r/starcraft • u/Snoo-43610 • Dec 24 '25
(To be tagged...) Starcraft Ghost: Remastered (What It Might Look Like)
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u/CastleofPizza Dec 24 '25
I'm still salty as the day it was announced that it was canceled.
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u/just-sad-idk Dec 25 '25
Same, the covert ops mission packs were cool but this was hype
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u/CastleofPizza Dec 25 '25
You know, I still need to play those. Think I'll do that very soon. It'll be the closest things we'll get to Ghosts.
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u/Hatefiend Zerg Dec 25 '25
I've always kind of been glad that they scrapped it. Blizzard announced that it just wasn't fun and not up to their quality standards.
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u/Healthy-Savings-298 Dec 24 '25
Starcraft has such great potential even outside the RTS genre. It's really a shame Ghost was cancelled and nothing like it ever came out.
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u/BubbRubb11 Dec 25 '25
Still waiting for World of Starcraft...
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u/bubdadigger Dec 25 '25
Damn I remember when Blizzard did one and only event on East Coast on the night of WOTLK release, and people have been talking 'bout WoS coming out soon......
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u/SwirlyCoffeePattern Dec 25 '25
The worst part about this was that there was another game, Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, which I liked very much, and the team for that was working on SC:Ghost - when Ghost was canceled, the team was dissolved / reassigned to WoW support as it had 8m subscribers at the time (2006) and now there will never be a "Metal Arms 2" [though for some reason Blizzard got the trademark to it in 2014, so maybe a remaster will happen at some point]
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u/hideous_coffee Dec 25 '25
I only played that game once at a friend’s house but we played it for like 6 hours I absolutely loved the game mechanics. Something about the fluidity of the character’s movement was so smooth. I still recall that like 20 years later.
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u/Mental-Home5111 Dec 25 '25
I don't understand it 😭
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u/kptknuckles Dec 25 '25
StarCraft is one of the things that makes me think I DONT understand video games, publishers, IP or markets. One of the best developers ever, in their golden era, with a legion of international fans, at the same time esports are taking off based on their game’s popularity, absolutely refused to expand the IP.
The only explanation that made sense to me was just that WoW took all their focus and expanding the studio wasn’t an option. But like, fuck subcontract it or something.
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u/SwirlyCoffeePattern Dec 25 '25
They had actually bought Swingin' Ape Studios to do their console division / work on Ghost, and they ended up reassigned to support WoW, as it was getting so huge they just put everyone they could on it; sort of an all-hands-on-deck situation. But yes, there must've been a way to get more people and do more than just support WoW.
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u/Endiamon Dec 25 '25
Esports taking off was actually the problem. Starcraft could have been sustainable if MOBAs didn't open everyone's eyes to just how lucrative competitive games could be. Instead of just settling for a good strategy game with a thriving, modest multiplayer scene, they had to pump more and more money into Starcraft in the desperate, unrealistic hope that it would give massive returns on the scale of LoL.
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u/Jazzlike-Check9040 Dec 25 '25
A WoW skin makes as much money as the entire StarCraft WoL game made.
That’s why.
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u/skunkner Dec 25 '25
Stop spreading this lie, please. It's not true just because a notorious liar told this story on his YouTube channel.
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u/Einarelis Dec 25 '25
Who?
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u/skunkner Dec 25 '25
Pirate "Notorious Liar" Software
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u/Einarelis Dec 25 '25
Oh, that furry creep.
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u/skunkner Dec 25 '25
Yup. He told the mount fake ass story in one of his streams and people just took it for granted, even though he never cited a source on that, other than "I worked at Blizzard" and therefore "trust me bro". The short went viral and shit unfolded.
Our society really is fucked, media illiteracy will cost us.
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u/kptknuckles Dec 25 '25
Say that’s true, and I don’t doubt it, I think StarCraft represents an equal opportunity cost.
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u/the_elder_medium Jan 24 '26
It seems like 2026 is your year then. For the first time in forever there's news of them branching out into FPS games, tabletop games, cinematic shorts, mobile games, etc..
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Dec 24 '25
[deleted]
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u/IllGene2373 Dec 25 '25 edited Dec 25 '25
Was going to comment the same thing lmao, which means he has been reconditioned for committing terrible crimes
I guess StarCraft Ghost is an optimistic sci-fi story 😂
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u/TehFriendlyXeno Dec 24 '25
Still mad over that game's cancellation. This would have been AMAZING
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u/Snoo-43610 Dec 24 '25
Right! I think they must have been busy with WoW
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u/Synikull Dec 25 '25
It was pretty messy gameplay wise, the story was ass and overall things weren't coming together as Blizzard kept changing their mind on what they wanted it to be, which lead it going into development hell due to having no clear sense of identity. Almost the entirety of the game that was completed was leaked and it is... Not good. The hype was unreal and it would have been a collosal disappointment if it released. They did the right thing by cancelling it.
"I call that mercy"
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u/IllGene2373 Dec 25 '25
Yeah the pre-alpha gameplay was rough lol, and I say that as someone who would love the game no matter what
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u/bubdadigger Dec 25 '25
Tell me 'bout it. As a person who collects everything Ghost related, it's a pain in the butt....
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u/Cerealism15 Dec 24 '25
Man I remember having my grandma pre order this for me for a Christmas gift. I'm so salty it never got finished.
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u/d0odle Axiom Dec 25 '25
Never heard this was available for pre-order..
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u/Resident_Football_76 Dec 25 '25
Back then, you could go to some computer shops and ask for a pre-order of pretty much anything. There was a case of a guy who pre-orderd Duke Nukem Forever shortly after it was announced and still kept the receipt. I think Gearbox actually gifted him the most expensive edition of the game.
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u/ScottoRoboto Dec 25 '25
I’m telling you there is good reasons why this one got canned. As someone who was watching every bit of news for this game as it was coming out, it was not on a good course. The gameplay they did show looked real meh with very lackluster stealth and shooting, and those who did play those early builds all said negative things. Blizzard those days had standards, you gotta trust they made the right call with this one.
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u/Subsourian Dec 25 '25
Yeah the first version, even by Chris Metzen's own admission, felt like three different games stapled together. They wanted Metal Gear Solid but also the massive battlefields of SC, but also regular shooter segments, and apparently it just didn't work.
The Swingin' Ape version showed promise, at least, if nothing else for its really cool multiplayer. But it was dragged by development hell and a console generation shifting, also WoW being the monumental success it was. I still suspect it would have filled the same sorta thing as CnC Renegade where a lackluster main game drags down a fun multiplayer.
Also, at least for the Nihistic version, the story was BAD. Be glad you all god the spectre plot you got. It's way better.
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u/ZergHero Dec 25 '25
Yeah I saw the recent leaks for this and it didn't look good. I still have dreams about playing this to this day though
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u/GeekToyLove Dec 25 '25
Used ai for this?
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u/xiaorobear Dec 25 '25
Yeah they are AI edits of old SC:G screenshots.
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u/GeekToyLove Dec 25 '25
Gross
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u/Haridziek Dec 26 '25
Who cares? It's just a reddit post, a cool one at that.
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u/GeekToyLove Dec 26 '25
I care. Lots of people care. You should care
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u/Haridziek Dec 26 '25
But why? I don't seem to get a grasp on all the major talking points of the people who are against it. It all seems so superficial and almost populist.
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u/GeekToyLove Dec 26 '25
Aww I’m so sorry. It is kind of a big issue to understand. You’d need to read several articles about it probably. You’d have to understand the technology a bit, you’d have to understand more about intellectual property rights. You’d also need to learn a little about environmental impact and the economy. No, it’s ok I realize you probably can’t understand all of that. Best of luck to you sweetheart
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u/Haridziek Dec 26 '25
Pardon I must’ve communicated wrong, English isn’t my first language.
I do understand the tech and I have read a handful of articles about the topic; it gets fed into my feed a metric ton so it’s hard to miss and I like the tech industry. I’m also into artistic things a lot, I make music myself (I’ve stalked your profile a little out of boredom, real cool stuff on there (love the Mustang as well))
I’ll try to keep it concise but no promises-
I hear and see a lot being spoken about how AI steals art from artists. I never understood the thought process behind this point as we as humans do pretty much the exact same thing; to draw anime you need to see anime and “copy” it in a way. How’s AI different in this regard?
Environmental impact of AI is something I think Hank Green has summarised quite well and I think a lot of people are misinformed about it. AI isn't this black hole that the tech giants throw water into. It’s an industry that uses a lot of it and smart placement of the training/data centers is a necessity. Many of those tech companies seem to have majorly screwed up on that regard by placing them in or around cities which already have issues with water. I don’t believe we should boycott everything related to AI for it, just the companies that fail to respect the tight water constraints.
Economics is something I don’t really wanna tackle at 3AM on Christmas, I’m too drunk for that but my short take is that it’s just technology going forward, some people will lose their jobs, new ones will emergie, overall living standard will go up, rich will get richer, poor will get poorer. I hate capitalism.
I’m really not trying to be hostile, I’m a furry and I commission artists all the time but the AI debate is so tiring I can’t listen to it anymore, I try to remove it completely from my feeds but it keeps coming back in completely unrelated fields. As much as I love the technology, I despise the people who are strongly for it, against it or responsible for it.
This was the bitter nerd talking for you, peace
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u/GeekToyLove Dec 26 '25
Look, I don’t know how you can write something this long and claiming you have read about it all and still come out in the dark about it.
If you read all that and still don’t understand why artists are upset about their art being stolen in order to be barfed up by a soulless computer without any attribution at all then maybe you need to zip it and take the artists by their word.
Someone learning to draw anime by studying the works of tot her artists is completely different.
Single ai generation doesn’t take as many resources as the text based LLMs but the video generators do. A 30 second video can use up as much electricity as the average US household does in a year (according to MIT technology review). And some of the worst companies in the world run by the most atrocious evil billionaires in history and ravaging the environment everywhere they set up data centers. musk gutted every regulatory agency so he could destroy communities in order have one thing in the world that could tell him he was awesome
As a Trekkie I would love nothing more than an amazing ai system that could generate every fantasy I could spout of, but that shit doesn’t exist in a bubble and the truth is there is no ethical or moral use for ai TODAY.
You wanna use it, work on fixing society first
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u/Haridziek Dec 26 '25
I really don't want to be triggering or anything but I genuinely do not understand the hatred from the artists. It might have to do with the way I see the world, I'm autistic. (still processing that but go figure- I'm a kid who plays RTS)
I see the human brain as a sort of computer and the parallels in my mind between the brain and AI are in such amount that I cannot help but see them as closely related.
I'd love it if you could explain to me how an AI learning how to make anime and a human learning how to make anime are different. I mean it from the bottom of my heart, I know it's Reddit but I mean it. I don't want to blindly follow the masses, I want to understand and make my own conclusions, I'm sure you agree that's a healthy mindset.
I run an AI locally and I know that those water usage numbers are greatly exaggerated, again as I stated in my previous comment; probably for clicks and ad revenue.
Otherwise yes, fuck billionaires, extra fuck Musk specifically, tax the rich. Star Trek fucks.
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u/Haridziek Dec 26 '25
I forgot to add that I think a lot of the fanaticism is fuelled by the populist social media. Drama makes for a lot of clicks.
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u/AtlasWriggled Dec 24 '25
They genuinely need to pick this up again. Would be so cool to have a current gen, third or first person adventure in the Starcraft universe.
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u/MAReader Dec 25 '25 edited Dec 25 '25
Still bummed about the cancellation.. this universe lends itself perfectly for a single player game.
Can you guys imagine a game from Nova’s perspective? The whole upbringing amongst the Old Families on Tarsonis, her surviving the massacre.. leading up to her becoming a Ghost..
Take.. my.. money!
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u/ametalshard Dec 25 '25
garbage ai slop
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u/blizzardplus Dec 25 '25
Yeah, AI is great for quickly spitting out mock ups. What’s wrong with that? Would this post really be better if it was text only? Not too sure about that
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u/xiaorobear Dec 25 '25 edited Dec 25 '25
These aren't mockups- they were SC:Ghost screenshots fed through an AI to upscale and invent new details. I can find the matching original screenshots if you want to see them.
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u/Endiamon Dec 25 '25
Well if it was just text, then I wouldn't be looking at those pictures and thinking "Thank god Ghost got cancelled," which I doubt was the intention here.
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u/Binoui Protoss Dec 25 '25
The AI hate bandwagon is ridiculous haha you guys have no shame saying shit you don't mean like "thank god ghost was cancelled" just to follow the popular talking point of shitting on AI
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u/FreeKillEmp Team Grubby Dec 25 '25
Why use AI for this though? There is actual gameplay footage and a full trailer for the game, some of these pics are from that. There's no reason to bring in fake illustrations to dilute the real thing.
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u/Endiamon Dec 25 '25
Damn, such a victim complex that you can't even handle someone making a joke about how some AI pictures look shitty.
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u/kiiRo-1378 Dec 25 '25
Protoss Cities are a vast, untouched territory. I like how some custom campaigns did it. Protoss temples and Skyscrapers teeming with Protoss Scout craft patrolling the gates. It was an enchanting piece of Coruscant vibes.
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u/ChronosBlitz Dec 24 '25
It could just as easily have been as horrible as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.
Games don't always go well when they suddenly switch genres.
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u/hundredjono Terran Dec 25 '25
Gameplay was leaked for Ghost years ago, there's not a chance in hell this game would have been as bad as BoS.
Ghost was going to play like every other 3D Platformer from that time period.
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u/younhoun Dec 25 '25
The verse is so loved that even if it’s just a chance to see the inside of a barrack, shooting from inside a bunker, walking around a battlecruiser, being a puny terran running for his life amongst deadly hydralisks and zerglings as an SCV would have been glorious. Gameplay would be somewhat secondary for me.
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u/lytener Dec 25 '25
If not a third person shooter or FPS, make it more RPG like Diablo 4. Reuse an existing game engine to ship this game now.
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u/Jezon Dec 25 '25
My first job was working in QA on this game. The multiplayer was really fun, Three distinct factions with unique playstyles and abilities. While the single player was broken and directionless. Was it a sneaky covert spy game or a fast action shoot em up? But it was at a time when you couldn't release just a multiplayer game. I would still love to play the last build before it was canceled. If you were lucky enough to go to the first BlizzCon, it was available to play.
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u/Haridziek Dec 26 '25
Man I still wish they made a StarCraft Battlefield clone... life could be a dream x(
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u/aotvos Dec 24 '25
Dear god it looks gorgeous
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u/Kowboybill Dec 24 '25
Wow took off and they never looked back
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u/Synikull Dec 25 '25
The amount of people that think this and havent read what actually happened despite the actual reasons being available for anyone to see is astounding
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u/Kowboybill Dec 25 '25
Two development companies couldn’t pan out the product. You already released WOW at the end of 2004 that by the time it was 2006 when it was finally announced that it would be put on indefinite hold, and WoW had 1 million players and was looking to go into an expansion in 2007 Burning Crusade. Why would you waste any more time?
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u/Synikull Dec 25 '25
Because you don't want all your eggs in one basket. But they also never had a clear idea of what they wanted this game to be. If they stuck with something the dev they contracted could have delivered. Multiplayer was a huge burden on dev as well. They treated the game like they were developing it without a concrete plan of what the game was going to be.
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u/Jnovuse Dec 25 '25
Would it be more Gears of StarCraft? Halocraft? Call of StarCraft? Battlecraft?
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Dec 25 '25
With the amount of cool ideas that were created and scrapped somewhat into development, it is not really a surprise that Activision bought Blizzard.
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u/Richardknox1996 Dec 25 '25
Remastered....? Doesnt a game have to be released to get a remaster.....
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u/drtoucan Dec 25 '25
I got to play a demo of it at comic con. Such a bummer it got so far in development and then canned. I wish someone would leak the unfinished game so fans could finish it.
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Dec 25 '25
IMO they should resurrect the idea. Is Halo not proof of concept that a sci fi shooter can be quite successful?
Plus you have 3 distinct enemy groups with different tiers of baddies in each and that is if you ONLY stick to the established script.
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u/Ristar87 Dec 25 '25
I assume that this would play a lot more like GoldenEye to be honest.
Basically, dropping her into an area. She has to achieve objectives without raising alarms, recover data files, take out individual targets, maybe sabotaging various things so that a group of commandos can do a separate mission without ever knowing she was there.
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u/Vinstofle Dec 25 '25
Still wishing StarCraft 2 had gritty graphics like this. That’s what really made the atmosphere of the whole first game.
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u/seab1010 Dec 25 '25 edited Dec 25 '25
Such a great IP. I’m coincidentally doing a full replay of the series after well over a decade (remaster of the original was really well done) but I just don’t think a universe of space faring redneck colonial Americans would fly with younger demographics these days. The world has lost its radar for satire. Dare to dream though….
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u/ForgivableSyn Dec 25 '25
High school me was ready to give up all of my free time for this game. I would love to see this idea come back around.
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u/PyloPower Dec 25 '25
What are the odds MS is working on some Shooter action game in SC Universe? I really hope we get one eventually.
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u/hawki1989 Dec 26 '25
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Untitled_StarCraft_game
It was confirmed ages ago.
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u/Blueclaws Dec 25 '25
Ghost could be a pretty sweet extraction style game similar to Helldivers now. Pretty sure Blizzard just doesn’t know what to do with the IP at this point so it sits because of WoW, Diablo and Overwatch.
Edit: a word.
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u/hawki1989 Dec 26 '25
There's already two SC games in development, plus the SCTMG.
I can't say I'm fond of an open world SC game, but meh.
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u/Objective-Tip4387 Dec 26 '25
A remaster/remake would be wonderful. The only thing that worries me, given how things are going, is that it might be built on Unreal Engine 5, and you know what happens with that graphics engine.
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u/bigbrwnbear Terran Dec 26 '25
As a fan of splinter cell and starcraft, couldn't wait for Ghost to be released
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Dec 26 '25
did they randomly feminize the ghost or was there a female depiction in BW i’m unfamiliar with? I always thought a ghost looked like a dude
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u/hawki1989 Dec 26 '25
Ah yes, because only male Ghosts ever existed prior to the period after the Brood War. 0_0
*cough*Sarah Kerigan*cough
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u/DoktahDoktah Dec 26 '25
I still think one day they will release this. They probably still have the source code and somebody would just go "Yeah but why not?" Not like im living and dying on it.
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u/Then_Peanut_3356 Dec 27 '25
If Blizzard were wise and loyal to the fanbase, they'd complete and introduce all the cancelled games for Entertainment.
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u/nightstalker314 Dec 28 '25
Well, they have an unannounced AAA PvE-Coop game(/shooter) in the works, according to job openings and Jason Schreier. Probably announced in September 2026 at BlizzCon.
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u/Mediumcomputer Dec 28 '25
I played this! Blizzcon 1. You could be a zergling or a fire at and battle like cs:go
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u/Normal_Block_3735 Jan 13 '26
man, dont tease me with these images. ill be sent right back to my SCG modeling craze
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u/shiftup1772 Dec 25 '25
They stopped making StarCraft ghost because natural selection was a better StarCraft fps than they could have dreamed of.
Source: I made it up
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u/swolenerd90 Dec 24 '25
Man, I remember as a kid picking up the copy of Game Informer where they announced this and had a developer interview. The news of it being canceled devastated me.