Vice president of game design Rob Pardo revealed recently that StarCraft II's development process was hindered early on by Blizzard's great money-making machine, World of Warcraft.

StarCraft II development actually began in 2003, though we didn't hear a peep about the game until 2007.  Not that he's bitter about it or anything.

"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 Pardo.

"They had a lot of really great experience to bring, with their knowledge of how they approached the map editor problems, how they dealt with balancing - which we could then leverage into class balancing."

Lead producer Chris Sigaty stated that a lot of artists and other team members got called off to work on WoW.

"That's a question we get asked," Sigatay said.  "Wow, you made this decision in 2003 and now it's 2009, what's going on? It's just been that what we've been trying to do as a company is bigger than any one project."

Pardo explained that since StarCraft II took focus again, the team has been busy testing the new engine and doing a lot of balance work.

"We build the multiplayer side first," he stated. "It was a brand new engine and brand new technology, so it did take us a couple of years before we had something that was reasonably playable. I would say late 2005 or early 2006 is when we had something that was probably legitimately playable."

Interestingly enough, StarCraft II is the first game in Blizzard's recent history that hasn't required any backtracking for the development team.  In fact, they haven't had to go back to the drawing board once throughout the entire process.

"This may be the first game in our recent few games that we haven't done that major reboot with," Pardo gushed. "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."

While multiplayer was addressed first, the single-player aspect wasn't picked up on until development was halfway through.  Incidentally, single-player was a greater struggle for the team.

"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, suggesting that there's still a lot more work to do in that field before StarCraft II is anywhere near completion.

"There are a lot of things in our approach to singleplayer that we've meandered around, trying different things until we got to something that we really felt happy with."