Blizzard Entertainment revealed a new StarCraft game during the BlizzCon 2026 opening ceremony on September 12. Titled simply StarCraft, it is an open-world shooter rather than a real-time strategy game, and Blizzard is targeting a 2030 release, according to Video Games Chronicle, Polygon and GameSpot.
The project was introduced by Dan Hay, the former Far Cry lead, whom Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier had previously reported was working on a StarCraft shooter in his book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, Video Games Chronicle reported.
This is something new: an open-world shooter where every step is earned. Not from above, but down on the ground, in the mud, in the fire.
Hay said the game would honor StarCraft's past while pushing beyond it. Polygon noted that an open-world shooter is a kind of game Blizzard has never released before.
The trailer
Blizzard showed a cinematic trailer rather than gameplay. It follows Terran soldiers of Arcturus Mengsk's Dominion as they train, suit up and drop onto an alien world, where they meet a massive wave of Zerg, according to Dexerto and GameSpot. Polygon described one soldier's gun running dry moments before he is killed. Blizzard has not said whether the game is played in first or third person, and shared no further details on how it will play, GameSpot and Polygon reported.
GameSpot reported that the crowd's audible reaction when Blizzard said "open-world shooter" was not one of clear excitement. The reveal followed a tease earlier this month in which the franchise's official website began to "glitch" and fans found hidden text logs.
A long gap for the series
The new game will be the first original StarCraft release since StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void in 2015, GameSpot noted; the series has been largely dormant since StarCraft: Remastered in 2017. Blizzard has tried to take StarCraft beyond strategy before, with the stealth-action StarCraft: Ghost and a shooter codenamed Ares, both of which were canceled, according to Polygon and Video Games Chronicle.
