More Blizzard News: Blizzard North closes up shop, moves South
Posted by inpheaux on August 2nd, 2005 at 3:01 amA month or so ago I was at a lanparty, and in between prolonged sessions of obliterating attendees in Unreal Tournament 2004 I got into a discussion on the subject of "Just exactly what is Blizzard doing right now?" This was pretty easy to answer, normal Blizzard was doing WoW stuff, Swingin' Ape had been acquired to take over and finish StarCraft: Ghost, and Blizzard North . . well . . no one knew what Blizzard North was doing. We asked around the room, and no one had any clue what Blizzard North had been doing since the Diablo II expansion pack had been released.
Then, much to everyone's surprise, there was the announcement last week and the release yesterday of D2 1.11. Blizzard North was alive! They had actual resources to devote to shipping a patch! And it didn't take them 800 years to release like 1.10!
This, however, is the last thing Blizzard North will release as Blizzard North. An announcement yesterday stated that Blizzard's North-California studio, responsible for the Diablo series, would be shutting down and moving whatever they have left to the main Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, CA.
This is another one of those changes that people really should've seen coming. For the past several years many of the developers from both of Blizzard's locations have been leaving, if not to join up with Bill Roper & friends at Flagship Studios, then to just march off on their own to some other company.
Alongside this change comes a more or less overall restructuring of Blizzard's internal workings. Previously we had Blizzard North responsible for Diablo RPGs, and Blizzard responsible for (War|Star)craft RTSs. Now that Swingin' Ape has been bought out (and renamed "Blizzard Console") and Blizzard North has been integrated into Blizzard, the new dividing line is development platform.
Supposedly this restructuring will have no effect on the "secret project" previously being worked on at Blizzard North, but who really knows? It's a secret, we don't have any idea what it was or could be, so how would we ever know if it gets scrapped or not? Luckily, this restructuring means there'll be more people around at the main office, so there's at least some chance that not everyone will be working on World of Warcraft 24/7, leaving some time to actually work on new stuff.
Source: Gamasutra
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