StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter(theverge.com) |
StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter(theverge.com) |
I hope it's good, but it's really disappointing to not just have starcraft 3. Instead we get diablo 5? I wish I could feel positive about any of the blizzcon announcements, but it all feels like an out of touch joke.
The game itself doesn't have to be dumbed down (i.e., removing base building, etc.). Making the RTS simpler is NOT the solution to player adoption. Starcraft II has some extremely complex mechanics (Zerg production) which have survived for 16 years without significant changes.
The reality is that RTS is very much alive if you are willing to get your ass beat constantly. What I think many people are actually asking for is that nostalgic experience where everyone kind of sucked at these games and they could cheese their way to easy wins. RTS felt better when everyone was kind of bad. In a shooter you can still get lucky shots and catch people off guard. In an RTS, if someone is 1000 ELO better than you, the chances you defeat them are essentially zero.
And there isn't much variation.
The cutscenes were almost the best part of the original game. Now they're really the only reason to even look.
I believe Destiny proved an open world shooter in this genre can work.
Also, didnt they announce a Warcraft HOTS?
I play AoE2 and it’s still growing.
A full warcraft III expansion is not nothing
They did announce a new Warcraft 3 expansion at Blizzcon too.
That said i do not trust blizzard to make anything that isnt lame and slop.
Meanwhile how many AAA hero shooters and extraction shooters have we watched get released and been massive commercial flops? Yet we don't consider those to be dead genres?
Ohh well
> Executive Producer on Far Cry 5
So it's safe to assume that's what they are aiming for.
Games these days need to have an almost hard cap on a “round” or session wrt to time. I need to know that the game will be over within x minutes’ish. The attention span is small. Almost all indie games have adopted this structure.
What fans really want is NOT another competitive rts but more campaigns and coop. Neither will convinced execs to dump cash into it unless it is a live service game with dlcs. Sc2 did this for a bit with a coop mode that did ok but not ok enough to continue.
One of the theories for part of the Civ6 flop is that they wanted to cater to multiplayer scenes which have different concerns from a casual single player. Removing hotseat is extremely egregious though and the one reason I’ve refused to give the game a chance. I’d be willing to look past the “Humankind ripoff lol” memes if I could play with my gf.
Given that Marathon is unlikely to ever make a profit, Tempest Rising technically made infinitely more in profits than Marathon did.
StarCraft: Ghost all over again.
There's quite a few new RTS games coming out
This is probably the safest thing they could do with the genre from a business perspective.
A shooter is a high risk high-reward endeavor. The track record for shooters for the past 5 years is actually much worse than it has been for RTS games, but the ceiling for success is much higher. In 2026 alone, several AAA shooters have failed in the market. Most of the shooters released in the past 2 years have failed to survive. The few that succeeded made a lot of money.
SC2 is my favorite game of all time and I would love nothing more than an SC3. But if there ever is to be a real spiritual successor it won't be from Blizzard.
Companies still announcing big AAA games as if their customers will have the hardware necessary to run such games in 2030.
And people say I'm the one huffing copium.
I wish people would stop supporting this trash site and let it die.
The trailer shows nothing. Mentions a couple of factions that have previously been established from the lore and shows some Space Marine montage footage that could have been a cutscene from the prior games. It is not gameplay and just as easily could be promotion material for a Starcraft 3 RTS.
What are existing players missing from Starcraft 2 to justify buying Starcraft 3 so that Blizzard can justify the money to develop it?
The best I can guess is that the space marine mech guys don't ever die in the original games? So its a big deal to see that in the trailer, or have that detail written down?
Having the habit of spoiling in the headline is kinda just funny and I had no idea, would genuinely love some examples.
Nintendo as a company is also extremely odious but that is a given of all companies these days so i give em a pass.
And, breath of the wild etc mechanics are almost all pulled directly from other open world games although they were a first for nintendo.
* YAML, etc.
Sure, the artists probably put tons of effort into it, but if you are reading an article instead of the short clip, then probably you didn't care about it as much anyway?
And how many copies are they gonna sell? How big is their player base?
All important things bean counters want to know before they pony up north of seven figures of investor money into another RTS and not into another looter shooter instead with a 100x revenue and 100x player base.
That seems like the obvious player base for a Starcraft 3, and it seems more than large enough for a major release.
GTA 6 preorders beat that in like a week and the game isn't even out and no gameplay footage was even show.
>That seems like the obvious player base for a Starcraft 3
A lot of that player based has aged out of the game or will stick to playing SC2 instead of spending 80-100$ on buying the same game over again. RTS have reached diminishing returns. There's not much more you can add to SC2 to improve it and convince people to spend on buying a new game. SC2 is feature complete.
Choosing the biggest flop as your benchmark is a very poor argument. If you lose half as much money as Marathon, you're technically twice as good, but it's still a flop and investors and publishers want successes, not half flops.
Marathon existing does not justify the investments into new RTS games. Quite the contrary. Marathon got hundreds of millions in cash because the shooter genre was making billions (at the time) so for them it was worth the gamble even if they lost. But the RTS genre is not making nearly enough money to justify Marathon levels of gambling on new IPs.
Two shooters were making billions at the time Marathon began pre-production (Fortnite and Destiny). Only two other live-service AAA shooters have made back their budgets (Apex Legends and The Division). Most live-action shooters generated huge losses; even Destiny wasn't doing great anymore by the time Sony acquired Bungie. Sony itself had a horrendous track record with live-service games (of any genre). Other than Final Fantasy Online they have no profitable live-service games developed internally (Destiny and Helldivers are both acquisitions).
But the RTS genre is not making nearly enough money to justify Marathon levels of gambling on new IPs.
We agree on the first half of that statement, but (a) RTS games don't need Marathon levels of gambling to be successful and (b) live-service shooters also aren't worth the gamble of Marathon levels of spending. Tempest Rising cost less than $10 million to develop, which is less than 1/25th of what Marathon cost. Starcraft 2, the most expensive RTS of all time, cost about $150 million (in today's dollars) and made that back in its first month and made at least $240 million in revenue before going free-to-play. COH3 cost somewhere between $25m and $50m, and earned approximately $50m in sales but also received significant tax incentives in Canada, for a modest profit. On the AA front, Iron Harvest cost approximately $5 million and grossed $15m ($10m going to the studio), for a 100% profit. Similarly, Zerospace has grossed over $5 million on a $2.5m budget.
Meanwhile, Fortnite, Destiny, Marathon, and Apex Legend revenues have all been trending downhill for several years. All of the studios behind these games have had sizable layoffs. Sony has lost more on Marathon alone than every AA and AAA RTS game's development budget in the last decade. To put it bluntly: the era of the live-service shooter is almost as dead as the RTS era. Fortnite is the only thing keeping the genre alive.
Objectively speaking, if the goal is to make a profit, RTSs are a lower risk than shooters. If the goal is to lose money, make a live-action shooter.
Other games having done bad is not proof that your unique RTS will do good. That's my argument.
> If the goal is to lose money, make a live-action shooter.
When your examples that lost money got the green light to start development, the shooter market was very different which is why they got all that money to begin with. But then you take 5-7 years to ship, and by that time the market has changed, so they lost the gamble but that doesn't mean that at the time it was a bad business decision.
Meanwhile new RTS is known for the start it won't make any money since the young players are captured by MOBAs and boomers still play the OGs. That's also my argument.
>Objectively speaking, if the goal is to make a profit, RTSs are a lower risk than shooters.
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is. THere's some indie RTS games out there who probably need some money.
Really? That's going to be your measuring stick? So anything that isn't as successful as GTA 6 is a failure that shouldn't ever exist again? In fact any genre that isn't as successful as GTA 6 should just be wholesale cancelled?
A game is successful if it makes a profit. Other games making more profit doesn't suddenly make them failures. This isn't a zero-sum game.
> A lot of that player based has aged out of the game
What does this even mean? Gamers don't "age out". We're long past the era of pretending Nintendo is a children's toy...
Probably best RTS game going on currently is Beyond All Reason, and that's because guys are doing it as an open source clone/followup to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Alliances and not actual business (but they started to look for a way to monetize it to fund future development).
Good luck convincing an exec to give you 200 million $ to make a new RTS for the 50 player based market out there who's playing the oldies anyway: AOE, RA, SC, etc.
It's a small and saturated market that's long been fished out and no point investing into, other than HD remakes/remasters of previously mentioned established IP.
No, it wasn't. You are just ignoring the dates. When Marathon got the green light, the shooter industry was already a feast-or-famine niche, with most entrants starving to death.
Meanwhile new RTS is known for the start it won't make any money since the young players are captured by MOBAs and boomers still play the OGs. That's also my argument.
Which is false. Almost every AA and AAA RTS in the last decade has made a profit. My point is that they don't make much of a profit, but a small profit is better than a huge loss.
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is. THere's some indie RTS games out there who probably need some money.
I probably already have purchased them.
By the way, I used to work in the video game industry, so my knowledge is firsthand.
Which AAA RETS games? How much profit?