Blizzard recently announced that it's Starcraft 2 will not be hitting shelves this year, but rather in late 2008.

"The game simply isn't ready" is what Blizzard is citing to us. Hopefully this is a good thing and will give the company plenty of time to perfect, amaze, and drive us towards the Starcraft series.

StarCraft II will not be released this year, Blizzard has confirmed. The likely launch window for the sequel, recently revealed at an event in Korea, would seem to be late 2008, although even that tentative prediction is subject to Blizzard's traditional "It'll launch when it's ready" approach.

With just over six months remaining until the Christmas run-in, a 2007 launch seemed overly hopeful. But fanboys across the internet had prayed that, given the near finished state of the game in the first revealed footage, Blizzard might unleash StarCraft 's second coming before 2008.

'Fraid not: "The only thing I can give you [that's] concrete is it's not going to be this year," Rob Pardo, Blizzard's vice president of game design, has stated in an interview with news site MSNBC. Just to be sure, he adds: "Some people were hoping, because of how advanced the game looks, that we’d have it out by Christmas, but that's definitely not happening.

Elsewhere, Pardo does reveal other details - certain characters will return from both the original StarCraft and the Brood Wars expansion, it'll have improved online matchmaking over the already impressive system in WarCraft III, and it will continue the story arc from Brood Wars.

Jax06 via gamesradar.com »