like to play with my sister without exposing her to my hordes of obsessive gamer buddies.
-Launching games was a little difficult to figure out. Everytime I went to click on someone in the party menu it showed their profile on top of the game launch menu and it took me several minutes to figure out that we couldn't launch a new game because I was already sitting in a game that was waiting to launch.
-The new chat feature is pretty cool, it works a lot like the Facebook chat, with a bar at the bottom with windows to click on for users. And that was actually really handy.
-Creating a party and jumping into a quick launch game was pretty easy too, all though the quick launch settings set us up for a game that quickly ended because it set the AI to high. Finer control over the quick launch game settings would have been nice.
-Lastly, some of the rendered cut scenes are terrible. I'm running 8 GB of DDR3 with a quad core processor, 1.5 GB of Video Memory on a PCI Express card with Windows 7. But some of these rendered cut scenes make me cringe. They are not at all up to par with the commercials and even the banner advertisements I've seen for the game around the web. I've heard they get progressively worse as you get into the campaign too - I'm only two missions in and already scared. It seems like my Anti-Alias settings aren't high enough, but I'm running everything in the game at Ultra High settings with no lag and the scenes still look awful.