Apparently the first 99% of developing a game is simple compared to that last 1%. According to an interview with Kotaku, StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, the next expansion for Blizzard's popular Real-time Strategy game, is almost complete. It's that last 1% that is holding them up from announcing an official release date, I suppose.
"We are 99% done," lead designer Dustin Browder said, "but that last 1%'s a bitch."
According to Browder, all of the missions are playable and the units are all in place. So what's that last bit entail?
"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," he explained.
"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."
I suppose it's a better answer than what we heard from PlayStation's Scott Rohde regarding The Last Guardian release. Who knows, maybe that last 1% is what keeps getting BioShock Infinite delayed.
[Kotaku]
