Fri, Jun 15, 2012 | 21:40 BST
Blizzard – Heart of the Swarm is “99% complete”
StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is 99% complete, Blizzard has told Kotaku; however, the last 1% is a bit of “a bitch,” said lead designer Dustin Browder.
According to Browder, the units are in place and the missions are playable, but the “tuning and polish,” is what Blizzard is now concentrating on.
“There’s something in for everything—it’s whether we like it or not that’s an open question,” he said. “It’s the tuning and polish that really takes us a long time, and that’s where we get into the unknowns.
“Like we could do a play-through next week that we’re like, ‘Wow this is really great.’ Or we could do a play-through and we still have 250 items we wanna fix. You know, historically speaking we’re doing pretty well. We’re getting there. But I don’t know for sure yet when we’ll be done.”
While Blizzard hasn’t set a release date for the expansion, it’s speculated for a late 2012 or early 2013 release. Once the beta is live, hopefully a more concrete date will emerge.
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Posted in: Activision Blizzard, Development, PC, Strategy
Tags: Dustin Browder, heart of the swarm, sc2, starcraft II, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. SCII
8 comments
#1
Talkar
15/06/12, 10:08 pm
They should take their time with the polishing. A game like SC2 depends more than most on balanced units, and all that good fine tuning.
#2
Erthazus
15/06/12, 10:25 pm
Starcraft is Starcraft.
They need content for DIABLO III because right now DIII is too short (i can finish singleplayer in 15 hours doing everything in the game) and they only finished with Auction house and there is no PvP… Yet. I finished Inferno with Wizard and Monk and i’m right on track with Demon Hunter.
come on Blizzard. You can do much better then that.
#3
KodyxDestroyer
15/06/12, 10:42 pm
@2 What if I told you, the team who make Diablo 3 is a different team than those who make Starcraft 2
#4
Erthazus
15/06/12, 10:47 pm
@3, actually not true at all.
Blizzard developers have teams and often one team helps another and etc.
#5
roadkill
15/06/12, 10:50 pm
Erthazus check out Krater! It’s an awesome 60-hour (or so I’ve heard.. I’ve only played for 15 hours and I haven’t explored not even half of the map yet) indie RPG-RTS that’s only 15 euros on Steam at the moment. It’s very good. Much better than Diablo.
#6
Talkar
15/06/12, 10:52 pm
@4
While true to an extent, it is more a matter of moving teams from a completed project unto an unfinished project such as moving people from the Diablo 3 dev team to the Project Titan dev team. Moving teams from project to project, where both are in development is not something that is common in any way.
#7
absolutezero
15/06/12, 10:54 pm
99% finished only 12+ months of the hype train. Choo choo.
#8
GrimRita
16/06/12, 11:10 am
I cant see why it takes them so long to remake a throw back from the 90s