StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter

Posted by sbulaev 7 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by Setheck 5 hours ago

They just abandon the entire RTS fan base. This feels just like the diablo immortal announcement disaster where they announce a product that is completely outside the target audience.

I hope it's good, but it's really disappointing to not just have starcraft 3. Instead we get diablo 5? I wish I could feel positive about any of the blizzcon announcements, but it all feels like an out of touch joke.

Comment by jm4 5 hours ago

RTS is pretty much a dead genre these days. There have been indie releases but nothing did well enough for a big studio to take notice. They tested the water with a Command and Conquer remaster a few years ago too.

Comment by AngryData 4 hours ago

The most ive done with RTS the last decade is watch some mass Beyond All Reason videos (I dont have the hardware for mass battles myself.) LoL and other moba dota-likes I think took the a bulk of the rts competative crowd. Now I feel like the traditional rts community has to butt heads with other strategy genres to take players if they want to approach old school rts levels of success. Trying to pull moba players back seems like it would have massive diminishing returns.

Comment by oefrha 5 hours ago

That’s fine, just let it die. But they gotta milk the goddamn IP dry.

Comment by nozzlegear 3 hours ago

It's been like 11 years since the last game, it seems a bit reactionary to call that "milking the goddamn IP dry."

Comment by nozzlegear 3 hours ago

> They just abandon the entire RTS fan base

They did announce a new Warcraft 3 expansion at Blizzcon too.

Comment by FanaHOVA 5 hours ago

What would be the point in making SC3? SC2 is free to play, great game, and still barely gets any players. I play against the same 30-40 people every time in ranked.

Comment by 999900000999 6 hours ago

I have absolutely no faith in Microsoft to make anything decent with its legacy IPs.

Ohh well

Comment by pokstad 6 hours ago

Meanwhile, Nintendo with a tiny fraction of MS market cap is absolutely killing it with their legacy IP.

Comment by Insanity 5 hours ago

For all the flaws in how Nintendo treats fans of their IP, the games they put out themselves are consistently fun. Mario Kart still feels like Mario Kart even decades later, and not in stagnating/bad way.

Comment by pitched 5 hours ago

The original creators of Mario Kart are still involved in the latest entries (a 34-year run!) Thats not common outside Nintendo.

Comment by Insanity 3 hours ago

Didn't know, that's pretty cool! I do think Nintendo generally has a good sense of what they want from their games, so perhaps future generations will stay true to the current 'generation' of game leads.

Comment by brendoelfrendo 1 hour ago

Nintendo seems to be the outlier in the video games industry in that they are very much willing to foster talent over a long term. People who started doing sprite work 35 years ago are still there today and directing games. It's almost like the secret to long-term success is developing a roster of highly-skilled professionals, rather than treating your staff as disposable.

Comment by poulpy123 6 hours ago

« as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced »

Comment by firstordefault 6 hours ago

I was wondering what do they exactly mean by "open-world shooter", and checked that Dan Hay guy:

> Executive Producer on Far Cry 5

So it's safe to assume that's what they are aiming for.

Comment by htrp 6 hours ago

Wasn't this starcraft ghost?

Comment by Waterluvian 6 hours ago

Kind of. That one was closer to C&C Renegade.

Comment by jzig 6 hours ago

And a Diablo 5 in 2029? https://youtu.be/GxCN_AKYtts?is=AgY1pqrkutISphr1

Comment by whicks 6 hours ago

is this “Helldivers 2”, but StarCraft?

Comment by geoffpado 5 hours ago

Helldivers 2 isn't open-world, so probably not.

Comment by ZiiS 6 hours ago

Even a half hearted RTS would be better recived, how can they not know that?

Comment by PorciiVorbesc 6 hours ago

Couldn't be more wrong. The market for new RTSs is too tiny and saturated to turn a profit on any new IP. The small existing player base is too entrenched to move away from the old established IPs that are still popular to something new and unproven.

Comment by promano 5 hours ago

Starcraft III would be as far from a new IP as you could go while still making an RTS. Except for a Warcraft IV, I guess.

Comment by gamblor956 5 hours ago

Tempest Rising made more in profits than Marathon, despite selling a fraction as many copies.

Given that Marathon is unlikely to ever make a profit, Tempest Rising technically made infinitely more in profits than Marathon did.

Comment by detritus 6 hours ago

Go on?

Comment by Ralfp 6 hours ago

Tempest Rising was taunted as the old school C&C RTS comeback and it ended as niche game with small player base and 9.5k player peak on Steam.

Probably best RTS game going on currently is Beyond All Reason, and that's because guys are doing it as an open source clone/followup to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Alliances and not actual business (but they started to look for a way to monetize it to fund future development).

Comment by card_zero 38 minutes ago

Taunted = vaunted?

Comment by PorciiVorbesc 6 hours ago

Gon on, as in you mean like to explain the obvious? Just google/chatgpt sales of RTS games vs shooters and other shit.

Good luck convincing an exec to give you 200 million $ to make a new RTS for the 50 player based market out there who's playing the oldies anyway: AOE, RA, SC, etc.

It's a small and saturated market that's long been fished out and no point investing into, other than HD remakes/remasters of previously mentioned established IP.

Comment by mcmcmc 6 hours ago

MOBAs largely absorbed the younger player base that would have been into traditional RTS games. The whole genre came out of a Warcraft mod.

Comment by bob1029 6 hours ago

StarCraft 2 is really hard to beat.

This is probably the safest thing they could do with the genre from a business perspective.

Comment by mikenew 6 hours ago

There is no one left at Blizzard with any RTS experience. They've long since left for smaller studios.

SC2 is my favorite game of all time and I would love nothing more than an SC3. But if there ever is to be a real spiritual successor it won't be from Blizzard.

Comment by tempestn 6 hours ago

Problem is I don't want a spiritual successor. I want an actual successor that would build on the Starcraft universe, but in an RTS.

Comment by greazy 4 hours ago

If you're a fan of single player checkout the mod scene. It's very good. UED First Light is excellent.

Comment by sdfginonoi 5 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by gamblor956 5 hours ago

An RTS game would generate lower revenue but higher profits. Low risk but low reward.

A shooter is a high risk high-reward endeavor. The track record for shooters for the past 5 years is actually much worse than it has been for RTS games, but the ceiling for success is much higher. In 2026 alone, several AAA shooters have failed in the market. Most of the shooters released in the past 2 years have failed to survive. The few that succeeded made a lot of money.

Comment by jayd16 6 hours ago

Financially incorrect, it seems.

Comment by joshu 5 hours ago

we are definitely getting AGI before a new starcraft

Comment by blueoranges 5 hours ago

Release dates is why Rust implemented the Never type https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49625056

Comment by gleezard 3 hours ago

Blizzard is getting a lot of vitriol and I don’t think it’s unwarranted. Yes, some of it might be melodramatic but I remember when Warcraft 3 was coming out. Or even Lord of the Clans. People were mega hyped.

This is a huge turn of the tide. Very little of the core fan base, if they even still have that, is interested. Both Diablo 5 and StarCraft 3 getting panned. Very strange of Blizzard to do this, especially as a fuck-you to people who bought Diablo 4 and now there’s no Diablo in it, unless they release a surprise expansion pack which would just be weird.

As for the trailer, it looks like a grimdark Warhammer 40K thing. I don’t know why they are releasing trailers so early. I’m guessing they’ll spend the next 3-4 years in constant marketing mode to drum up sales?

I don’t even get this company anymore. Who the fuck is in charge around here? And where’s our air support?

Comment by fomoz 6 hours ago

The trailer looks really good! Accurate.

Comment by PorciiVorbesc 6 hours ago

The trailer != the game, since there was no gameplay footage.

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by cyanydeez 6 hours ago

this will only be cool if the open shooter is a submeta game of some random south koreas going for gold at the olympics.

Comment by ares623 6 hours ago

you can milk anything with nipples.

Companies still announcing big AAA games as if their customers will have the hardware necessary to run such games in 2030.

And people say I'm the one huffing copium.

Comment by Waterluvian 6 hours ago

Consoles sold at a loss before. They can do that again if it enables selling software, which often has pretty fantastic margins.

Comment by fc417fc802 6 hours ago

This is easily the most depressing thought I've encountered in a while. It's entirely accurate and combined with talk of AI regulation it paints a picture of a very bleak future indeed. Locked down hardware given away almost for free, permits and AI based monitoring required for anything with the computational power of a GPU from 10 years ago, and market prices that place 64 GB of RAM in the same ballpark as a brand new vehicle from the dealer.

Comment by nozzlegear 2 hours ago

Idk I had a lot of fun playing Halo 2 as a teenager

Comment by Waterluvian 6 hours ago

Please drink Verfication Can™ to continue playing PEPSI™ Presents: Bubsy 3D™ Legends™

Comment by ares623 5 hours ago

It seems the industry has collectively and nearly unanimously decided that the Verification Can future is way less cringe and way more preferable than the future where we are writing YAML by hand*

* YAML, etc.

Comment by caidan 6 hours ago

Clowns

Comment by 59percentmore 6 hours ago

Well, I suppose it's something that a Verge article held back from spoiling the trailer until just before where they embedded it in the article. Usually they put it right in the headline.

I wish people would stop supporting this trash site and let it die.

Comment by 3eb7988a1663 4 hours ago

!SPOILERS!

The trailer shows nothing. Mentions a couple of factions that have previously been established from the lore and shows some Space Marine montage footage that could have been a cutscene from the prior games. It is not gameplay and just as easily could be promotion material for a Starcraft 3 RTS.

Comment by drfuzzy89 5 hours ago

They also claim the trailer follows the United Earth Directorate from Brood War when they clearly mention the Terran Dominion in the trailer. It's a minor thing, but do these sites not have editors?

Comment by beepbooptheory 6 hours ago

How did they spoil the trailer for you? What's an example of them doing it in the headline?

Comment by mcmcmc 6 hours ago

It’s a trailer, you really think that’s something that can be spoiled? Do you get mad if someone spoils a Super Bowl ad?

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by plorkyeran 6 hours ago

I have no idea what you could consider a spoiler for a three minute trailer that's nothing but vibes.