Blizzard Needs to Bring This Epic Sci-Fi Franchise Back

Blizzard Entertainment is one of the most successful video game developers and publishers on the planet. The hard-working developers at Blizzard have given the world several notable and highly profitable franchises, including Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo, Warcraft, and World of Warcraft, among others. Still, there’s one other IP that doesn’t get much press these days despite fan demand for a new entry, and that’s StarCraft. As of writing, there have only been two mainline StarCraft games, and they were released pretty far apart from one another — the first arrived in 1998, and it didn’t get a follow-up until 2010.

That’s 12 years between mainline games, and while add-ons and remasters followed the 2010 release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, no mainline titles followed. It’s been over 15 years since the last entry in the franchise, and fans want to return to the killer gameplay that helped define the real-time strategy game genre in the late 1990s and 2010s. Unfortunately, while there is word of a new game that’s in development, it strays from the original format, which will likely divide the fandom that yearns for a return to what they played years earlier, while others will come to embrace anything new in the StarCraft universe.

Blizzard Needs to Make Starcraft III

As of writing, there is an unconfirmed new StarCraft game in development, but fans might not like what’s coming. It’s likely to be announced at BlizzCon 2026 that the next game in the franchise will be a third-person shooter. This would somewhat align with how Blizzard evolved its Warcraft franchise into World of Warcraft, though it’s unclear if the new game will follow suit and be an MMORPG. Regardless, the franchise never featured that form of gameplay and was renowned for its brilliant use of tactics and strategy as an RTS game. That’s what most fans would like to see come out of Blizzard.

Straying from a popular format can be risky, and depending on the franchise, it could succeed or fail based on the fandom’s acceptance. Ensemble Studios did the reverse when it developed Halo Wars as an RTS game released in 2009. That worked well enough, though the Halo franchise has largely remained stuck to its FPS roots. Similarly, there’s no denying the success of World of Warcraft, so Blizzard has a track record of changing its IPs from one format to another. That said, there’s a portion of the gaming population who aren’t into MMORPGs who’d love to play Warcraft IV, which was reportedly in development and abandoned.

To be fair to Blizzard Entertainment, the gamescape evolves as time progresses, and the studio likely decided to shift from RTS games due to waning interest in the marketplace. While that’s supposition, it’s based on the fact that RTS games are no longer as big as they once were, and fewer are released every year. In the 1990s and early 2000s, they accounted for a massive share of the video game industry. It seems that today’s players gravitate more towards multiplayer shooters, casual games, and MMORPGs, explaining Blizzard’s shifting strategy. Still, it would be fantastic to dive back into the franchise via a new RTS.

Blizzard Should but Probably Won’t Make a New StarCraft RTS

Given the way the industry has changed throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, it doesn’t seem likely that Blizzard will return to form with a new StarCraft RTS game. While it’s unconfirmed as of writing, all the buzz suggests that the next game in the franchise will be a third-person shooter, and given the way Blizzard operates, it probably won’t go back. That said, the studio did remake its earlier Warcraft games to widespread acclaim, so there’s at least the possibility of getting a remaster of the original and its follow-up. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for BlizzCon 2026 to find out anything concrete.

Are you itching to return to the StarCraft universe? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

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