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Blizzard has denied rumours that development on StarCraft II has been largely postponed until Diablo III is finished.
In September, battleforums.com carried quotes from an “anonymous source from inside Blizzard” that said: “Starcraft 2 is still being worked on, but only by a minuscule amount of people compared to what Blizzard put on the Diablo 3 team.”
The comments suggested that massively anticipated dungeon crawler Diablo III would be out before RTS StarCraft II, a reversal in expected release timings.
However, speaking to VideoGamer.com yesterday in London prior to the midnight launch of World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King, Paul Sams, chief operating officer, Blizzard Entertainment, assured us that the StarCraft II team has “absolutely, positively… not been pulled off”.
“Absolutely not” said Sams when asked categorically if StarCraft II development had been postponed in favour of Diablo III development. “They are two separate teams entirely. The StarCraft 2 team is the most veteran team at Blizzard. As an example the team lead from StarCraft, the original, is one of the lead engineers on the game. I would say maybe as much as half of that team are among our most seasoned and most veteran players and developers in the entire company.”
He added: “They have not been pulled off. Absolutely, positively not. We used to do a lot more of that though when we were smaller, when we were a one product team or a two product company. People know, it is true that we had help from the Diablo team originally to get StarCraft out and vice versa. That is absolutely a fact, but that is absolutely not the fact this time.”
While Sams’ comments debunked the battleforums.com rumour we are still in the dark on release dates for both titles.
At Leipzig Games Convention in August, Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce told VideoGamer.com said there was ‘still a lot of work to do’ on StarCraft II, and refused to be drawn on a release date.
Speaking to Wired at the recent Blizzcon 2008 event, Blizzard executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo stated gamers shouldn’t be holding out for the release of Diablo III in the immediate future and was unable to offer even the vaguest release window.
Blizzard is famous for its ‘it’ll be ready when it’s ready’ mantra, and for sticking to it when quizzed by the media.
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