Blizzard pitched a Call of Duty RTS once

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.

“So, okay. StarCraft II did pretty well but it didn’t meet the company’s lofty expectations, and each entry in the trilogy did worse than the last. Production director Tim Morten led a plan to release new content packs in the form of Nova Covert Ops (which I thought ruled) but that didn’t sell gangbusters either. Then SC2 went free to play and again did well, but not Overwatch or Hearthstone well.

Morten and his team tried for years to kick off a new RTS, making all sorts of pitches and prototypes, from Warcraft 4 to even, wildly, a Call of Duty RTS pitch. (He was desperate.) But there was no appetite among Blizzard’s executive team for a new RTS game. They held out hope that if WC3 Reforged was a massive success it might help open the doors for a WC4, but Reforged turned out to be a debacle — the company’s first bad game and a blemish in Blizzard’s history.

So in 2020, Morten and some of his team left to form Frost Giant (and recently released Stormgate).

Maybe under Xbox there’s room for a small team to work on an RTS and release it on Game Pass or something, but these days, who knows.”