Dan Hay, the former frontman of numerous entries in Ubisoft’s Far Cry series, is now leading a team working on a new StarCraft shooter.
The detail comes from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier’s upcoming book on Blizzard, Play Nice, and was discussed with Schreier ahead of its publication during an IGN podcast first aired last night.
Hay, who joined Blizzard in 2022, is now said to be working on the company’s third attempt at a StarCraft shooter, following the infamously-cancelled StarCraft Ghost, and a second similar project codenamed Ares that also never saw the light of day.
There’s little detail on the new project – Schreier says he did not include the “nugget” as a scoop, rather to show Blizzard returning yet to again to a similar idea. Still, it’s the first we’ve heard of what Hay has been working on since the cancellation of Blizzard’s ambitious survival project Odyssey, which Hay had been overseeing.
Designed as Blizzard’s first new IP since Overwatch, and supposedly featuring gameplay elements reminiscent of Rust and Minecraft, Odyssey was cancelled by Blizzard back in January of this year after six years in development. The decision coincided with Microsoft’s cull of 1900 staff across its various video game teams.
Starcraft spin-off Ghost was memorably cancelled in 2006, four years after it was first revealed to the world. Blizzard would later explain its decision to drop the project as a consequence of World of Warcraft’s enormous success at the time.
This week, Microsoft confirmed StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection were coming to Xbox and PC Game Pass.