Why the long wait?

Are you reading this Blizzard? Please Blizz, help us out. We’re not asking for much. We’re not asking for an exact hour or day. We’re not even asking for the month you’re planning to release Starcraft 2. But can you please give us an approximate range? Something like “around December” works a lot better for fans than “we’ll let you know when it’s ready”.

Everything is under wraps

Ok message sent, now let me get back to you guys. If you took the time to read the Frequently Asked Questions on the Starcraft 2 official website, you probably noticed that most of the questions end in “we cannot give you any details on this, since the stuff you’re asking about can only be answered closer to the game’s release date”. My question for them is…why add those questions and answer pairs in the FAQ if all you’re telling us is that you can’t tell us squat?

What history has shown us

All we’re left to do is estimate. There have been a lot of rumors about the actual date when Starcraft 2 is coming out but knowing Blizzard, they probably don’t even have a fixed date planned. If you recall, in 96 or so, Blizzard started work on a small project called World of Warcraft. It was going to be an adventure game that placed you more personally inside the world of one of the company’s other huge successes, the Warcraft universe. They spent around 4 years developing the game, after which they simply cut off the project because they thought it couldn’t be brought to the same quality level as the main games from their three quality franchises: Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo. The same thing happened with Starcraft Ghost which was deep in the development process, but still got cut off because it didn’t meet the quality benchmarks that Blizzard imposes on their games.

The point is...

My point is, when Blizzard wants something done, they’ll do it right. And if they want to do it right, they’ll take all the time they need to do it. They’ll also cut off a project at the blink of an eye if it doesn’t have as bright a future as their past games. However, Starcraft 2 looks almost playable already, judging by the screenshots and videos you can see on the game’s website and throughout the Internet. The engine seems to be all set, so that means that the only thing that they still need to focus on is content and gameplay. As we speak, there’s probably some guy out there in the Blizzard offices that’s manually placing textures on the character models, polishing down small details, adding new content and creating new maps for the game.

Final Words

So when is Starcraft 2 coming out? Well no one can say with any certainty, but seeing how advanced the game is at this point in the development process, we may as well hope that it will be done before the summer.