Blizzard games are pretty big in China, and it’s hard to get bigger than Starcraft, the massively popular real-time-strategy game. The second game in the Starcraft II trilogy, Heart of the Swarm, is coming, and at China’s ChinaJoy games conference, Blizzard unveiled the game’s official Chinese logo. Behold!
Now before you zerg rush to the store to buy your copy (see what I did there?) it’s only fair to warn you that you might be waiting there for quite a while, as the game still doesn’t have an official China release date. In fact, the game doesn’t have a release date anywhere yet, though it is nearly finished and expected to release in the West sometime before the end of this year. Traditionally, Blizzard games end up being released in China significantly later than they are in the West thanks to the inspection and censorship process, so it’s unlikely that Heart of the Swarm will be wriggling its way into Chinese player’s bases before 2013. In fact, it could come even later than that — Blizzard still hasn’t announced a China release date for Diablo 3, which has been out elsewhere for months, and the company has ignored our questions about when the game will ultimately be released here.
On the other hand, the zerg are famous for showing up en masse before you’re ready for them. Could Heart of the Swarm‘s release be imminent? Is Blizzard going to use the zerg rush as its strategy for its zerg-focused expansion’s release? Probably not. But that would be awesome. In the meantime, we’ll just have to satisfy ourselves with that shiny new logo.
(Incidentally, if you don’t know what “zerg rush” means, you can type it into Google and get a pretty decent illustration).
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