A big might-have-been: It’s been a long drought for real-time strategy fans hoping for a new game from the genre’s pioneers at Blizzard Entertainment. According to surprising new revelations, a few developers, eager to revive Blizzard’s RTS legacy, pitched some bold ideas – including Warcraft 4 and even a Call of Duty spin-off RTS – but executives weren’t interested.
The revelations come from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who detailed the failed efforts of Tim Morten and his team to get a new RTS project greenlit at Blizzard. The session was part of his promotion for his new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, in which he interviewed around 350 past and present employees from the company.
Morten, a lifelong Warcraft and StarCraft fan, was hired in 2014 to oversee the final StarCraft II expansion, Legacy of the Void. After completing the expansion, Morten’s team felt they had gained invaluable RTS experience and were eager to apply those lessons to an all-new game.
Unfortunately for them, while StarCraft II had a strong start with its 2010 release, each subsequent entry in the trilogy “did worse than the last.” Even when StarCraft II went free-to-play in 2017, it failed to reach the heights of Blizzard mega-hits like Overwatch and Hearthstone.
As a result, Blizzard showed no interest in bankrolling another RTS.
Still, Morten’s team didn’t give up easily, noting that they “tried for years to kick off a new RTS, making all sorts of pitches and prototypes.” These included everything from the seemingly obvious Warcraft 4 sequel to the more unconventional idea of a Call of Duty real-time strategy spin-off.
Their hopes were briefly raised by the 2019 announcement of Warcraft III: Reforged, a remastered re-release they believed could reignite interest in the RTS genre. However, Reforged launched to a disastrous reception, plagued by missing features and technical issues.
As Schreier noted, it became “the company’s first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard’s history,” snuffing out any lingering hope of funding a new traditional RTS.
Still, with new ownership following Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard, there’s a slim chance that fresh leadership might revisit the idea.
“Maybe under Xbox, there’s room for a small team to work on an RTS and release it on Game Pass or something, but these days, who knows,” Schreier speculated.
That uncertainty is understandable, given that much of Blizzard’s RTS talent has since moved on. Morten himself was among those who left, co-founding Frost Giant Studios, which recently released the early access RTS Stormgate. So far, the game has received mixed reviews on Steam.
