Starcraft will probably finally be continued, but not as you might think

Blizzard wants to try again with Starcraft, according to an insider – but it won’t be a strategy game.

Blizzard is said to want to change genres again with Starcraft According to journalist and industry insider Jason Schreier, the publisher is working on a new game for the franchise that has been on ice for 14 years. According to Schreier’s sources, Blizzard has not yet given up on the idea of a Starcraft shooter.

Third time’s the charm

In IGN’s podcast Unlocked, Jason Schreier talks about his new book, which is scheduled to be released in December 2024 under the name “Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment”.

From minute 44the talk is of a new Blizzard project that Schreier learned about during his research for the book. According to the journalist, Blizzard is planning another attempt to develop a Starcraft shooter

The project is headed by Dan Hay, who has been with Blizzard since 2022 and previously worked as a producer for the Far Cry games at Ubisoft. Hay was involved in all of the series’ installments from Far Cry 3 to Far Cry 6.

At the beginning of the decade, Blizzard was in a much worse position, but Diablo 4 and WoW pulled the cart out of the mud:

However, he does not reveal any details about the game or the state of development. “Blizzard just can’t break away from Starcraft shooters,” jokes Schreier. He is alluding to two previous failed attempts: Starcraft Ghost and a project with the working title Ares.

Ghost and Ares

A lot is known about Ghost. The game was announced in 2002 and then repeatedly postponed until 2006, when it was postponed indefinitely. However, the official end of the shooter did not come until 2014.

However, as the gameplay footage leaked a few years ago shows, it is likely that Ghost was canceled as early as the mid-2000s. At least the state of the art and graphics allows for this conclusion.

Details about the canceled project Ares were revealed in 2019, also by Jason Schreier. The game was described as a kind of Battlefield in the Starcraft universe and was more of an experiment to see what could be done with the Overwatch engine and Starcraft. Unlike Ghost, however, Ares was supposed to be a first-person and not a third-person shooter.

However, Ares was then canceled in favor of Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4. The developers were distributed among the two more important projects.