It’s official! Okay, no, it’s not. Blizzard has been teasing the gaming world with its evolving homepage ice picture, and after this latest update, the planets certainly appear to be aligning for the announcement of World of StarCraft, or whatever they decide to call the new Massively Multiplayer Online game set in the StarCraft universe.

The StarCraft MMO has been rumored for a long time. It was reported as a sure thing for a brief moment in time back in May 2007 that it would be unveiled in South Korea at a Blizzard event, but that didn’t happen. Now with the upcoming release of StarCraft 2, what better time to release the StarCraft MMO than when they already got StarCraft on the brain?

Back to the picture, however, we’ve pretty much all decided there was a face there. It was originally suspected to be a Diablo head, indicating Blizzard’s new game was Diablo 3. Now the face, with glowing blue energy eyeballs, most likely is the face of a Protoss.

You can even see the faint glowing diamond between the eyes. Now let’s superimpose these two pictures:

Looks pretty clear to me. If that’s not good enough, take a gander at this:

The rune to the bottom left of the “face” is quite clearly the exact same as the Protoss symbol. Blizzard has already stated that they will be announcing a new game at their Worldwide Invitational, so it’s not just indicating StarCraft II again. They’ve also had job openings listed for “Next-Gen MMO” on their site for a while now. This all seems to point very rigidly in the StarCraft MMO direction, don’tcha think?

UPDATE: Turns out, no. While the flash image turned out to be completely unrelated to StarCraft (or an MMO), Blizzard confirmed that there is a fourth project in the works that is not yet announced, but is apparently the “next-gen MMO”.  I think you can guess what my prediction on that is.