- I found an interesting resume of a Blizzard employee who has been working there for the past 2.5 months.
His name is Robert "Robby" Duncan, and here's the interesting part from his resume:
2011 – Unannounced Game Title (Blizzard Entertainment - 2.5 months)
As soon as I read the "participated in key design decisions", I immediately thought "this guy must be an intern!". As I scrolled down towards the bottom of the resume, it was confirmed. :)
Designed and implemented a series of single-player missions, developed new features, participated in key design decisions, and provided a thorough design-analysis of the entire product.
Blizzard has a 12 week paid internship program by the way.
Here are the points that stood out:
* This does not appear to be Titan, it's the other "unannounced" game that Blizzard has been working on.
* Due to his early involvement in the project ("key design decision", "thorough design-analysis of the entire product"), this indicates that it's in very early stages of development. Titan is supposed to be much farther along.
* Based on his expertise, it's a PC platform game. (He also has SC2 Editor experience.)
* "Single-player missions" is RTS/MOBA language.
Based on Blizzards franchise release trends, I've always assumed with 99% certainty that the other unannounced game was going to be WarCraft IV/SC2 Phoenix related. This looks to be a pretty good confirmation (coincidentally, even his email address was rduncanIV@gmaildotcom).
Either that, he's slow, or he's trolling and it has nothing to do with a RTS franchise, even though he uses RTS language.
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I found a very interesting blog post that was made a few months ago by a Blizzard employee named Shay Pierce. In this post, he describes working on a prototype game within the Blizzard workplace:
The idea started to come to me as I worked on card game and board game design prototypes - this, I realized, was a very pure form of game design. Though "table game" design gives you a limited set of tools compared to those you have on electronic games, it can really open your eyes as to what the core of game design really is.
This could be very big news indeed. His mention of card games makes me think back to the Product Slate Leak, where WOW TCG was mentioned. This seems to be related to that online World of Warcraft trading card game. Perhaps this is what Robert is working on if it's not a RTS or MOBA title. "Team 4" would be the unannounced MMO and "Team 5" is this upcoming trading card game? A game like that would be very successful on PC and mobile.
- In other news, I caught a very interesting B.Net post about wagering within Diablo 3. It was written by Sixen, one of the Community MVPs on the official message boards.
Date: 9/22/2011
So, right now most of the focus is on PVE, but later on down the road Blizzard is really keen on implementing an observer mode and an in-game wagering/betting system for PVP arena matches. This totally fits in with the high stakes arena gambling system I mentioned in that old mock Diablo 3 X1 post. :)
"It's something Force and I brought up at the Press Event back in July... Gambling, Replays, and Observer Mode to PvP. Jay Wilson said they're all cool ideas they want to do at some point in time... Just... Later on down the road."
Not only that, but apparently Micah Whipple (aka Bashiok) is ALL FOR turning Diablo 3 into a whole PVP / E-Sports system with wagering and arena gambling for players. Very interesting indeed.. it might not be called gambling though, I've noticed that Blizzard has been very careful in how they use that word (for obvious reasons) and get rather nervous when it's mentioned. - Because Diablo 3 is online only, it opens up some really cool features like what they have in World of Warcraft. Nothing has been announced yet, but I'm 100% certain that there will be holiday events and special activities during certain times of the year. Specific details about these events will most likely be exposed when people finally hack apart the retail code and patch updates. There will probably be Halloween stuff around town, Christmas presents, unique items that are only available on certain days, and even random events or encounters with a Holiday-based boss. 4-teaming a demonic Santa Claus for example. Since there's a server timer involved, I wonder if D3 will be implementing daily quests for players.. an extra way to level up, or earn gold for selling?
- Constance Wang apparently left Blizzard last month, and now she's developing content for the new Wildstar MMORPG. :) Constance, by the way, was a PA on the Titan team. She wasn't directly involved in development, but assisted with the research for them (ie, lore related stuff, library book diving, etc.)
- If you were curious if there were any Titan goodies in Kim Sellentin's tweets.. there aren't. I managed to find out. She's always been pretty careful about what she writes, though, especially after she started working at Blizzard.
* UPDATE:
