Essentially Heart of the Swarm is 99% complete — all the new units are finished, the new storyline has been mapped out, and the missions are playable — but it still needs a ton of fine tuning and polish. It might sound a bit strange that a game like this is so close yet so far, but that’s part of the Blizzard experience.
Rather than let the players work out the kinks, Blizzard tends to play test and play test until literally every part of the game, even those units that are completely insubstantial, is balanced. And then, when competitive players find those loopholes, they jump back in and institute a new patch.
As Browder puts it, working on Heart of the Swarm can be a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde experience, where one day everything looks perfect and the next there are dozens of items to be corrected. Many gamers out there might rather Blizzard just release the expansion, but, at this point, we wouldn’t expect anything less than a fine-tuned product.
Hopefully, along with raking in a handsome chunk of change, Blizzard learned from their mistakes with the launch of Diablo 3, and will roll those lessons learned into the launch of this expansion. Obviously StarCraft 2 isn’t meant to be a wholly single player experience, but at the very least hopefully Blizzard will be prepared this time around.
Would you rather Blizzard just release StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and fine-tune that 1% percent later? Or is it part of a Blizzard product’s appeal that it was painstakingly polished several times over?
Source: Kotaku
