Videos by ComicBook.com
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.
