July 13, 2007

E3 Exclusive: Blizzard Establishes Third Team, New Game Expected

Talking to Gamasutra, Frank Pearce, founding member and senior vice president of product development for Blizzard revealed that the company has a third team hard at work on a new title, separate from World of Warcraft and StarCraft II.

The comment came amid discussion of the company's current workforce. "Our global headcount is 2,700," said Pearce, "And most of that is customer service for World of Warcraft! In terms of development staff it's probably around 350. World of Warcraft is about 135 people, 40 for Starcraft II, 40 for team 3, our cinematics team is about 85 guys. Then there's sound and Q/A and that sort of thing."

When pressed for details regarding the new project, Pearce was cagey. "Team 3 is working on something really awesome. I can't give you any hints, but it's totally awesome."

All attempts to extract additional information were understandably met with looks of shock and horror from Blizzard's director of global public relations, who also attended the meeting.

Gamasutra was able to confirm that, in spite of Rob Pardo's comments at Hollywood and Games that they weren't giving up on StarCraft Ghost, this Blizzard project remains something different. With Blizzcon coming up in mere weeks, it's possible that additional information could be revealed at that time.

"If there's 6 pieces that could be linked to the word DIABLO, having also 6 letters.

Like someone posted here, D is the 4th letter of the alphabet and O is the 15th. The names of the hidden images have been 04.jpg and 15.jpg, corresponding the word DxxxxO.

Could this indicate the order the runes should be read? Like if the runes in the splash are "shael" and "hel", they could mean words "shall" and "hell". If the third rune is "fal", interpreted as "fall", you could have a phrase "hell shall fall" following the order of the hidden images, instead of "shall hell fall".