Blizzard planned to include a small arsenal of weaponry with assault and sniper rifles, grenades, shotguns, and flamethrowers.

If alerted, enemy characters would hunt for the player, set up traps, and fire blindly to nullify Nova's cloaking device.

[1] The player had access to Nova's psionic powers honed through training as a ghost agent, such as the ability to improve her speed and reflexes drastically.

Some vehicles, such as space battlecruisers and starfighters, only played support roles, while others, such as hoverbikes, scout cars, and futuristic siege tanks, could be piloted.

The first was "Mobile Conflict", which required two teams to fight for control of a single Terran military factory with the ability of atmospheric flight.

[6] In all of the team-based game modes, teams had access to four Terran unit classes: light infantry, marine, firebat, and ghost.

[12] Ghost took place four years after the conclusion of StarCraft: Brood War, in which the Zerg become the dominant power in the sector and leave both the Protoss and the Dominion in ruins.

[14] In the novel, Nova is a fifteen-year-old girl and daughter to one of the ruling families of the Confederacy of Man, an oppressive government featured in StarCraft.

To further bolster the effectiveness of his military, Mengsk initiates a secret research operation codenamed Project: Shadow Blade and places it under the command of his right-hand man, General Horace Warfield.

In the program, an experimental and potentially lethal gas called terrazine is used to enhance the genetic structure of the Dominion's psychic ghost agents.

It is into the midst of this that Nova finishes her training and is dispatched in operations against the Koprulu Liberation Front, a rebel group that challenges Mengsk's empire.

[16] On September 20, 2002, Blizzard Entertainment announced the development of StarCraft: Ghost in conjunction with fellow video game company Nihilistic Software.

[20] In July 2004, Blizzard Entertainment began collaboration with Swingin' Ape Studios to work on the game,[21] and bought the company in May 2005.

At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2005, Ghost was officially reannounced,[25] but the GameCube version was canceled by Swingin' Ape Studios due to the platform's lack of online support.

The team, which originally consisted of six people, grew to 25, and used newer hardware, software, and cinematics techniques to create higher quality cut scenes than those featured in StarCraft and Brood War.

The game's protagonist, Nova, shows up in one campaign mission of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, in which players are given the option to side with her or fight against her forces.

When questioned about this, Blizzard's co-founder Frank Pearce explained that the title was never "technically canceled" and that it was not in the company's focus at the time due to a finite amount of development resources.

[36] Morhaime later elaborated that it was the sudden success of World of Warcraft and the concurrent development of StarCraft II that consumed Blizzard's resources, leading to Ghost being put on hold.

[45][46][47] Throughout the day, infringement notices were issued to channels hosting footage of the game on YouTube, resulting in many videos being removed.