Blizzard finally remembered it owns the StarCraft franchise. Unfortunately, it forgot it’s an RTS series as the next game is an open-world shooter, simply titled StarCraft, and it’s targeting Spring 2030. The announcement came during the BlizzCon 2026 Opening Ceremony alongside a cinematic trailer and not much else. Dan Hay, the former Ubisoft Montreal executive producer on Far Cry 3 through Far Cry 6 who joined Blizzard in 2022, introduced the project and the team building it, describing the goal as bringing players back to the Koprulu Sector from a completely different perspective than the overhead real-time strategy view that has defined the series since 1998. Blizzard’s own summary of the reveal was: it’s about damn time.
The trailer follows a group of Dominion recruits through training before dropping them onto a planet and into the Zerg, and that’s the extent of what was shown. There’s no gameplay footage, no platforms, no pricing, and no word on multiplayer or structure beyond the open-world shooter description. XBOX has since said the game is coming to console in addition to PC, which is the only platform detail so far. Hay’s team, in his words on stage, was built with the single purpose of returning to a universe forged in interstellar war, and the 2030 target means that return is still more than three years away.
This is the first new StarCraft game since StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void in 2015, and it’s not Blizzard’s first attempt at taking the series out of the RTS genre. StarCraft: Ghost, a stealth-action console game starring Nova, was announced in 2002 and canceled in 2006 after years of delays, which I noted in my Overwatch review showed Blizzard wasn’t afraid of killing off games it didn’t find fun. A second shooter project was reportedly scrapped in 2019 so the studio could focus on Diablo IV and Overwatch 2. In the meantime, StarCraft: Remastered and the StarCraft II campaigns have been on PC Game Pass since November 2024.
Spring 2030 puts StarCraft a full year behind Diablo V’s Spring 2029 window, making it the furthest-out date Blizzard put on anything at the show. The trailer is below.
