Why would Blizzard have purchased Swingin' Ape if they were going to give Starcraft: Ghost to another developer? If anything, Dave Maldonado left Obsidian for Swingin' Ape.
Why would Blizzard have purchased Swingin' Ape if they were going to give Starcraft: Ghost to another developer? If anything, Dave Maldonado left Obsidian for Swingin' Ape.
Why would Blizzard have purchased Swingin' Ape if they were going to give Starcraft: Ghost to another developer? If anything, Dave Maldonado left Obsidian for Swingin' Ape.
Well, aside from StarCraft Ghost, the other motive behind the purchase was so they can focus on console specific titles also. Blizzards has always hinted at pursuing in-house console development beyond just Ghost, so its obvious. I wouldn't be suprised if its also in response to SOE's move into the non-PC arena.
StarCraft: Ghost
Expanding the StarCraft Universe
Panel includes:
Chris Metzen, Vice President of Creative Development
Steve Ranck, Vice President of Console Development
Dave Maldonado, StarCraft: Ghost Senior Game Designer
Given that Steve Ranck is the former President of Swingin' Ape, and Chris Metzen has been supervising Swingin' Ape's development of the game for Blizzard since they took it over from Nihilistic, I think it's safe to assume SA is still the SC: Ghost team.
Considering how good S:G looked at E3, I think it would be a really stupid move for it to change hands again. It might be possible that Obsidian is going to handle a port or 2 but common sense tells me that would be the extent of their involvement.
No, it's impossible, Obsidian is not involved with the game.
Maldonato is not currently with Obsidian, in fact I'm not sure if he ever was permanently. He's generally a freelancer who's worked with Black Isle Studios, Obsidian Entertainment, TimeGate Studios, and BioWare in the past.
This is an ill-informed news article that leaps to baseless speculation.
All reports said SC:Ghost was hot shit at E3, so I doubt Blizzard is changing. Hopefully this is a sign that Blizzard is planning much more console releases. The only thing that'd really hurt them is that most of their games have control schemes geared towards using a mouse. I personally think thats an easy solution for next gen though since both X360 and PS3 will support camera peripherals. Have a little eyetoy type of recognition program running and do it all with hand gestures.
Regardless, a Warcraft or Diablo licensed hack n' slash would sell buckets.
