The ghost of StarCraft: Ghost endures as a new shooter set in the RTS universe is in the works at Blizzard

Outstanding

A new shooter set in the StarCraft universe is in the works at Blizzard, according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier's book Play Nice, via Eurogamer. The project is headed up by Dan Hay, who worked various leading roles on Ubisoft’s Far Cry series, and also a 1999 CGI film starring Jim Belushi named “The Nuttiest Nutcracker”. The real-time strategy spinoff was also mentioned during an IGN podcast that aired yesterday.

This’ll be Blizzard’s third attempt at a Starcraft shooter. Nihilistic Software’s Ghost was announced in 2002, put on indefinite hold in 2006, then officially cancelled 8 years later in 2014. Ghost’s protagonist, Nova, eventually showed up in Starcraft 2 as part of Project: Nova, a story expansion containing several single-player missions taking place after Legacy Of The Void.

More recently, another shooter named codenamed Ares was rumoured to have been cancelled in 2019. It was “"like Battlefield in the StarCraft universe,” one source told Kotaku at the time. “The team had built prototypes in which the player, as a Terran marine, could gun down Zerg aliens, and there were plans to experiment with playable Zerg as well."

As for this new shooter, details seem fairly scant at the moment. It's not Hay's first game for Blizzard - he also worked on Odyssey, a survival project that was cancelled this January. The cancellation coincided with nearly 2000 people across Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and Xbox teams being laid off.

StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection arrived on game pass this week, if you somehow haven’t played the greatest RTS campaign in history, and also Starcraft 2.