14 DAY TRIAL // According to the team working on it at Blizzard, the Heart of the Swarm expansion for the real-time strategy title Starcraft II is 99 percent complete, but the developers still need to put in effort in order to make the rest of the experience work well.
Dustin Browder, who is one of the leading designers working on Heart of the Swarm, has told Kotaku that, “There’s something in for everything—it’s whether we like it or not that’s an open question. It’s the tuning and polish that really takes us a long time, and that’s where we get into the unknowns.”
He added, “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.”
Browder has also led the creation of the first installment in the Starcraft II series, so he has the experience to evaluate the current stage of the development process.
Initially the fan base believed that Heart of the Swarm would be launched during the summer of 2012, two years after the core game, but it the expansion seems more likely to be released late in the year or in early 2013.
The single-player component of Heart of the Swarm will deliver around 20 missions, with a number of choices for the player to tackle while he is developing his forces and getting to know an all-new cast of characters.
For the multiplayer modes, Blizzard will introduce a number of new units that will change how players approach the game and will introduce new tactical choices.
The Starcraft II trilogy will be concluded by the Protoss focused Legacy of the Void.