Not to fully transform into the Pepe Silvia meme pointing at a wall of “evidence” but I’m convinced Blizzard is gearing up to announce something StarCraft-related at BlizzCon this year.
The first reliable clue came from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier’s 2024 book on Blizzard’s history where he said the studio was “incubating” a StarCraft shooter (not that one) under the helm of former Far Cry producer Dan Hay.
A couple of years passed with no news on that StarCraft project. But in April of this year, Blizzard was looking to hire a lead designer of innovation for an “AAA open-world shooter” using Unreal Engine—a game engine that it’s never used before. Blizzard game designer Jeff Hamilton said on Bluesky that the person who got the job would have a “fairly unique design role” as part of the team.
While that was the last direct evidence for a new StarCraft game, Blizzard recently surprised-dropped a massive patch for StarCraft 2, which feels like the kind of thing you’d do to remind people you still care about the series. The update wasn’t just a bunch of bug fixes and minor tweaks either. Blizzard said the focus was to spice it up with meta-changing tweaks to early- and mid-game build variety. The people still playing StarCraft 2 seemed to love it.