Starcraft: Ghost is a weird footnote in Blizzard history that just won’t seem to go away. A largely stealth-based game set in the Starcraft universe, it got dragged through a development that lasted almost the entire lifecycle of the original Xbox. Passing through two different developers with Blizzard acting as the publisher, a role they were maybe not best equipped to be at the time, by the time a version of the game was nearly finished, the Xbox 360 was out and the Playstation 3 was on the way. Given the money already sunk into it and how much more it would have taken to port it to the new consoles, it was put on “indefinite hold”.
Recently, however, a build of the game has leaked, which is playable on the Xbox or a modified Xbox 360. With a bunch of footage having made its way online, interest in Starcraft: Ghost is at an all-time high, even though Blizzard put the game on hold back in 2006 and officially canceled it in 2014.
From much of the footage from the leaked build, Starcraft: Ghost looks like a pretty standard stealth game. It started development around the time that Metal Gear Solid 2 was making waves and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was in development, so stealth gaming was a big thing in the moment. The premise of what would it be like to play in a Starcraft battle seemed pretty solid as well. They created a protagonist, Nova, and dropped her into several different scenarios where she had to fight her way out, using stealth as much as fighting.
The problems with Ghost seem to have come from the management side during development. Blizzard was much more of a developer than a publishing company at that time. It may have seemed like a good option to get Nihilistic Software and later Swingin’ Ape Studios to develop the game so that Blizzard could focus more on their core titles rather than be drawn into creating this specific game. Since Blizzard was a company built around developing their own games, however, the development of the game ran into a lot of problems.
The big two issues in development were cracking the story and figuring out the right balance of gameplay. While the premise for the game was pretty straightforward, the actual story was thin, following Nova on some missions from planet to planet with the barest excuse of a plot to connect them. This didn’t have to be a fatal problem, as many beloved games have essentially no story and do just fine with solid gameplay.
But the gameplay was a problem. The first studio, Nihilistic Games, was looking to make a stealth game, with some action elements in the mix. They constantly delivered what Blizzard was looking for on time, but ran into internal conflicts about the direction of the game. They spent a long time going back and forth on just what the right balance in the gameplay should be. Nihilistic couldn't decide on the right style, causing delay after delay as the focus of the game kept shifting to match the vision of whichever faction of the team came out on top most recently.
Eventually, Blizzard brought on Swingin’ Ape Studios and took the game in a much more solid direction. They didn't run into the same internal issues about the style, instead solidly going in the direction of a mostly action, with stealth being an option to handle situations. This direction also made the multiplayer mode click, which had been a struggle to get right while the game was being developed by Nihilistic.
The problem was, by the time they got to this point, the clock had almost run out on the Xbox and Playstation 2. It was 2005, so the Xbox 360 was already out and the Playstation 3 was coming in the next year. Starcraft: Ghost would have to be ported to the next generation of consoles, which would have cost a lot more money that Blizzard wasn’t willing to spend. Partially, this is because World of Warcraft was now out as the company’s new cash cow, so it made more sense to move resources there. With that, Starcraft: Ghost was put on “indefinite hold”, with the actual cancellation not being confirmed until an interview in 2014.
With the recent leak of a sort-of working build of the game, an awkward situation has arisen. Blizzard fans are clearly interested in this weird bit of their history, but that’s about the extent of its appeal. There have been so many action/stealth games since that it would likely feel rather old if they released it today. Starcraft: Ghost would never sell well enough to be worth the cost to finish the game, so instead, fans are just left wishing that Blizzard had finished the game a decade ago.