Blizzard has recently cancelled a StarCraft first-person shooter that has been development for around two years according to Jason Schreier from Kotaku. They are told that the main reason for the cancellation is that they needed the staff to work on two new titles rumored to be Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4.
Now that is something you don’t hear every day as two new games being suddenly announced through anonymous staff as another gets cancelled. Well unfortunately the StarCraft project known as Ares was supposed to be a game that’s like a Battlefield game in the StarCraft universe. The game was cancelled as the development progress of the game was going slow but was looking, “quite good.”
Fortunately no staff was laid off during the cancellation as they were basically just being moved to the other two projects, Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 which are expected to be announced at this year’s BlizzCon.
While news of a new Diablo 4 is great news for PC players who thought that Diablo Immortal is not the game they really want, it seems Blizzard understandably heard their cries and decided to work on the new one. Overwatch 2 on the other hand is a strange thing to hear from the team-based hero shooter but based on what Schreier was told, the game looks to have a PVE element. This now puts into question of what will happen to the original Overwatch or if it’s simply an Overwatch spinoff so the two games can coincide, hopefully Blizzard will clear this up for us this year.
Blizzard put out a full statement about the two projects by talking about why another game’s priority just was higher than another and that this was pretty much a difficult difficult situation for everyone involved. You can see the full statement here:
“We don’t generally comment on unannounced projects but we will say the following:
We always have people working on different ideas behind the scenes – including on multiple projects right now – but the reason we tend not to discuss them publicly is because anything can happen over the course of development. As has been the case at Blizzard numerous times in the past, there is always the possibility that we’ll make the decision to not move forward on a given project. Announcing something before we feel it’s ready stands the risk of creating a lot of frustration and disappointment, both for our players and us, not to mention distraction and added pressure for our development teams.
We pour our hearts and souls into this work, and as players ourselves, we know how exciting it can be to see and know with certainty that a new project is coming. Knowing that changes or disappointments can happen doesn’t make it any less painful when we have to shelve a project or when an announcement doesn’t go as planned. We always make decisions about these things, regardless of the ultimate outcome or how things might be interpreted, based on our values, what we believe makes sense for Blizzard, and what we hope our players will enjoy the most. The work that goes into these projects – whether they ship or not – is extraordinarily valuable. It often leads to great things and helps foster a culture of experimentation here.
With all that said, we’re very much looking forward to revealing other things we’re working on when the time is right.”
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Source: Kotaku
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