How Blizzard’s creators almost brought Call of Duty RTS to life

Great potential: Real-time strategy fans who were counting on a new game from the pioneers of this genre at Blizzard Entertainment experienced a long drought. According to surprising new reports, several developers eager to revive Blizzard’s RTS legacy have floated some bold ideas – including Warcraft 4 and even an RTS spin-off of Call of Duty – but executives weren’t interested.

These reports come from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who detailed the failed efforts of Tim Morten and his team to greenlight a new RTS project at Blizzard. The session was part of the promotion of his new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, in which he interviewed approximately 350 former and current employees of the company.

Morten, a longtime fan of Warcraft and StarCraft, was hired in 2014 to oversee the latest expansion for StarCraft II, Legacy of the Void. After completing the expansion, Morten’s team felt they had gained invaluable experience in RTS games and wanted to apply those lessons to a brand new game.

Unfortunately for them, although StarCraft II got off to a strong start when it was released in 2010, each subsequent installment in the trilogy “performed worse than the last.” Even when StarCraft II became free-to-play in 2017, it failed to reach the heights of Blizzard megahits like Overwatch and Hearthstone.

As a result, Blizzard showed no interest in financing another RTS.

Still, Morten’s team didn’t give up easily, noting that they “have been trying to create a new RTS for years, creating all kinds of proposals and prototypes.” This included everything from the seemingly obvious sequel to Warcraft 4 to the more unconventional idea for a Call of Duty real-time strategy spin-off.

Their hopes were briefly raised by news of the 2019 announcement of Warcraft III: Reforged, a remastered re-release that they believed could reignite interest in the RTS genre. However, Reforged had a dismal reception, plagued by missing features and technical issues.

As Schreier noted, it became “the company’s first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard’s history,” extinguishing any remaining hope of financing a new, traditional RTS.

Still, with new owners following Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard, there’s little chance that new management will consider the idea again.

“Maybe there will be room within Xbox for a small team to work on an RTS and release it on Game Pass or something, but in this day and age, who knows,” Schreier speculates.

This uncertainty is understandable considering most of Blizzard’s RTS talent is gone. Morten himself was one of those who left, having co-founded Frost Giant Studios, which recently released the RTS Stormgate in early access. So far, the game has received mixed reviews on Steam.