Blizzard’s new game hints that a UE5 open world shooter, with a focus on cinemetic storytelling is on the way

Eagle eyes around the world have noticed that Blizzard Entertainment is hiring for an unannounced new game, and it seems to be quite a serious role. A recent lead developer role went live, which has caught the eyes of many in the social space, but it turns out this is a project they’ve been hiring for since February.

The most recent bit of evidence comes from Blizzard’s career page, where Blizzard is looking to hire a Lead Designer and innovator with 15+ years’ experience working in game design, and 4+ years of actually leading teams. The role is about innovative ideas that they can bring to a project that is an upcoming AAA open-world shooter.

In addition, on March 30th, Blizzard posted a job posting for a Lead Concept Artist, also looking to help conceptualize and lead teams in R&D and early incubation phases, suggesting it’s hiring for some big leads on this new project.

Other key senior hires recently posted also include Senior Character Artists for rigging in engines like Unreal and Unity, with extra points for familiarity with Blizzard-style games and cinematics.

If we go back to early March and late February, we can see a bit more about the general theme of what to expect. There’s an Audio Software Engineer on an unannounced project, with responsibilities for games in a production environment, alongside experience for shipping on PC and consoles, especially using scripting and Blueprint in Unreal Engine 5.

For more narrative moments, there appears to be an Animator focusing on cinematics, with a niche for those key narrative gameplay moments with in-game cutscenes telling those tales. Throw in a role from Feb 25th, Blizzard is looking for a Combat Designer to work on a 3D action multiplayer game with abilities, items, combat state management, and other gameplay logic.

Then, if we go back to February 3rd, we can see two roles appear for Senior Systems Engineers in Unreal Engine 5, alongside a Lead Systems Engineer for UE5 too.

What could the new Blizzard game be like then?

As it stands, it looks like Blizzard were building the main architecture team out first, then hiring specialists in that engine’s tools and skillsets for key game dev roles. Then, with the project ongoing, it seems like the dev team is now looking for specialists and designers to help design what appears to be an open-world action combat game.

Given that it’s still really early pre-production, with ideas needed to be developed, it sounds like it could be a new IP or that rumoured StarCraft shooter game, as Jez Corden at Windows Central reported on in January. The implications that there will be model riggers and animation cinematic hires soon could put the game’s reveal trailer in mind for BlizzCon’s revival in September 2026.

But given the game is extremely early in pre-production and still needs innovative ideas months from now, on top of hiring processes and notice periods, it may not even be the alluring StarCraft game. For all we know, it could be a new IP altogether, given the time frame.

It would be dope if StarCraft got a resurrection at BlizzCon in an open-world UE5 game. It did get cancelled last time in 2019, so there’s certainly room for this project to have gotten kickstarted again between then and now.

Given it’s in UE5, and not Blizzard’s own engine, which only really uses Unity for Hearthstone, this could be a sign that getting a new engine for an open-world shooter might be the play. It also shows signs of why that unannounced survival game also got canned with its internal engine. A survival game implies it probably would be a semi-open-world game, and given that Blizzard lacked confidence in what their systems could do for the genre, it contributed to it getting binned.

There’s a decent chance they took failures from that project and chose to go with UE5 because of that. We’ve seen what WoW’s engine is doing years later with laggy open-world world bosses in real-time fights… A grand open-world shooter might not be the best idea on Blizzard’s own engines, indeed.

If it is StarCraft, and Blizz is confident they can at least have a cinematic out by BlizzCon, then that would be very cool. Given that we know there’s combat state switching, abilities, items, and other game logic,it might be reasonable to expect playing as heroes from the series. Or a type of unit — probably Terran. Also, cinematic cutscene storytelling is very SC2, and Overwatch for that matter. Even very WoW, considering the latest WoW cinematic story reveal.

We don’t really know yet if it’s a multiplayer live service, or more SC2-like, with big campaigns at a box cost, with expansions coming later. Kinda like how Diablo 4’s business model works, with seasons every now and then to help keep gameplay updated before dropping massive expansions with stories, new gameplay features and things like that.

Either way, September will certainly be interesting to see what they can reveal about it. Presuming it does happen, then of course..