Blizzard Explains Why The StarCraft Shooter Coming In 2030 Was Announced Now
Thanks to rumors and reports, the announcement of a new StarCraft game taking the form of an open-world shooter did not come as a complete surprise at BlizzCon's Opening Ceremony. What is surprising is when it's coming: 2030. That's a long time from now, and we've heard other developers lament announcing their games too soon. So what made Blizzard reveal StarCraft so far in advance?
"We totally get the question. You walk that kind of knife's edge of how much do we want to show, when do we want to show," Blizzard GM Dan Hay told GameSpot at BlizzCon. "We've been working on it for a little bit now, and we feel like we've got something that we wanted to show. We felt like this was the right moment. As we're building out the story, the characters, and kind of the feeling of the worlds that we're building, we felt like, 'You know what? We've got enough to show.'"
Hay said that with Blizzard being confident in what it's developed so far, it didn't want to further delay going public and getting the benefit of putting it in front of fans.
"There's a moment when you're making a game where you're like, 'Have we landed the emotion? Do we feel like we have enough of the verve, the identity, and the feel of it to start to share it?'" Hay continued. "About a year ago, we started to feel like we were there, so we were like, 'Okay, it's time to show it. It's time to get feedback.'
"What's super important about it is you want to put it out there, get people to feel the emotion and the value of it, and you want to be there live to be able to get a sense of how they feel about it. We were in the room; it felt great. People were going nuts."
Feedback from fans at this point can only be surface level. Although we know the new game, known at least for now simply as StarCraft, is an open-world shooter, we've yet to see any gameplay--the reveal took the form of an extended cinematic setting up the vibe, but not tipping Blizzard's hand in terms of how it will play. Blizzard confirmed to GameSpot that StarCraft will be a third-person, single-player game, but that's not much to go on.
Still, Hay said he sees value in attaching a date to the project and having developers examine their decision making through that target.
"Yeah, we also know that the date of 2030 is one of those things where--I like a date," Hay said. "I like the idea that there's something out there for us to go after. It helps us sometimes when you get into a meeting and you're thinking about the creative, and you go, 'All right, well how long are we going to wax poetic on this? How long are we going to think about this?' The answer is, 'Can we get all this done by that date?' If the answer is no: Let's rethink, let's refocus, and let's make sure we're thinking about players wanting to get this at the highest level of fidelity possible, but in a reasonable amount of time. That's why we picked that date."
A new StarCraft game that currently feels out of reach isn't a new thing; StarCraft: Ghost infamously was in development for ages but ultimately never came out. Although Hay was not at Blizzard during that era (he spent many years working on the Far Cry franchise at Ubisoft), we asked what Blizzard could take away from Ghost in order to avoid repeating that situation. Although he had little to say about that, he did share more about Blizzard's vision for the new StarCraft.
"I think our focus is we're building a new team. We've got a whole bunch of energy to it from the standpoint of this really comes from what we call a creative ache, right?" Hay said. "We really started with--when you think about the genesis of it--what's the story we want to tell? How do we want to make this game unique and different? The answer is, in previous versions of StarCraft, you were up above, looking down at the battlefield, and you had the deployment of many Marines and many different factions. This time, we were like, 'What if it was just one? What if you only got one suit? What if you had to take care of it?'
"We use the analogy of: You know that first time you get your first car? The first car was probably not great, but it was amazing because it was your first car. What happens when you get this thing and you have to take care of it? What happens when you start to see a world that has opportunity and discovery, but things that you can also pick up and maybe make your armor better? How do you go out into the world and start to take care of this thing and push against it?
"Then you start to think about, 'Wait a minute, I'm in this armor.' You saw it in the teaser: The character in the teaser gets the armor and is feeling super powerful and everything, and it's a 10-foot-tall thing that weighs a thousand pounds. You think, 'There's nothing that I can't beat.' Then you watch his face as the doors open, and you hear that growl of the Zerg. You watch his face--and we spent a ton of time just on the facial expression--of just loss, just the understanding of the distance between what we believe we can do and the reality of what life teaches us. We captured all that in that moment on his face of, 'I might be in trouble here.' But he put up a valiant effort.
"Then you realize: Okay, our story is darker. It's grittier. It's a little bit meaner; it has more stakes and more bite to it. So we thought that that was a great place to start: Put your boots on the ground and say, 'Can you do better than the character in that teaser?'"
Hay also revealed to us that StarCraft is third-person with a single-player focus, and yeah--you'll fight the Protoss, too.
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