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Blizzard Closes North Offices
An anonymous reader writes "GameSpot reports that Blizzard, the company responsible for StarCraft, Diablo, and most recently World of Warcraft, will be closing the offices of Blizzard North, the division of the company that traditionally housed Diablo series development. The article mentions that employees will either be offered severance or moved down to the Blizzard HQ to work on an unnamed project, and speculates that Diablo 3 could be the project. Is it just coincidence that Blizzard released the 1.11 patch for Diablo II on August 1st and closed the studio on the same day?"
Blizzard North pretty much lost all of their top talent in 2003 when the original Condor founders and Roper left (as well as a number of other lead personnel). Combine that with the absence of a game announcement by them in several years, and it really seemed just a matter of time before something drastic happened.
As someone who lives in Irvine, near Blizzard, I wonder how many new people I'll start seeing at the fast food joints wearing their Blizzard t-shirts. (Spot the Blizzard employee. Yes, that's the kind of fun we have here in sterile, conformist Irvine.)
Try Diablo II. Although I don't doubt people still play the original- it was good for some mindless fun. I'd play it over the latest FPS crap any day of the week.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
...the company responsible for StarCraft, Diablo, and most recently World of Warcraft Ohhh, that Blizzard.
Especially when you consider that the Northern office was responsible for StarCraft, Diablo, and Diablo II. All the southern office ever did was the WarCraft series (and the Blizzard Classics of course.) With that many of their best properties coming from one office you'd have thought they woulda held on a little longer :)
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
My jaw just hit the floor. With WoW being as successful (#1 MMP) I figured that Blizzard would be the last game developer doing layoff... for any reason.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
I would not be surprised to hear "World of Diablo" announced soon.
I was surprised when I played the Guild Wars beta weekends at how many people in the game were current Diablo 2 players. I would imagine some have migrated onward to Guild Wars.
But yeah, Diablo and Neverwinter Nights still have large fanbases.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I knew someone that played until WoW came out... I can't believe that they have a patch this far out? And that there were major bugs still to fix?
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Diablo 4 evar!!!!11
You shall not taint the goodness of the original with the craptacular sequal!!
Actually, there was a tiny little blip of an article in the last Computer Gaming World that mentioned the score for Diablo III had just been recorded, so I assume that means they're currently developing it. Either that or they're just planning ahead. Waaaaaaaay ahead. =)
Please Please let this mean that they'll start on StarCraft II
Which kind of shows that Blizzard isn't all that bad of a company -- running free servers and making up patches years and years after the game has came out. They could be patching against new things as well, some previously undiscovered or until now not massively exploited bug as well.
There's an FPS crap game coming out called Hellgate London you might be interested in. It's made by a company whose staff escaped from Blizzard after having worked on StarCraft and Diablo. It was in PCGamer a few months back. Should be worth investigating at least.
patches are really becoming deadlines:
-no patch: the game dies, the compagny is now known to drop games prematuraly (vampire the masquerade, tribes3, etc), then kills the studio.
-patch: the game lives, the compagny closes the studio anyway.
I prefer the original, actually. Felt a little more like Nethack, but with graphics. Also, it didn't give me the same urge to tape down my mouse button.
WOD (Worms of Doom) already exists, it's a game I'm doing. So Blizzard don't even think about it or I'll sue you :P
PS: Work on the game restarting soon for real, at last...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I work right above the blizzard office. They have a real cool life sized statue of diablo and an orc. They locked out all their employees this morning, and the landlord had to get a locksmith so they could get in themselves.