In a short Q&A posted on fan site StarCraftWire.net, StarCraft II Lead Developer Dustin Browder encouraged fans to “hang in there,” because they were “in the final stretch.”
First it was the announcement that the date had been set for the StarCraft II beta back in January. Then, more recently, said time frame was narrowed down to in the next few months. Now, Dustin Browder’s remarks might well be hinting that the sequel to Blizzard’s legendary RTS is perhaps closer than we think.
There are also some other interesting pieces of information in Browder’s responses. In response to the claim that the version playable at BlizzCon felt “almost done,” he agrees, but says that the things holding the game back at the moment are the single-player campaign and changes made to the company’s Battle.net service – both of which are “under heavy construction.”
Browder also acknowledges that even their internal target date might be overly optimistic, which is the reason they haven’t gone public with it yet:
Let’s be realistic. Our target dates are not something we hit more than half the time. Putting those out there would be pretty close to lying to the fans. We are not going to do that. We want to be able to give good info, not info that we know is suspect. We’ll give target dates when we think it is very likely that we will hit them.
On the positive side of things, Browder’s admission that they might not hit their target dates could help assuage concerns that Blizzard’s recently announced “one-release-per-year” policy could be reflecting a shift away from the company’s famous “it’ll be done when it’s done” mentality.
Mmmm… StarCraft II…
