Blizzard North was just shut down. The remaining staff was transferred to the Southern California Headquarters, and will continue work on their not so secret project, which will probably be Diablo3.
Diablo3 after WoW is for some an understandable step, for others it is trying to milk the Blizzard fan out of his last dollar. WoW is, in my own personal opinion, what Diablo2 should have been, and what Warcraft3 never was. There are enough similarities between Diablo2 and WoW to cater to the same the fan base. Two exception perhaps, bandwidth limitations and age. Diablo3 will cater to those left out of WoW, either because of their age or their bandwidth, which means Diablo3 is still a good idea. Of course hypothetically speaking, if there is ever a Diablo3.
Blizzard North was the home base originally of most of the Diablo franchise developers. We all know what happened, most of them disbanded to form their own project(s) in the mass desertion of employee's that Blizzard had a year or so ago. Whether they made the right choice or not, probably depends on the success of their current projects, and the ever growing shadow of WoW in the gaming industry. WoW has effectively acted like a "fan" vacuum, making a dent in many other MMORPG fan bases, something that does not have other game developers in the same genre too happy.
Blizzard North developers left in tandem to form other independent game developing studios. Curt Feldam from GameSpot writes, "ArenaNet, formed in March of 2000 by Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt, and Jeff Strain (and since acquired by NCsoft); Flagship Studios, founded in 2003 by Brevik, the Schaefer brothers, and Bill Roper (among others); and Castaway Entertainment, also founded in 2003 by brothers Stefan and Mike Scandizzo". So something good did come out of the mayhem, more games.
Setting aisde the rumors and heresay, today Mike Morhaime said that the changes made were to "improve our efficiency as a company" and "represents an opportunity for all of our teams to have regular, direct input on each other's projects." He is, to be blunt about it, being very honest and for some it was an expected, maybe overdue due to the WoW pre-launch chaos, a sound business decision. As always in these things, some employee were minimized. Cheer up guys, GG.net is recruiting, play Starcraft not Diablo!
//Entropy
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Links
Gamespot.com - Source
