Summary
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, a team atBlizzardwas desperate to make another real-time strategy game, pitchingWarcraft 4and even a Call of Duty spin-off to Blizzard’s executives (thanks,GamesRadar+). Blizzard ultimately wasn’t interested.
Tim Morten joined Blizzard Entertainment to make real-time strategy games, a genre Blizzard helped define and used to be known for. Morten had played Warcraft 2 and Starcraft in his youth and was hired by Blizzard in 2014 to be a production director on Starcraft 2, eventually winding up as the game’s lead producer.
Morten worked on Starcraft 2’s final expansion, Legacy of the Void, and felt the team had learned a lot of valuable lessons about the RTS genre. The team was eager to take these lessons and create a new RTS, but priorities had shifted inside Blizzard. Commercially, each of Starcraft 2’s expansions had performed worse than the last, and with Overwatch’s loot boxes printing money, Blizzard’s leadership had no desire to pursue a new RTS.
According toSchreier in his Reddit AMA, Morten and his team made several pitches to no avail. “Morten and his team tried for years to kick off a new RTS,” Schreier writes. “[They made] 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.”
Morten had been hoping Warcraft 3: Reforged would reignite Blizzard’s desire to make RTS games, but Reforged wound up being negatively received for various reasons, including technical issues and the non-inclusion of previously announced features. As Schreier put it, “the company’s first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard’s history.” After Warcraft 3: Reforged, there was little to no chance of a new RTS being greenlit at Blizzard. Morten has confirmed a lot of these details in the past, such as in an interview withPC Gamer.
Morten and some of the team eventually left to found Frost Giant Studios which recently released the free-to-play RTS Stormgate in early access. The game currently hasmixed reviews on Steam.
