Key Takeaways
- Blizzard is hiring for an unannounced, open world, first-person shooter, according to a new job listing.
- While StarCraft wasn’t mentioned, this listing lines up with recent claims from Jason Schreier that Blizzard has a StarCraft FPS in development.
Blizzard has plenty of big franchises that it makes good use of, but one that has seen relatively little use lately is StarCraft. That’s kind of understandable, given that the RTS genre – whether we like it or not – doesn’t have much mass appeal these days. A new StarCraft probably wouldn’t make the big bucks that Blizzard demands these days, but one way in which the series could return is through a shift in genre.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier suggested that happened earlier this year, claiming that he heard that a StarCraft shooter was in development at Blizzard while writing his book. He was fairly confident the project hadn’t been scrapped between then and now, and there’s actually new evidence to suggest that this might be the case.
Blizzard Has An Open World FPS In Development
Take a trip on over to the official Blizzard website, and you’ll be able to find a job opening for an associate design director that will focus on innovation for a currently unannounced title that’s in development. While the job description is rather vague on exactly what title any prospective employee will be working on, it does reveal that this unannounced title is an open world, first-person shooter.
Blizzard doesn’t actually have much first-person shooter experience, with the Overwatch series the closest thing it has, so it makes sense that the company would be looking for someone to come in with innovative ideas. It also makes sense if this mystery title is indeed StarCraft, as Blizzard will need to flex its creative muscles if it wants to successfully shift genres so radically.
Unfortunately, the job listing doesn’t actually hint at this title being StarCraft in any way, but if what Schreier claims is true, then it would be very odd for Blizzard to have two different first-person shooters in development at the same time. Interestingly, this is also the first sign we’ve had that this title could be open world, which isn’t that surprising in today’s industry, but is unusual for a first-person shooter.
In any case, there’s not a lot more we can infer from this job description, since the rest of it is typical industry jargon. We’ll have to wait for Blizzard itself to find out exactly what this first-person shooter is, though if the company is still hiring for positions as important as design directors, we may be waiting quite a while for the curtain to drop.
