Something amazing is going to emerge from under the bright orange auspices of Amazon Game Studios, I’m sure of it. But so far we’ve only really heard from those who’ve left the engine room and never returned: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 lead Clint Hocking, Crystal Dynamics vet Jonathan Hamel, and Microsoft narrative designer / Halo novelist Eric Nylund.
This news is more positive: After years spent watching the mad scientists of the Asura, Guild Wars 2 lead Eric Flannum has left ArenaNet to engineer his own wild project at Amazon. He’s working there as a creative director – quite possibly on Amazon’s rumoured third-person, competitive, melee-oriented PC game that aims to incorporate Twitch in some fashion.
Amazon’s first PC game will pull together Twitch, the Amazon Web Services cloud and technical innovation in such a way as to “radically evolve gameplay”, they say.
“We believe that games have just scratched the surface in their power to unite players and will produce some of the future’s most influential voices in media and art,” they wrote in a recent job listing.
The dev team includes veterans of WoW, BioShock and Portal – the latter most likely Kim Swift. Flannum worked at ArenaNet for over a decade. What would you like to see him achieve at Amazon?