In a post on Blizzblues.com, Dustin Browder (Cavez), lead Developer of Star Craft II today answered a few of the questions that are floating around online regarding the massively anticipated RTS.
“I see lots of questions about timelines. Here is a little FAQ.
Question: “Why hasn’t Blizzard released the Beta?” or “WTF have they been working on, I played it at Blizzcon last year and I thought it was done!”
Answer: Solo campaign is under heavy construction as is Battlenet. When these things have enough work done that we know when our release date is going to be with strong confidence we will announce the Beta. Unless something crazy happens, the Beta is going to happen this year.
Question: “Why don’t you just give us your target dates if you don’t know the final date? We promise, we won’t get mad if Blizzard misses target dates.”
Answer: 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.
Question: When can we have the next Battle Report?
Answer: We were waiting on getting some improved graphics in (some of the new stuff looked REALLY rough). That was finished last week and we are now playing and looking for a good game. Once we get that game the process is reasonably quick to get it out. Once we go Beta, you guys can do these and put them up. When that happens I’m sure there will be a ton of them and I’m sure the quality of the games played and the announcing will go way up.
Question: “I notice that you haven’t actually given us any dates….”
Answer: Yeah. Sorry. We don’t want to lie about the Beta, and we don’t even want to lie about the next Battle Report. When we know a date (for anything) for certain, we’ll let you know.
Hang in there. We’re in the final stretch.”
The comment that stuck out for us was “Unless something crazy happens, the Beta is going to happen this year.” The possibility of the beta not landing in 2009 had not even occurred to most people. Lets just hope that nothing disastrous happens.
At any rate, we commend Blizzard for taking their time and resisting public pressures to set a release date. The “when its done” approach has not failed them yet, and we are quite happy to wait if it means that StarCraft II will live up to its hype.
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