After some time of complete silence, we finally got some news regarding Bonfire Studios' next title.
Bonfire Studios is well-known for being spearheaded by former World of Warcraft designer Rob Pardo. Some of the team members are also former members of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft team, until they left their positions back in 2014.
After some years of silence, Bonfire Studios finally got to talk about their first-ever project, which is being developed for a primarily PC “core audience”. Pardo talked to Morgan Webb with regards to the new game at the recent GamesBeat Summit in Los Angeles, all the while providing some details – extremely broad, mind you – about their very first title.
“It’s a PC game,” Pardo said. “It’s definitely much more for a ‘core’ audience; we’re not going to suddenly go out and make Candy Crush.”
“Our time at Blizzard taught us well, what gamers want,” he added, with a somewhat meaningful chuckle. The rest of the interview can be viewed in the video below, starting at about 12:50 in.
The studio was also revealed to be working with the Unity engine and that the development team is broken up into smaller teams. Pardo has also stressed that they are not focused on mobile games, which seems to be a shade thrown at Blizzard itself, particularly with regards to its subsequent handling of the Diablo Immortal reveal at BlizzCon 2018.
In any case, much like their previous work on World of Warcraft, Bonfire Studios' upcoming title will feature online multiplayer elements. It will have both a cooperative component, and a competitive component, which seems to suggest something along the lines of a massively multiplayer online game.
It should be worth noting that Bonfire Studios is trying to move away from its image as the “former Blizzard devs.” While a new MMO certainly sounds plausible and very likely for their first title, it can also be something totally unrelated, but perhaps bearing some elements of what they had discussed during the GamesBeat event.
In any case, it’s exciting to see how Bonfire Studios' new game will fare in the near future.
