Blizzard is reportedly making a third attempt at developing aStarCraft shooter, with former Far Cry executive producer Dan Hay, who joined Blizzard in 2022, leading the charge. The claim appears in Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier’s new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment.
All this comes from Jason Schreier while speaking to IGN’s Podcast "Unlocked," below, about his new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. Hay’s StarCraft shooter is mentioned in the book, and IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey asked Schreier if it’s likely to actually come out.
McCaffrey noted that one section near the end of the book states that a team at Blizzard is working on the game under Dan Hay, the former head of the Far Cry series at Ubisoft.
The passage, which refers to two previously StarCraft shooters, reads: “Most of the developers were laid off, while a few would remain with Hay to begin incubating, of all things, a new StarCraft shooter. Perhaps after StarCraft Ghost and Ares, the third time would be the charm.”
“If it’s not canceled!” Schreier replied. "This is Blizzard after all". Their history with StarCraft shooters is not good.
"Yes, that is a project that as far as I know is in development, or at least as of the time that I wrote this book was in development. They are working on a StarCraft shooter, StarCraft is not dead at Blizzard".
“The goal of the book isn’t to get a bunch of scoops about upcoming things. That wasn’t the purpose of this book at all, it was very much to tell a story and focus on stuff that had happened. But this felt like such an interesting and useful nugget to include because it really just shows you that Blizzard cannot quit StarCraft shooters.”
Schreier went on to say that he didn’t wrote the book to drop a lot of unannounced news, but that the book was designed to tell a story and that since part of the book mentions the two previously cancelled projects Ghost and Ares, the story that Blizzard was attempting a StarCraft shooter for the third time was worth mentioning.
That’s a reference to Blizzard’s infamous attempt to release a StarCraft shooter in the past as part of a bid to expand the StarCraft franchise beyond its real-time strategy origins. StarCraft Ghost, announced in 2002, was going to be a tactical-action console game in which you played as a deadly Ghost operative in the employ of the Dominion, but it was canceled in 2006 after a series of delays.
A second attempt to make a StarCraft shooter, codenamed Ares, was canceled in 2019, so Blizzard could focus on Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2. Ares was reportedly “like a Battlefield in the StarCraft universe,” but, like Ghost, fell by the wayside.
Now, it’s a case of third time lucky for Blizzard, with this new StarCraft shooter in development.