14 DAY TRIAL // Gamers are often sad when a videogame developing studio goes under and 2008 was an especially hard year, with the likes of Ensemble Studios, the creators of the Age of Empires franchise, disbanding. Another videogame studio that could not sustain itself was Iron Lore, which is probably best known for having created Titan Quest, a Diablo like RPG, which improved a lot of the features of the genre.
The good side of a failure is that it can sprout something new and exciting. Two Iron Lore veterans, former lead designer Arthur Bruno and former art director Eric Campanella, have founded a new studio, called Crate Entertainment, already working on its first project.
Game publishers are already being showed a demo version of Black Legion, the action RPG title under development at Crate Entertainment. The rights for the game were acquired from Iron Lore by the two veterans and they really believe that they can create something exciting.
Arthur Bruno says that Black Legion is going to change the way people look at role playing games on consoles. He declared to site Masshightech that “One of our real goals is to take the solid game play we established in Titan Quest and repackage it to make it sort of grittier and more appealing to the mainstream audience. We’re trying to evolve the action to something that will bring the RPG to its next level.”
The game will include a more in depth story than most similar games and Crate Entertainment is also thinking of including player-versus-player combat over the Internet to the game, creating a level of competition beyond that available in single player.
Also, the company has a second videogame in development, with the rights bought from Iron Lore, but there's no information available on it at the moment.