Blizzard has officially revealed its long-rumored StarCraft shooter, confirming that the new game will be an open-world shooter targeting release in 2030. The project was announced during the BlizzCon 2026 opening ceremony and is currently simply titled StarCraft. Former Far Cry boss Dan Hay introduced the game and the development team before Blizzard showed its first cinematic trailer.
Hay described the project as an attempt to return players to the StarCraft universe from a completely different perspective, moving away from the overhead real-time strategy gameplay that has defined the franchise. Rather than commanding armies from above, players will experience the conflict directly on the ground in what Blizzard describes as an open-world shooter. Hay said the team wants to respect StarCraft’s history while also having the opportunity to push the series beyond what it has done before.
The announcement cinematic, titled Dominion, focuses on a Marine named Holt and the forces of the Terran Dominion. The trailer follows Holt through his training before his deployment takes a disastrous turn when Zerg forces attack, establishing the familiar Terran-versus-Zerg conflict without showing actual gameplay. Blizzard has not yet detailed how the open world will be structured, what combat systems players can expect or whether the final game will include multiplayer or cooperative modes.
The reveal confirms years of reporting surrounding Blizzard’s attempts to bring StarCraft back as a shooter. Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier wrote in 2024 that a small Blizzard team led by Hay was incubating a StarCraft shooter after the cancellation of the studio’s survival project. More recently, reports claimed the project had evolved into a story-driven game with a substantial single-player campaign, although Blizzard has not yet formally outlined the final campaign structure or confirmed all of the previously reported features.
Blizzard had also been steadily increasing StarCraft activity ahead of BlizzCon. Its official StarCraft website began displaying unusual glitches and cryptic transmissions in the days before the event, prompting speculation that a major franchise announcement was approaching. The BlizzCon reveal now confirms that Blizzard was preparing to introduce a new game, though the company has not explained how every element of the preceding teaser campaign connects to the shooter.
The new project is particularly notable because Blizzard has attempted to create StarCraft shooters before without bringing them to release. StarCraft: Ghost was announced in the early 2000s as a console action game centered on Nova before eventually being cancelled, while another shooter project known as Ares was later developed internally and also cancelled. The newly announced StarCraft therefore represents Blizzard’s third major attempt to translate the franchise’s large-scale science-fiction warfare into a shooter.
It is also the first major new standalone StarCraft game announced in years. StarCraft II’s final expansion, Legacy of the Void, launched in 2015, and Blizzard later shifted the game into long-term maintenance while leaving the future of the franchise largely unclear. The 2030 target means fans will still have a substantial wait before this new entry arrives, but Blizzard has now firmly established that StarCraft is returning as an active game franchise rather than remaining limited to its existing strategy titles.
Many important details remain unconfirmed, including platforms, playable characters, the exact perspective used in the final game and the scope of its campaign and multiplayer offerings. Earlier reporting described a third-person, story-focused project featuring Terran Marines fighting Zerg, but Blizzard’s announcement currently confirms only the broader open-world shooter direction. With development still several years from its planned release, the BlizzCon reveal serves primarily as the formal introduction to a project that had previously existed only through reports, job listings and speculation.
