14 DAY TRIAL // A while ago, Blizzard announced their plans for using the StarCraft universe for something... different. Something other than an RTS. It's opposite actually, a third-person action-adventure game, entitled StarCraft Ghost. Things were looking good half way through development and the company even had plans for releasing it on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, if I'm not mistaken. The company encountered numerous obstacles in preventing the game from being released. People forgot about Ghost, but Blizzard hasn't...
In a meeting of the MMO minds at the Hollywood and Games Summit, Blizzard's Rob Pardo was asked the following question, as NextGeneration reported yesterday: "when do you pull the plug on a project?"
Blizzard's lead designer of World of Warcraft replied: "Hopefully before you announce it." As the same site reports, the man went on drawing an example from his own experience with Blizzard, which was none other than Starcraft Ghost. Before being placed "indefinitely" on hold, the game migrated between developers twice.
"[There's] no easy answer...we've cancelled a lot of projects," said Pardo, also claiming that Blizzard really doesn't have a higher "hit game rate" than other developers. Continuing with his speech, Pardo implied that the public doesn't see the non-hits: "We're just willing to cancel the products that fail," he said. "That's important to our brand. We're willing to bite the bullet and write off those expenses. Sometimes six months into development, the idea doesn't flow."
And here comes the good part:
"Our most recent one was Starcraft Ghost. With that game we were very stubborn. I still believe in that game and the characters but we were not able to execute at the level we wanted to?Rather than work on that we had to focus on our other games. We're hoping one day to return to it."
So, there you have it, Pardo's got his mind on StarCraft Ghost, which means that Blizzard may one day start up work on it again (if they haven't already), tweaking it up and adjusting its features to the currently available hardware. But I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you, as they've still got their hands tied with StarCraft 2 so... early 2009 maybe.
Just so you don't leave our site empty-handed (don't get too excited, it's just an expression), we've made available some gameplay footage of what should have been StarCraft Ghost. Enjoy!