Amid a barrage of remakes and remasters of classic 1990s games — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VII and Tomb Raider, to name a few — Blizzard Entertainment is bringing back a beloved franchise, but with a twist.
On Saturday, Blizzard announced a third installment of the StarCraft franchise that will move away from the real-time strategy genre that helped the studio become a household name. The new game, set to be released in 2030, will instead be an open-world, story-driven shooter, with similarities to titles like Destiny and Borderlands.
“Previous versions were about being a commander up above, almost like a god looking down and controlling things,” Dan Hay, the upcoming game’s creative director, said in an interview. “What we simply want to do is take that world and just shift the perspective. Rather than being about making units, you are the unit.”
Blizzard executives gave scarce information about the new game, simply titled STARCRAFT, but a cinematic trailer portrays a soldier, Holt, training in the Terran military. As players progress through the story, they may be able to upgrade the character — improving equipment and honing skills — as in the role-playing space shooter Mass Effect.
“I want to be able to have my own armor,” Hay said. “I want to be able to have that armor grow and I want to be able to see that that armor is something that I can invest in.”
Details may change during development, but Hay entertained the possibility of letting players select the main character’s role, whether as a Firebat, which specializes in close-range combat with a flamethrower, or as a Ghost, the stealthy assassin who attacks with a sniper rifle.
The first StarCraft game and its sequel, released in 1998 and 2010, had stories that were largely overshadowed by online gameplay, in which players directed space units to destroy an opponent’s troops. Each player could choose from among three races: Terran, the human military; Zerg, biologically advanced insectlike creatures; and the technologically adept Protoss aliens.
Blizzard has long considered evolving StarCraft into a story-driven shooter. In 2002, it announced StarCraft: Ghost, in which players would take on the role of a stealthy assassin; the game was canceled in part because of resource constraints.
Investment in real-time strategy games has shrunk industrywide since the genre was eclipsed by multiplayer online battle arena games such as League of Legends and Dota, where each player controls an individual unit instead of micromanaging entire armies.
Johanna Faries, the president of Blizzard Entertainment, said in an interview that she viewed a fresh approach to StarCraft as an opportunity to “meet players where they are and where they will be.”
“There’s so much passion around the StarCraft universe,” she said. “I think that was, first and foremost, what has guided us to say, What more can we do to bring this universe forward?”
Hay said it had been his dream for at least 25 years to work on a StarCraft story. He said a scene from the original game — where a soldier was being attacked by Zerg aliens — inspired him to go to animation school and eventually apply for a job at Blizzard, which rejected him because of his lack of experience. He built up his résumé animating TV commercials and developing smaller games before leading the popular Far Cry franchise and finally landing at Blizzard.
Game development has become so costly — often hundreds of millions of dollars for major studios — that trying something new is a risk. And turning StarCraft into a narrative with a beginning and an end is a significant change for Blizzard, an early leader in “forever games” like Diablo and World of Warcraft, addictive experiences that seemingly never run out of quests to complete or gear to collect. That type of gameplay allows the studio to charge for subscriptions to play online.
“We’re talking about something that is contained and focused and very high fidelity,” Hay said of the upcoming StarCraft game.
For fans of StarCraft, waiting several years for the new game could feel like a long time. But Hay said that announcing it now would help motivate his team.
“When we put the date, we write it on the wall and we go, Let us hit that,” he said. “Let us make sure we do not kick these ideas around too long.”
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