It's been over a week since the launch of the StarCraft II beta and everyone who has been playing this sample of Blizzard's upcoming sci-fi RTS game has one question: How long will it really be before the full game is ready? Blizzard's latest podcast attempts to answer that question with their StarCraft II beta special.

The podcast goes over several topics but one brought up by production director Chris Sigaty deals with the game's release date. He states, "We were targeting three to five months for the beta, we're really at a three month period of time for the beta at this point. We are still targeting the first half of this year . . . " In fact if that three months hold up we are looking at a mid to late May 2010 release date. Blizzard also plans to release a big content patch near the end of the beta but the promised map editor might not be released before the beta ends.

In related news, Blizzard has released the first patch for the beta test. The patch has a number of unit balance changes along with a few bug fixes.