StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm Is “99%” Done, Blizzard Says

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Blizzard’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2010’s StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, is now about “99 percent” complete, lead designer Dustin Browder told Kotaku.

Before you get too excited, there’s a bit of a catch with that remaining one percent; it’s the hardest part. Browder says that all of the units and singleplayer content are all finished, but that last one percent is the “polishing” phase which, as any Blizzard fan would know, takes the developer the longest to get through.

“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,” Browder told the site.

“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.”

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is still without a release date, but it’s expected we’ll see a release at some point late this year, or possibly early next year. A Heart of the Swarm closed beta is expected to kick off in the coming months.