Changes

As with all Blizzard titles, the release date is, "When it's done." They do not make estimates in advance or give hints, at least not publicly. Any listed dates, such as the ones found on software sales sites, are not official and are gross estimates, or are simply manufactured in order to boost presalespre-orders.

Unfortunately we don't know more exactly how much earlier StarCraft II will hit the stores, but we have an inkling to how close to completion that game is. The game has so far gone through most of it's major changes, with all units planned for the game available and decently balanced. Minor tweaking is still in progress, but no massive changes have been done in the last few months.

As Blizzard had decided to split the SC2 single player campaigns into three different games, this naturally speeded along since nearly the entire team can dedicate themselves to working on the main game, with just the Terran SP single-player missions and [[Battle.net|Battle.net 2.0]]. Right now, there's no major delay, although Battle.net was the one major issue to keep the game from entering beta back in April 2009.

Blizzard has stated slated StarCraft II is to be released in the first half of 2010, and beta started on 17th February 2010. A long beta test is expected for StarCraft, as the complicated multiplayer aspects of the game will need to be extensively play tested and balanced, but not longer than late June 2010. Blizzard has also said, and confirmed on several occasions, that the game will be released in the first half of 2010.

This, of course, assumes that the statement made back in 2008 about Diablo III being released before StarCraft II's expansions still old hold true. Seeing as the two development teams are both Blizzard, one could argue the "delay level" of them would be equal, and from a release point of view, it makes more sense to release their new game before an expansion anyway. Whether or not Blizzard are is still aiming for "one expansion per year" for StarCraft II is unknown, however.

Estimates of a % percentage completed are discouraged by Blizzard development teams, since there's no way to quantify the process in that fashion. They spent years working on the foundation of Diablo III: programming the game engine, trying out numerous different styles of art design, coming up with a plot and character concepts, etc. The hardware and foundational work takes as long or longer than adding in the content, which makes it impossible to estimate the overall % percentage completed.

However, we We can wager a guess that [[Act I]] is likely relatively close to "completion", and [[Act II]] possibly so as well. At this time, Blizzard has said this is the order of the acts, but anything can change before release. The order of the acts might very well be something completely different.