Project RedLime?
From
Shacknews:
Shacknews said:
Starbreeze Studios, the developer of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness, is working with Electronic Arts to reinvigorate one of the publisher's "most acclaimed classic franchises". The project, which carries the codename Project RedLime, is in development for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
There must be a bunch of them, but apart from
Wing Commander, none of EA's other "most acclaimed classic franchises" that need to be reinvigorated spring to mind; it could be an earlier console original perhaps? However, at the moment, I'm more skeptical of any
Wing Commander relationship here for a couple of reasons:
1. Starbreeze is based in Sweden (Uppsala), home to a number of successful development studios (DICE, GRIN, Avalanche, etc) -- this makes bringing in Origin/WC veterans more tricky, yet doesn't preclude outside consultancy. Unless EA plan to make a fuss of a future WC being developed with a "clean sheet" / outside dev team (even though that could very well be the case as it's been a decade since the last big EA WC game), I would think that EA would look to leverage any WC vets within their dev stable for promotion (e.g. "hey, we've got people from WC4 working on the next WC!") if they happened to work in the chosen developer for the rumored WC title, e.g. Bioware.
2. The publishing arrangement (EA Partners) is designed for independent developers, although I think EA owns Crytek. If EA does bring back WC, they would surely develop it internally under one of their own first party labels rather than the kind of contracted out arrangement that EA Partners seems to suggest?
3. Starbreeze has a platform/fps pedigree (e.g. the excellent
Riddick), so a space sim would be a bit of departure. However, if the next WC is going to be a fps...
Anyway, I'm keen to hear what others think about this and whether it could be WC related. I suspect it's not WC, but some other EA franchise. Slightly OT, but the PC gaming market is still incredibly
strong in Sweden, with
47% (pdf - Swedish) of the gaming market (all platforms).
BTW, Is "RedLime" some sort of oblique WC reference?
Edit: Apologies, I've only just now seen the post and thread that Loaf started
here about this -- I've been away for a couple of days and when I got back today and checked in at the CIC, the latest update I could see was Feb 20 -- should have cleared my browser's cache.
Feel free to move this post.