Key Blizzard developers apparently tried for years to get a new Starcraft or Warcraft RTS off the ground, but execs had 'no appetite' for them
Blizzard RTS fans haven't been having it great, since, as a studio, it doesn't seem to have much of an interest in strategy anymore, despite—as our own Fraser Brown put it while lamenting Spencer's t-shirt tease at the Tokyo Game Show, having established "the model for the RTS genre" back in the day.
Well, turns out there could've been a new Blizzard RTS game. There could've been multiple. There could've even been a Warcraft 4—but alas, Blizzard's executives didn't bite.
That's as per Bloomberg writer Jason Schreier, who's on the promo tour for his new book called "Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment". One of these interviews, an AMA on the World of Warcraft subreddit, reveals a behind-the-scenes history that might break RTS fans' hearts in two: "[Tim] Morten and his team tried for years to kick off a new RTS, making all sorts of pitches and prototypes, from Warcraft 4 to even, wildly, a Call of Duty RTS pitch. (He was desperate)."
Schreier is referring to Starcraft 2's production director, who left Blizzard in 2019 to work on Stormgate, which was released into early access to a mixed reception in August.
Schreier says that, regardless of the individual pitch, "there was no appetite among Blizzard's executive team for a new RTS game." He points to Warcraft 3: Reforged as a sort of last-ditch effort to prove to the execs that there was still some gas left in the ol' RTS tank, but we all know how that went.
Just in case you don't, though: It went badly. The lofty promises of a 2018 demo were broken on release when fans, quite rightly, pointed out that the reimagined cutscenes were a far cry from what was shown off two years prior. While the developers had clarified that their initial vision had to be tamped down a bit, expectations were catastrophically mismanaged.
Throw that in with a lack of features present in the 20-year old original, a crappy EULA that gave Blizzard ownership over what you made in it, and the fact this thing released during the nightmare of the studio's rep-tanking controversies, and you have the final nail, one which fan reception drove hard into the genre's coffin at Blizzard.
"Reforged turned out to be a debacle—the company's first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard's history," Schreier adds. "So in 2020, Morten and some of his team left to form Frost Giant (and recently released Stormgate)."
Still, with new ownership comes new executives that might be more amenable to bringing the genre back from the dead—though if Blizzard wants to get back into the game, it's facing a studio mostly devoid of the original talent that made its old RTS classics great. As our own Fraser put it, Blizzard "does have the resources and ability to attract talent that could give us another genre-defining RTS. If, you know, it tried."