Blizzard Pitched A Call Of Duty RTS, Canceled An Overwatch Show

Activision Blizzard has been the subject of immense attention and scrutiny over the past three years, ever since the company was sued over an alleged culture of workplace harassment in 2021. This was followed by a $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft and over 2000 layoffs at the company. With all these big, far-reaching changes making headlines, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of all the other happenings within the company and its many individual teams. Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment is an upcoming book from Bloomberg (and ex-Kotaku) reporter Jason Schreier, and it’s going to blow the lid off several untold stories from the Warcraft and Overwatch developer. But we already know some of what’s in store, because in the lead-up to the book’s October 8 release, Schreier held a Reddit AMA in which he answered some big and small questions about the state of Blizzard.

Throughout the AMA, Schreier teased some stories that will be in the book itself (including the trials and tribulations of developing Overwatch 2, which has not lived up to the original 2019 pitch), and also replied to some big questions with answers that will be interesting, and in some cases likely very frustrating, to longtime Blizzard fans. We’ve rounded up a few of the big takeaways here.

Overwatch was notorious for its content drought in the years leading up to Overwatch 2’s launch in 2022. This was due to much of the team working on the sequel, but according to Schreier, Bobby Kotick, the ex-CEO who left the company in 2023, wanted to hire hundreds of people to lighten the load. Then-lead director Jeff Kaplan and producer Chacko Sonny were against this, which led to further complications in developing both games. Schreier’s full answer reads as follows:

When one Redditor asked if Blizzard had been working on a possible fourth Warcraft real-time strategy game, Schreier revealed that he’d been told production director Tim Morten attempted to get a new RTS out the door. However, Blizzard’s executive team didn’t seem gung-ho about going back to the RTS genre. Morten led pitches and prototypes, one of which was Warcraft 4. More surprising was that he also tried to pitch a Call of Duty RTS somewhere in the process. When Warcraft III: Reforged launched in 2020 and was considered a “blemish” on the company’s legacy, hopes for a new Warcraft RTS under Blizzard faded.

Asked about whether the surge in micotransactions and the like was a direct result of Activision’s influence, Schreier says no, some of the earlier examples of microtransactions, such as the 2010 Celestial Steed mount in World of Warcraft, were introduced as ways for Blizzard to attempt to offset the cost of running servers and expanding the company, rather than any new push from Activision. It wasn’t until the 2013 cancellation of Titan, the game that would eventually lead to Overwatch, that pressures from Activision to introduce more microtransactions became more prevalent. The sad side note of Schreier’s answer here is that Diablo III only got one expansion because it no longer had any form of in-game revenue after the Auction House was removed, which led the team to devote resources to Diablo IV instead.

Ugh, this one hurts. Overwatch’s story has been stagnant since the game launched in 2016, and it seemed like Overwatch 2’s story missions were finally going to move things along. But with those reportedly being canceled, fans have been holding out hope for an animated series along the lines of Arcane to push the plot forward. Well, it sounds like that was in the works at Netflix at one point, alongside a Starcraft and Diablo project. That is, until Activision Blizzard sued the streaming service for allegedly poaching CFO Spencer Neumann in 2020. Pain.

Schreier says Play Nice will dive into some canceled projects within Blizzard. He mentions two, including one called Andromeda that would have been a God of War-style action game featuring Thrall from Warcraft, but was canceled after Alex Afrasiabi was fired for “misconduct” in 2020. Another game mentioned was Avalon, which was a Minecraft-like set in the Warcraft universe.

You might remember back in 2019 when pro Hearthstone player Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung called for the liberation of Hong Kong on an official Taiwanese Hearthstone stream. Blizzard responded to this by suspending him and the casters who were conducting the interview, This led to protests inside and outside of BlizzCon that year. Many speculated this came from pressures in Chinese markets and its partnership with Chinese company NetEase to release its games in the territory, but Schreier says it was entirely a Blizzard decision.

“Yes, and I can tell you with full confidence that the decision to suspend Blitzchung was made by a Blizzard executive who wouldn’t have even interacted with NetEase, let alone felt any obligations to them,” he wrote. “Chinese pressures had nothing to do with it. It was entirely Blizzard people feeling like he had hijacked their platform for a political message.”

These days, Blizzard is working on Overwatch 2’s seasonal content, is about to launch Diablo IV’s Vessel of Hatred expansion, and just released World of Warcraft’s The War Within expansion. While each of these games are trucking along, there’s been a cloud hanging over the company for those who have been tuned into Blizzard and its projects over the years as all this news has trickled out. Perhaps when Play Nice comes out next week we’ll have a better picture of how it all ended up like this.