Blizzard har i årevis febrilsk forsøgt at få et nyt RTS-projekt godkendt

Engang var RTS-spil ret afgørende for Blizzards ry, men efter World of Warcraft, Overwatch og Hearthstone er deres output langt bredere. Samtidig er de dog blevet beskyldt for at have negligeret deres rødder, men åbenbart har designere og kreative sjæle internt forsøgt at få godkendt et nyt RTS-spil i årevis - uden held.

Jason Schreier har for nylig deltaget i en AMA på Reddit på baggrund af hans kommende bog om Blizzard, og her afslører han at StarCraft II's Production Director, Tim Morten, forsøgte i årevis efter lanceringen af spillets tre dele at få grønt lys til et nyt RTS-projekt, deriblandt Warcraft 4.

"So, okay. StarCraft II did pretty well but it didn't meet the company's lofty expectations, and each entry in the trilogy did worse than the last. Production director Tim Morten led a plan to release new content packs in the form of Nova Covert Ops (which I thought ruled) but that didn't sell gangbusters either. Then SC2 went free to play and again did well, but not Overwatch or Hearthstone well. Morten and his team tried for years to kick off a new RTS, making all sorts of pitches and prototypes, from Warcraft 4 to even, wildly, a Call of Duty RTS pitch. (He was desperate.) But there was no appetite among Blizzard's executive team for a new RTS game. They held out hope that if WC3 Reforged was a massive success it might help open the doors for a WC4, but Reforged turned out to be a debacle — the company's first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard's history. So in 2020, Morten and some of his team left to form Frost Giant (and recently released Stormgate). Maybe under Xbox there's room for a small team to work on an RTS and release it on Game Pass or something, but these days, who knows."

Som Schreier siger forlod Morten og resten af hans slæng Blizzard i 2020, og har netop lanceret deres eget RTS-spil, Stormgate.