Heart Of The Swarm may be a lot further away than previously anticipated.
In the latest Developers Update, Dustin Browder talks changes that have happened since our last major update on Multiplayer news — mainly Blizzcon.
So what has happened in half a year?
There have been rather substantial changes made to the HotS multiplayer since Blizzcon. Basically everything you thought was cool about HotS may now be changed or even completely gone.
Shredder – Gone, it was a rather effective at decimating worker lines rather than map controlling
Warhound – Possibly gone, too similar to the Thor so it wasn’t changing tactics like they wanted.
Replicant – Gone. It was a new unit that turned into old ones, thus negating its purpose of being a new unit to be used in new ways, when facing a older composition it would just mimic it.
Tempest – No longer an aerial AoE. They fixed the issue with the Mutalisk in PvZ with the new Anion Pulse Crystals upgrade for Phoenixes.
Viper – Can regain energy by harvesting crystals but makes it unavailable harvesting for the duration of the cast, whilst making it a pure caster — similar to the infestor.
Overseer – Returns, the aerial detector returns to remove the detection for the Viper.
Nydus Worm - The function of the Nydus worm is changing. There will be different worms, one working as a creep spreader and one that actually attacks enemy buildings. Making the Nydus work more of a unit than a transportation building.
All of these changes are really shaking things up.
This has put HotS on the back foot once again.
The amount of time that went into units such as the Warhound and Shredder — just creating the model and animation themselves would have taken a huge amount of time — would have been hours of development time and now it’s just gone, never to be seen again.
If Blizzard still havent got this ironed out we are mabye months away from just beta! Let alone a concrete release date. When the dev team still cannot decide whats actually going into a game we are a way of at least testing it in a beta environment.
Those of you hoping to get your hands on HotS soon[tm], I’m sorry to say but it’s a long way off yet.
