Blizzard - Heart of the Swarm is "99% complete"

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is 99% complete, Blizzard has told Kotaku; however, the last 1% is a bit of "a b***h," said lead designer Dustin Browder.

According to Browder, the units are in place and the missions are playable, but the "tuning and polish," is what Blizzard is now concentrating on.

"There's something in for everything—it's whether we like it or not that's an open question," he said. "It's the tuning and polish that really takes us a long time, and that's where we get into the unknowns.

"Like we could do a play-through next week that we're like, 'Wow this is really great.' Or we could do a play-through and we still have 250 items we wanna fix. You know, historically speaking we're doing pretty well. We're getting there. But I don't know for sure yet when we'll be done."

While Blizzard hasn't set a release date for the expansion, it's speculated for a late 2012 or early 2013 release. Once the beta is live, hopefully a more concrete date will emerge.