Photographer: Troy Harvey / Bloomberg
Photographer: Troy Harvey / Bloomberg
Activision Blizzard Inc. video game publisher has taken over. another step in consolidating control of the Blizzard Entertainment division, once proud of its independence, by moving a 200-person design studio to its ranks.
The studio, Vicarious Visions, had been a subsidiary of Activision since 2005 and worked on franchises such as Skylanders, Crash Bandicoot and Tony Hawk. He now focuses entirely on Blizzard rights, including Diablo, instead of making his own games. Vicarious Visions studio vice president Jennifer Oneal will chair Blizzard’s leadership team, reporting directly to the president.
The news, reported by GamesIndustry.biz, they arrived just weeks after Blizzard quietly shut down one of its in-house development teams, according to people familiar with the company.
Blizzard, a maker of games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch, has traditionally developed most of its games in-house. But in the last few years, Activision’s publishing arm has taken over a stronger hand in the work of Blizzard. Vicarious Visions, based in Albany, New York, has been working with Blizzard since last year on the Diablo franchise, including a planned redesign of Diablo II, said people familiar with the Diablo II. plans. They asked not to be identified talking about private information.
A Blizzard spokesperson declined to comment on Vicarious Visions’ current projects, only confirming that the studio “has been working with Blizzard for some time. ”
Until last year, the Diablo II remake was developed by Team 1 Blizzard, part of the Irvine, California campus, the company that was known for reworking classic games. His latest release, in January 2020, was re-released as Warcraft III: Reforged. The title was not badly received due to glitches and past features, earning 59 out of 100 points on the Metacritic review aggregator – the lowest score Blizzard game has ever received.
Members of Team 1 met to discuss what went wrong. Blizzard’s internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg pointed to the game’s failure on poor planning, miscommunication, and hasty distribution due to financial pressures from management, among other things. For example, Blizzard announced the game in November 2018 and started taking pre-orders for 2019 without informing the majority of the development team in advance, according to several people who worked air Warcraft III: Reforged.
Team 1 wanted to avoid the mistakes of Warcraft III: Consolidation of their next project, the remake of Diablo II. Shortly after the postmortem, however, Blizzard withdrew that project from the team and put the division behind Diablo IV over. Vicarious Visions also has a group working on the remake, called Diablo II: Resurrection.
On October 15, 2020, Blizzard informed Team 1 members that it was reorganizing the entire region, according to the people working on Warcraft III: Reforged. In the weeks that followed, team members were offered interview opportunities for jobs elsewhere within Blizzard. Those who did not find jobs in the company were gradually cut. Others went for independent studios that were recently started by veterans of a well-known company, such as Frost Giant Inc. and DreamHaven Inc., started by Blizzard co-founder and former CEO Mike Morhaime, which went widely to mark the start of Activision’s takeover.
Team 1 was also responsible for the Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft II games. Blizzard suspended the development support of Heroes of the Storm in 2018. On the same day Blizzard announced it was reorganizing the division, it publicly announced that StarCraft II was ending all ongoing development.
Blizzard has promised to continue repairing and updating Warcraft III: Reforged, though it looks like it will do it with a different outside team. A spokesman would not confirm who is handling the ongoing development of Warcraft III: Reforged but said “we remain committed to updates in support of the community.”