Blizzard is hiring for an unannounced upcoming open-world shooter game. A job ad posted on November 13 revealed this, though the requisition doesn’t have too many details about what the game is.
The job ad for the Associate Design Director, Innovation says this person will be the “vision holder and owner of key strategic innovations” for the upcoming unannounced “open-world shooter game.”
The job calls for someone to help implement strategies that have “shown potential but have not yet permeated the AAA space.” The successful candidate will work with Blizzard’s engineering, art, and audio teams to help guide the project from concept to release. This wording specifically suggests whatever this game is, it might be early in development.
According to the job listing (via VGC), a successful candidate can expect to earn a minimum annual salary of $124,400, with the potential of reaching $230,300.
This job ad was only posted this week, but journalist Jason Schreier’s new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, contained a passage mentioning that a StarCraft shooter is, or was, in development at Blizzard. Whether or not this newly posted job ad is connected to that is unknown.
The rumored StarCraft shooter was said to be led by Dan Hay, the former Ubisoft and Far Cry veteran who joined Blizzard as vice president and general manager in 2022.
As part of the iterative nature of game development, Blizzard cancels about 50% of the games it works on, so whatever new Blizzard shooter is in development, it’s not guaranteed to release. In January this year, Microsoft announced that Blizzard had canceled its survival game, codenamed Odyssey, with some staffers moving over to an incubation project that was said to be a StarCraft shooter.