Blizzard RTS fans weren’t having it Great, because as a studio it doesn’t seem to have much interest in strategy anymore, despite – as our own Fraser Brown put it, lamenting Spencer’s T-shirt taunt at the Tokyo Game Show – after establishing “the model for the RTS genre” back in the day.
It turns out that a novel Blizzard RTS game could have been created. There could have been many of them. There could even be a Warcraft 4 – but unfortunately Blizzard management didn’t care about it.
Schreier is referring to the Starcraft 2 production director who left Blizzard in 2019 to work on Stormgate, which opened for early access in August to a mixed reception.
Schreier claims that regardless of individual stance, “Blizzard’s executive team had no appetite for a new RTS game.” He points to Warcraft 3: Reforged as a last-ditch attempt of sorts to prove to management that there’s still some fuel left in the aged RTS tank, but we all know how that ended.
But in case you didn’t: it went wrong. The lofty promises of the 2018 demo were dashed at launch when fans, quite rightly, pointed out that the cutscenes were a far cry from what was shown two years earlier. Although the creators explained that their initial vision needed to be tempered somewhat, expectations were disastrously mismanaged.
Add to that the lack of features present in the 20-year-old original, the shitty EULA that gave Blizzard ownership of what you created in it, and the fact that this thing was released during a nightmare of studio retanking controversy, and you have the last a nail that the fan reception firmly hammered into the coffin of the genre at Blizzard.
“Reforged was a failure – the company’s first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard’s history,” adds Schreier. “So in 2020, Morten and some of his team left to start Frost Giant (and recently launched Stormgate).”
Still, with novel ownership comes novel managers who may be more open to bringing the genre back from the dead – although if Blizzard wants to get back into the game, it faces a studio largely devoid of the original talent that made its aged RTS classics great. As our Fraser put it, Blizzard “has the resources and ability to attract the talent that could give us another genre-defining RTS. If, you know, he tried.”
