While the possibility of Blizzard ever making StarCraft III appears to remain distant at best, the company is reportedly still keeping the dream of a StarCraft shooter alive despite several previous mothballed attempts. This time, however, Far Cry 5 director Dan Hay is seemingly at the helm.
That’s according to a recent IGN interview with Bloomberg reporter and former Kotaku editor Jason Schreier, about his upcoming book on the history and future of Blizzard. Titled Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, it includes a mention of a recent project aimed at creating a shooter inside the sci-fi universe of the famous RTS.
“They are working on a StarCraft shooter, StarCraft is not dead at Blizzard,” Schreier said during the interview. He added that it could come out or it could get cancelled. “This felt like such an interesting and useful nugget to include because it really just shows you that Blizzard cannot quit StarCraft shooters,” he said.
Previous attempts by Blizzard to make one a reality included StarCraft: Ghost, a third-person shooter about a Terran psychic espionage operative set after StarCraft: Brood War. It was announced in 2002 only to get indefinitely delayed once the Xbox 360 and PS3 generation arrived, eventually being officially cancelled a decade after its initial tease.
Then there was another project, codenamed “Ares.” According to Schreier’s report for Kotaku in 2019, it was supposed to be a first-person shooter like “Battlefield in the StarCraft universe,” but it was eventually canned so Blizzard could focus exclusively on getting Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 out the door, which ended up taking another three or four years.
Third time’s the charm? Hay, who was the head of the Far Cry franchise before leaving Ubisoft and joining Blizzard in 2022, was previously heading up Blizzard’s survival crafting game project Odyssey before that got cancelled as well earlier this year amid a brutal round of Microsoft cuts. Maybe Hay’s leadership, combined with Blizzard being part of Xbox now, will help this newest incarnation of a StarCraft shooter succeed where others failed.
It’s certainly easy to imagine it scratching a similar itch to Saber Interactive’s recent Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. And maybe, if it does just as well as that game has, we’ll end up that much closer to actually getting StarCraft III.