What you need to know
- Speaking with IGN about his upcoming book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier revealed that Blizzard Entertainment is in the early stages of working on a StarCraft shooter.
- The small team is working on the project under the leadership of Dan Hay, a developer who previously worked on Ubisoft’s Far Cry franchise.
- Blizzard Entertainment has attempted to craft a StarCraft shooter twice in the past, with both attempts ending up being canceled.
Maybe the third time’s the charm.
That certainly appears to be the thinking of a small team at Blizzard Entertainment that is reportedly working on a StarCraft shooter. This news comes via Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who spoke with IGN’s Podcast Unlocked about his upcoming book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment.
As covered in his book, Schreier explained that after the cancelation of Blizzard’s survival game following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, most of that team was laid off. A handful remained, and are “incubating” a StarCraft shooter under the leadership of Dan Hay, a veteran developer who previously worked on Ubisoft’s Far Cry franchise.
Schreier notes in the conversation with IGN that it’s very early days on this project, and Blizzard has already canceled two attempted StarCraft shooters in the past, with the infamous StarCraft: Ghost and the lesser-known project Ares. Schreier’s book covers a wide range of topics and stories from throughout Blizzard’s storied history, of which this story is only a tiny portion.
The StarCraft universe is ripe with potential
Despite being a pillar of Blizzard Entertainment’s franchises, StarCraft hasn’t been explored as much as it could be.
While StarCraft has fallen by the wayside in recent years as Blizzard Entertainment continued to work on games like Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2, the games did receive a bit of attention recently, with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer revealing during the Xbox Tokyo Game Show 2024 presentation that StarCraft Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection are slated to join PC Game Pass on Nov. 5, 2024.
As a big fan of StarCraft, I’ll remain hopeful that this shooter comes to fruition. Given the myriad studios with first and third-person shooter expertise under the Xbox first-party group, there’s certainly plenty of talent that could help guide this game, if needed. Given its early stage of development, it’s likely that even hoping things go well, we won’t be hearing about this project for some time.