If you've got qualms about the StarCraft II delay, blame it on WoW. Speaking to Eurogamer, the guys at Blizzard reveal that the reason we've been waiting so long for StarCraft II is because World of Warcraft held it up.

"One of the reasons that StarCraft II had some delays very early on in development is because a fair amount of the design team went onto World of Warcraft for a year to really help finish that game off," said VP for game design Rob Pardo, adding that the design team had a lot to offer in terms of map editor problems and class balancing that really benefitted WoW.

"...during the time that we were working on World of Warcraft, our team got sucked into that to some extent. A lot of our artists went over and worked on WoW - I was called off, too." said Chris Sigaty, StarCraft II lead producer, who also revealed that they had a playable build since way back late 2005. Since the launch of WoW, the team has been able to develop a multiplayer version of StarCraft II, which they've been testing and balancing ever since.

Pardo reveals more:

This may be the first game in our recent few games that we haven't done that major reboot with. It's been a long project for sure, but if you look at say World of Warcraft, or Warcraft III - or even the original StarCraft - there was a halfway point where we took a dramatic left turn and took a different direction. We haven't done that with StarCraft II. That said, it's certainly taken a long time to get to where it's at, for a variety of reasons.

It's also interesting to note that Blizzard didn't start work on the single player for StarCraft II until multiplayer was fairly underway. Pardo said that the single player posed an even bigger design challenge than that of the multiplayer. "If anything, the single-player has taken a lot more iteration because we are going into such a new direction with how to approach that," he said, though he gave no game specifics as to what he meant by that.

For now, the best release info we have on StarCraft II is that they're targeting a year-end release.

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More on StarCraft II:

• Video: 7 minutes' worth of StarCraft II multiplayer action
• Blizzard prepping media for StarCraft II beta
• StarCraft II map editor new details revealed by Blizzard