Blizzard VP of game design Rob Pardo (pictured left) has confirmed that the recently announced StarCraft 2 will not be released in 2007. "The only thing I can give you [that's] concrete is it's not going to be this year," Pardo said to MSNBC. "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."

"Different companies have different philosophies on how long they spend on products," he continued, explaining that Blizzard redesigned a large part of Warcraft 3 after two years in development. "We're able to do that because we have smaller teams and we give ourselves time to iterate through the product...You see a lot of companies that are so focused on the release date that they put 100-person, 200-person teams together to hit that [target release] date, and at that point you're really the runaway train. You have to hit that date and live with decisions that you might not have been 100 percent happy with. We take the opposite approach."

Pardo also revealed that the sequel's development team now numbers almost 40 people and that the game began pre-production in 2003, shifting into full production "another year or so" later.

When asked about the possibility of Blizzard returning to console development, Pardo remained non-committal. "If you talk to our biz guys, they like the PC for a lot of reasons, but we don't make our decisions based entirely on business or even primarily on business," he said. "We make our decisions based on the games we want to make. After that point, we make the decision on [what system] that game is going to live. And up to this point, the games we wanted to make worked best on the PC."