GoKawiilSomething to look forward to: StarCraft is coming back, but it's not the real-time strategy game that became a global phenomenon. This time, Blizzard is reimagining the franchise as an open-world shooter. Sadly, we won't get to play it until 2030.
Rumors of a new StarCraft game have been circling for a while now. Its existence was confirmed during the opening ceremony of BlizzCon with a three-minute cinematic video.
The video continues Blizzard's tradition of flashy and quite gory game promos. It shows a determined young recruit going through training before being dropped on an alien planet to face a swarm of Zerg forces. With his weapon seemingly out of ammo, we next see the slushy remains of the soldier being drained from his CMC Powered Combat Suit.
There are no gameplay clips at this early stage, but we do know it's going to be an open-world shooter rather than an RTS.
Dan Hay, GM & VP of StarCraft, told IGN about why Blizzard decided to change the format of one of the genre's most famous franchises.
"For us, when we think about the themes and we think about the opportunity for you to be on the battlefield and for you to go out and think about the vista, the opportunity to explore, and then to discover, and then to disrupt," he said.
"It's incredibly unique. And then when you think about the different factions that there are, we just wanted people to go out into these worlds and actually get a sense of what it's like to meet these different groups."
Hay also talked about using enemies as a "tool" against other enemies, which sounds like a feature that may appear in the finished game.
2030 is a long time away, of course, so why did Blizzard not just wait a bit longer before revealing the next StarCraft? Hay said sharing a "solid" release date keeps the team "honest," so it should release that year and not any later – but then we've heard those sorts of promises before.
We almost had a genre-changing StarCraft game more than 20 years ago. Blizzard announced StarCraft: Ghost in 2003. It was supposed to be a third-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe slated for an Xbox release later that year, and there was even an hour-long gameplay reveal. But prioritizing World of Warcraft and the upcoming next-gen consoles pushed back development and Ghost was eventually canceled.
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