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Reports have emerged that developer Blizzard Entertainment has cancelled work on a potential Starcraft first person shooter in order to divert resources into future Diablo and Overwatch games.
According to sources at Kotaku, Blizzard had been working on the unannounced shooter for two years. Going under the codename 'Ares' it had been described by those same sources as similar to 'Battlefield in the Starcraft universe' and had even gone so far as to having several prototypes made for the title. It was set to use the same engine as Blizzard's popular hero shooter Overwatch before the project was allegedly shelved a couple of weeks ago.
Blizzard provided a statement on the rumour to Kotaku, and while they stopped short of confiming the project, they did say '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.'
'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.'
'With all that said,' Blizzard continued, 'We’re very much looking forward to revealing other things we’re working on when the time is right.'
