It feels like the darkness and freezing temperatures of this winter have lasted an age. In that sense, we all share an experience with Blizzard Entertainment’s ground-breaking real-time strategy (RTS) franchise, StarCraft, with no updates seeing the light of day for years. In October 2020, after slowly winding down the pace of live-service additions in the game, Blizzard officially announced that no new content would be produced. With nary a peep about the franchise’s future, and a serious competitor hot on its heels, it’s time to ask – will StarCraft ever be defrosted?
Space & Time
StarCraft released in 1998 on PC and quickly became the biggest selling game of the year, with 1.5 million copies sold worldwide. A company as large as Blizzard might consider that a failure by today’s standards, but the gaming landscape at the time did not enjoy the mainstream success it does today, and this was an enormous feat. It has now sold around 11 million copies in its lifetime. An expansion pack, Brood War, was released in the same year, with additional story content, new units and balancing, and a thriving online multiplayer that is still active to this day.
The game features three playable races: the human and mech-focused Terran; the hivemind and innumerable insectoid-like Zerg; and the technologically-advanced, psionically-linked Protoss. The story plays out through various factions within each race, as their plots crossover and converge in incredibly climactic fashions. Outside of JRPGs at the time, StarCraft was one of few titles boasting a beloved story as much as a dedicated player base.
StarCraft’s popularity utterly exploded in the early eSports scene. By no means was it the first game that led to the rise eSports, but it paved the way for team sports as we know them today, and has always been one of the most popular and consistent – and showed how online multiplayers in the PC gaming space could be grown. Its impact on the worldwide competitive scene cannot be overstated, particularly in South Korea, where Brood War in particular remains one of the most popular games to play in internet cafés today and birthed some of the world’s first “pro-gamers”. At its peak, Brood War tournaments sold out stadiums and featured broadcast television in South Korea.
The inevitable sequel was released in 2010, 12 years after the original release, bringing a completely new experience. StarCraft II was not an expansion, but an entirely new game – new mechanics, new units, and new ways to compete. StarCraft II was split divided into three titles, with Blizzard aiming to provide more sustained support and updates over a longer period. Each title focused on the different playable races in their single player campaigns, and each release brought huge balance updates, and even more new units and features – including a Hero-based co-operative mode and the ability for players to create their own custom games using StarCraft II’s engine.
Dipping its toes into a more live service-based model, the game also saw the additions of battle chests, new skins, and purchasable Heroes in co-op mode. The game eventually went free-to-play with the release of StarCraft: Remastered – a notable release which reinvigorated the StarCraft scene, and lovingly maintaining the game’s original quirks and bugs to keep the faithful player base happy.
Much like Brood War before it, StarCraft II continues to enjoy a vigorous eSports crowd. The last single-player update came in 2016, with the release of a spin-off DLC-like set of mission packs focusing on one of the supporting characters in the series. While these were well received by lovers of the story, word on the street at the time was that Blizzard made a loss from this – and the fact that no further story-based expansions in StarCraft’s lore-rich world have been on the cards since then would give that theory some legs.
It took 12 years for Blizzard to release a sequel and, going from StarCraft II’s initial release, it has now been even longer without a hint of what a possible StarCraft III could look like – but we’re starting to get an idea from another developer entirely.
A Storm is Coming
In 2022, a new studio called Frost Giant revealed a cinematic trailer for their post-apocalyptic RTS, Stormgate. If the name of the studio didn’t give it away, its team is composed almost entirely of former key development figures at Blizzard who worked on StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo.
The game promises “at least” three playable races, with only the human mech-based Vanguard and demonic Infernal Host races being seen so far, mirroring the Terran and Zerg races respectively. It is an easy comparison to make, and Frost Giant make no apologies for that – in fact, they seem to be aiming for it, as their own mission statement is to be the “next great Blizzard-style RTS”. They promise regular updates to the single player campaign several times a year, innovative technology to make units and gameplay feel more responsive, 3-player co-op play against the AI, and support for competitive play at all levels.
Late in 2023, Stormgate’s official Kickstarter raised approximately $750,000 in its first 24 hours (its goal was only $100,000) – and, at the time of writing, it is currently sitting at over $1.8mn. The support, faith, and trust being placed in this game by the community shows that the appetite for a newRTS to fill the void left by StarCraft is very deep indeed. Stormgate has no release date yet but, following a very well-covered closed beta period in December 2023, the game will enter an open beta phase very soon – just February 2024.
The beta did feel very much like a modernised StarCraft game. In addition to typical 1v1 and AI matchups, the game is set to feature plenty of support for co-op play. The preliminary focus seems to pull players away from traditional tedious base management and more towards staying in the action. This is largely possible because of a well-considered approach to hotkeys and unit production, where all units can be produced from a single hotkey menu, regardless of which structure would normally produce them. Similarly, all upgrades can be triggered from a single hotkey menu, and all buildings can be produced from another. Save for physically placing structures in your base or making an expansion, there is little reason to linger in your base, and all the more reason to get back into fighting. Resources in your base are limited compared to StarCraft, forcing you to push out into the map to keep your economy running, and encouraging you to scout out temporary buffs for your units littered around the map. As a fairly below average RTS player, I look forward to a game that makes it easier to keep developing my economy without worrying too much that all of my units will die the second I look away from them.
The beta had limited units, buildings, and no story – entirely acceptable for a beta – but if Frost Giant continues to develop Stormgate in this way, and nail an engaging narrative across their regular campaign updates, they may well pull off their mission.
Where does that leave StarCraft?
2020’s announcement that further development for StarCraft II was ending came as no surprise with dwindling support for the RTS genre at large in the world. Some in the industry are reading signs of life again more recently, and Frost Giant certainly aim to be the future of the RTS genre “for the next 10 years”, but Blizzard have remained tight-lipped about any plans for the future. In November 2023, ex-Blizzard dev, Jason Hall, shockingly claimed that a single mount in World of Warcraft made more money for Blizzard than the entirety of StarCraft II. We don’t have those figures to unpick this, but what he is most likely saying is that there is more money for Blizzard in microtransactions than there is for big, expensive projects with limited sources of income like an RTS – which they obviously deemed as unsustainable in StarCraft II, given no further additions to the game since 2016.
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that Blizzard doesn’t have to worry about money. Let’s take a scenario where they are bought by a tech giant in a deal worth over $68 billion, one of the biggest in the world, with a renewed interest and enthusiasm in all of their properties. What might Blizzard do then?
Well, the obvious answer is another RTS powerhouse in StarCraft III. Although most of the main characters wrapped up their arcs in 2015’s Legacy of the Void expansion, there is plenty of mileage left in the galaxy-sprawling story. New factions, settings, or even a new race could extend the universe for many years to come.
As we learned with the DLC mission packs, however, StarCraft’s financial success may not come from its story appeal, but from its enduring multiplayer aspects – and this means monetisation. The fact that StarCraft II was essentially left alone despite the monetisation attempts also suggests that this may not be something Blizzard is desperate to try again, unless they can come up with something particularly ground-breaking. Their shift to a free-to-play model in Overwatch 2 and abandoning generous loot boxes for grindy battle passes, while they stripped out the promised RPG elements, left the sequel much maligned – so a similar model applied to StarCraft is unlikely to be one that fills many players with excitement.
One area ripe for development is the noble attempt at co-op missions, something the Stormgate developers seem to have picked up on. This saw players take on unique arrangements of units and strategies under the leadership of a Hero unit from the campaign. For example, Raynor’s Terran factions focused heavily on old-school marines and classic units, whereas Swann’s Terran focused on juiced-up variants of mech and tech from the campaign. Players would work together against the enemy AI to achieve objectives under increasingly pressurised scenarios. There was a finite amount of expansion they could add at the time, by virtue of choices being limited to main characters from the story, but it never felt like the co-op missions were a primary idea developed from the beginning.
Co-op missions were significantly more attractive than the competitive ladder scene for people who weren’t as good at competitive play, or wanted gameplay more grounded in the lore. A future iteration of StarCraft could consider how co-op play could be pushed into a new experience for players who want more out of the story and less out of being steamrolled by players who have build orders planned down to the second. Co-op play could be built into the main campaign, or be given as much weight as competitive play in monetisation models. The story in co-op missions weren’t considered canon, as some very deceased characters were playable, and the setting for co-op was essentially “the Big Bad is winning, help us push them back on this front”. Although the gameplay varied in each mission, a better model might consider how and when co-op missions occur in the narrative, which could be a more sustainable, longer-term approach.
There is a less obvious, and more radical suggestion apparently being considered – that the next entry in the series might not be an RTS at all. That is a proposition equal parts interesting and concerning for veteran fans. It could obviously be a huge mistake to develop something with the StarCraft name that hops into another genre but, if they pulled it off, it could mean a longer-term series revival and reimagining of what it could be.
The DLC mission packs, Nova Covert Ops, was a particularly interesting venture for veteran fans, as it was somewhat of a reimagining of a cancelled PlayStation 2 game by the name of StarCraft: Ghost, which was intended to be a first-person shooter game based on the character of Nova, who eventually featured in Covert Ops. The project was entirely scrapped following a tumultuous development cycle, but it caused a great deal of excitement in the community, and many still hope it might be resurrected seen at some point.
It could be argued here that the lesson is StarCraft will be doomed to fail in other genres, but one could also argue that Blizzard are able to turn old ideas into new ones. With Stormgate prepared to step into a spiritual successor role, Blizzard could be looking at some good old-fashioned stiff competition in a shrinking market – but that might also force them to inject some more innovation, and push themselves even further. With Microsoft’s Xbox in fierce competition with PlayStation, Blizzard titles could start to be developed with consoles as the primary focus – hopefully more successfully than the long-forgotten N64 port of the original StarCraft – bringing a different player base into the fold. Quite what any non-RTS game might look like for the series is anyone’s guess at this point. A CRPG with huge consequences for different races based on your party’s choices? A fighting game pitting Heroes from the campaigns against each other? A true stealth/survival shooter after all?
Whatever Blizzard decides to do next with StarCraft, we certainly won’t see it for many years to come – but at least we’ll have Stormgate to scratch the itch.
