Blizzard Revives StarCraft as an Open-World Shooter, Targeting 2030
Blizzard Revives 'StarCraft' Franchise with Open-World Sci-Fi Shooter
Blizzard Entertainment unveiled a new StarCraft at BlizzCon 2026, reimagining the strategy franchise as an open-world, story-driven sci-fi shooter. Set in the Koprulu Sector 70 years after StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, it is the series' first mainline entry since 2015. Game director Dan Hay leads the project, still early in development, with a 2030 launch planned.
Set in the Koprulu Sector 70 years after the events of Legacy of the Void, the project transitions the long-running series into an open-world, story-driven shooter format.
- jceg
Incredible to see how disconnected Blizzard is from its customers.
One more shooter, when we wanted the next RTS.
- jjcm
> a target release date of 2030
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for a StarCraft shooter despite it not being StarCraft at all (I enjoy the universe). I wanted StarCraft: Ghost back in the day, and this feels like a taste of that dream.
That said, targeting a release of 2030 is wild to me. Look at the Astra game dev hype that's hitting twitter right now. Yes it's all filtered to the best possible examples / yes people are not one shotting these things, but still it's very clear that LLMs are beginning to be very capable at game dev in a way that doesn't look/feel like ass.
LLMs are going to become more capable over time. I think most of us can agree that eventually they'll be competitive with AAA developers given enough GPU cycles. I would argue that given rate of improvement, we're looking at that point coming in the next year or two.
To emphasize this point, a year ago GPT-5 got released. This was the type of game it would make: https://youtu.be/yTHo7tMborY?t=324
This is the type of game Astra is making: https://youtu.be/GuO_Eo34C8E?t=348
It's just starting to be capable of making assets in blender / unreal. Given this rate of advancement, what is the state going to be like 4 years from now? It really feels a bit like the "travelling to distant stars" problem, where at some point it's faster to wait for better engines than to leave now. I worry that by the time this gets released, the market is going to be flooded with fully custom AAA games that are hyperniche. 4 years out […]
- eykanal
"Set to launch 2030"
Why even bother to announce this now? I only see downsides in mentioning something that far out.
- torh
All I could think about watching the trailer was that this must be a game based on Starship Troopers.
- skibz
The strongest pitch at BlizzCon was WoW Forever, I think.
It's finally cementing Classic as a format with its own set of disciplines, and I believe it'll draw a lot of players back from Turtle, Ascension, etc. which have seen interest in recent years.
I'd love to see Blizzard work with the community projects [0][1][2] that underpin most private servers to release first-party (or "blessed by Blizzard" third-party) engine tooling (the way they used to with games like StarCraft and Warcraft) for WoW as a whole.
Doing that would be a lot easier than continuing this cycle of having to revamp things every few years to keep pace with what their arch enemy (the private server community) is doing.
Some players would argue that private servers are where the most interesting ideas for the WoW franchise are coming from, and that Blizzard haven't made experiences that are compelling enough to justify paying their subscription to play on official servers for a long time. WoW Forever is probably changing that for a lot of people, obviously, but for how long?
Consider, also, solo creators [3] who want to work on passion projects (with no intent to hurt Blizzard's bottom line by running a public server and "stealing" their players with their own intellectual property.) Why should they have no support whatsoever from Blizzard to create new games/experiences within WoW?
It's worth remembering that entirely new genres of games emerged from the communities of earlier Blizzard titles, like tower d […]
- brightball
Impressive. They managed to turn the hype video in a more depressing parody of Starship Troopers.
- strbean
Are we finally going to get StartCraft: Ghost ?
- VCFundedGenYer
Nobody wanted this. This is so off base. This is Microsoft operating at an insanely incompetence.