Rumor: Blizzard Working On An Open World Shooter (Is This StarCraft Ghost?)

Fans have found an interesting job opening at Blizzard that’s basically outed a new unannounced game.

As shared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by user Zesilo, the Blizzard website has a job opening for an Associate Design Director of Innovation. And the job description says this:

“As the Design Director of Innovation, you will be the vision holder and owner of key strategic innovations on an upcoming open-world shooter game.”

The job description also states that this is a hybrid position, with the applicant being asked to attend work days in Blizzard’s homebase in Irvine, California. So this doesn’t sound like it is a spinoff or a incubation project that Blizzard is simply exploring.

This is definitely a game they want to bring forward to full production, and this choice of a job opening also suggests that they want to make some calculated risks with it.

As we know, Blizzard made a very successfully calculated risk when they launched Overwatch, their first ever entry into the shooter genre. One could take for granted that a veteran game company like them could be satisfied just making games in the WarCraft and Diablo franchises. With Overwatch, they proved that old dogs can learn new tricks, and they can absolutely do that again.

So, it’s very much possible that this upcoming open world shooter is a wholly original title. To be honest, we would not be surprised if this turns out to be an Overwatch spinoff, to live up to the community’s desire for more Overwatch games after they failed to live up to what they promised for Overwatch 2. But there’s also another possibility.

As we reported last September, there was another rumor that Blizzard is working on a StarCraft themed shooter, from no less than Jason Schreier. While, once again, this could be an entirely new game idea for a StarCraft shooter, many fans immediately think of one such promised game that didn’t come to light.

Because Blizzard themselves expressed their frustration that they were never able to make StarCraft Ghost, to tell their story about Nova Terra. StarCraft II Nova Covert Ops was supposedly meant to satiate that desire, but it’s clear that such a game would have turned out completely differently.

Just to punctuate how crazy this could be. Nintendo’s Yoshio Sakamoto wanted to make Metroid Dread in 2002 for the DS, shortly following the release of the GBA title Metroid Fusion in that same year. Sakamoto and Nintendo also struggled to make that project take shape, but they eventually did make the game. With MercurySteam tapped as developer, Metroid Dread released for the Nintendo Switch last year.

If Blizzard really is making StarCraft Ghost, it would have just as crazy a development arc as Metroid Dread did. Your average Fortnite gamer wasn’t around to know that StarCraft Ghost exists (or for that matter, StarCraft.) But we’ll just have to wait it out for when Blizzard is finally ready to show us what this game is.