StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is a RTS developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released on July 2010 for PC and MAC. As we can read on Wikipedia, the project was announced on May 2007 at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea, but the development began in 2003, shortly after Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was released. According to Rob Pardo and Chris Sigaty, development for StarCraft II was put on hold for a year in 2005 due to the assistance needed for World of Warcraft. On February 2010, StarCraft 2 began closed beta testing, that was expected to last for 3–5 months.
Thanks to the beta, players were able to experience various changes during the development of the game, as posted by ABetaname and Zero7 in our U64 Forum.
Stuff from earlier builds such as cut units were found as leftovers in the beta.
soul hunters aren’t in now
phase cannons aren’t in now
tempests were changed back to carriers
no twilight archons, I believe anyway, I think they’re still normal archons though there is a twilight academy so maybe it’s an evolution/transformation
There has been a lot of other changes over the years that we can find from the Alpha version of the game. Such as the Thor.
“The Thor also originally required an SCV to construct, as opposed to being internally built from a structure. The idea behind this is the Thor was too large to be created from a Factory.” It also had a different (obviously place holder) voice actor. Basically over the years the Thor kept getting smaller and smaller.
It seems that Blizzard planned on having the Corsair from Starcraft Broodwar in StarCraft 2. However only the voice clips exist of him, hidden in the game’s code.
Various beta voice clips of some units were on the old StarCraft 2 website can be listened below, thanks to Starcraft2units‘ Youtube Channel.
More videos that explain some interesting beta changes can be found in PsyStarcraft‘s Youtube Channel: