StarCraft II Delayed Until 2010

Blizzard has just announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty won't be released this year. From their announcement: "Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game. The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward. This extra development time will be critical to help us realize our vision for the service. ... As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we'll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series' legacy in the first half of 2010."

Comments

Re:Why not "polish and refine"...

[Kurusuki]

Locking your door at night is greedy preventing all those less fortunate homeless people from eating your food, sleeping on your couch, and stealing your TV. A publicly traded company has an obligation to do what's best for the company. It does not, however, have an obligation to support a mode of play most commonly associated with unauthorized copies of the game. Communist pig

Re:Not really

[Beardo the Bearded]

You don't honestly think that SC2 will ever be released, do you?

It's all WoW for them from now on. Sure, they'll say that they're coming out with it, but it'll be rushed, buggy, and incomplete. Maybe it'll be written by a couple of co-op students. Who knows?

I'd wait until they get the install disks working correctly before you go out and buy it.

Re:Not really

[afidel]

Did you play WoW at release? Seriously buggy, painful town experience, and frequent server crashes for the first 6 months at least. I don't really blame them as it was their first MMO and the most successful one ever, but it wasn't exactly some perfectly polished piece at release. The same was also true for Diablo 2, I was a beta tester on that and I know of 20 bugs I reported during beta that made it to launch, quite a few that weren't fixed until the third patch. Blizzard might have been better than many PC publishers, but that's a fairly low bar.

Personally I think this is partly getting the new platform ready and partly not wanting to release an AAA title during one of the weakest holiday seasons in decades. If you spend the better part of a decade developing a game, why release it at the worst possible time? My biggest fear personally is that this will push SC2 to fall 2010 which will mean no Diablo 3 until 2011.