Blizzard Entertainment is notoriously secretive when it comes to their in-development projects but that didn’t stop gaming journalist sleuth Jason Schreier of Kotaku unearthing that the Anaheim based developer halted work on the yet another Starcraft shooter (RIP Ghost) to move developers onto either a continuation or spin-off title set in the Overwatch Universe currently called “Overwatch 2”.
Project Ares was the code name given to this potential Starcraft third person shooter helmed by veteran developer Dustin Browder. A playable build of the game reportedly cast the player as a Terran Marine who could “gun down Zerg monsters” but future plans for the title included the ability to potentially play as the Zerg, but development was slow and it’s not known if this milestone was ever reached. Project Ares has been in active development for at least two years and it’s sudden cancellation only occurred a couple of weeks ago.
With developers moved onto what is essentially “the next Overwatch title” – what does that game look like? It’s been compared to Valve’s Left for Dead Games By Schreier’s sources, meaning that it has is most likely not a single player game but something closer to the smaller scale P.V.E modes released every spring for the game’s anniversary event. Imagine a scenario where teams of 4 Overwatch members have to defeat waves of Talon Robots – a likely event were Blizzard to show us more of the non PVP aspects of Overwatch. Reportedly Overwatch 2, the still unannounced Diablo 4 and the cancelled Starcraft project all run on the same engine – a change for Blizzard which with the exclusion of Starcraft II and Heroes of the Storm generally have different engines for each major franchise.
The public didn’t hear about the former Project Titan (which would be later reworked into Overwatch) very much at all while it was in active development. Aside from the odd omission of the projects existence during investor calls (and to be honest none of us listen to those) – Titan was spoken about mostly by fans as speculation and nothing more.
Blizzard actually did issue a vague statement to Kotaku which read in part:
“We always have people working on different ideas behind the scenes – including on multiple projects right now – but the reason we tend not to discuss them publicly is because anything can happen over the course of development.”
[Source]