With the rampant popularity of most Blizzard Entertainment games, it's pretty safe to assume that the company has been hard at work on Diablo 4 and a sequel to Overwatch for some time now, even if we still don't have any official confirmation. But a new report from Kotaku reveals a project we would've never guessed: a first-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe that anonymous sources likened to "Battlefield in the StarCraft universe."
According to three anonymous sources within Blizzard, the game was codenamed Ares and had been in development for two years using the same engine as Overwatch. "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," reads Kotaku's report. A few weeks ago, Ares was suddenly canceled so that employees could be moved to teams working on Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2, which are suspected to be revealed at BlizzCon later this year.
In an unusual move for the company, Blizzard issued an official statement in response to Kotaku's findings. "We pour our hearts and souls into this work, and as players ourselves, we know how exciting it can be to see and know with certainty that a new project is coming" reads an excerpt from the statement. "Knowing that changes or disappointments can happen doesn’t make it any less painful when we have to shelve a project or when an announcement doesn’t go as planned."
Though it sounds like no part of it will ever see the light of day, this FPS take on the StarCraft universe sounds fascinating, like a modern, playable version of those Brood War cutscenes with heavily armored Terrans fighting off waves of Zerglings in dilapidated trenches. The current lack of visual evidence means the StarCraft FPS will never top the legendary cancellation of the third-person stealth game StarCraft: Ghost, but at least Nova got her chance to shine in a dedicated StarCraft 2 add-on campaign. We'll just have to add this canned Blizzard project to the list of 'Things we'd love to have seen for ourselves,' right up there with the version of Diablo 4 done in the style of Dark Souls.
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