With the end-of-service hitting Destiny 2 , players have been looking to fill the void. The obvious choice is fellow healthy live-service shooter Warframe , but for many, it’s just not the same. Now, with a new StarCraft game announced , a shooter that is not the series typical RTS, could that work instead? The universe seems ripe for such a project.

Nope. Not happening. Though many would argue that’s probably for the best.

While StarCraft is an open-world, story-driven shooter with what is meant to be a “living universe,” Blizzard has explicitly shot down the idea that it could be a live-service game, a genre that is enormously expensive and hard to maintain in 2026. While it appears there is gear finding and upgrading, that’s hardly unique to live looter shooters, and StarCraft (no subtitle yet) appears to be more along the lines of something like Halo Infinite.

While that campaign was lacking (severely, in my opinion), it represented an open-world narrative with factions scattered across the map and choices about how you approach the world. I have a sense this would be larger and more involved than Infinite , however, at least from early looks and descriptions.

One big difference from Destiny, Halo and other games is that it is a third-person shooter, allowing players to see their armor sets and it’s a system that will likely mirror Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine more closely, right down to the hulking armor. Also Remnant, The Division 2 and Gears of War as some of the top third-person shooters. Maybe it’s personal preference, but that’s a bit of a disappointment, as I have been waiting for a StarCraft FPS for twenty years now. Still, there is every chance this is going to be awesome, regardless. There is so, so much potential in StarCraft’s world to do more than just RTS games, and this may be the start of a whole new era of the IP.

While Xbox has been struggling for a while now (aside from a recent PR win, landing Hideo Kojima, who just left PlayStation), Blizzard has lately been a solid performer for the brand. Overwatch and Diablo 4 have been surging lately. Alongside this StarCraft shooter, Diablo 5 w as also announced, surprising many given the gaps between past games. But it seems that the move may be to capitalize on the current relative popularity of Diablo content, and it is likely to target a game like Path of Exile 2, as it is moving back toward more traditional ARPG mechanics. We already saw Diablo 5 is returning to the much-liked “Tetris inventory” system, for 0ne.

I think that a StarCraft shooter, in whatever form that takes, is going to be a big deal. The bad news, of course, is that we have to wait until at least 2030 for it to arrive, as Blizzard confirmed. Hopefully it will be worth it, though we’ve been waiting almost three decades, what’s a few more years?

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .