Ex-Blizzard and Epic Devs Creating a New Studio that will "Revolutionize" RPGs

It’s not always newsworthy when a new indie studio opens up — there are a lot of them out there, after all, and generally speaking the games they put out are more important than their mere existence — but sometimes a studio will open up that has such pedigree we have no choice but to take notice.

In this case a group of former Blizzard and Epic developers came together to form LightForge games, a indie developer that intends to “revolutionize” the theole RPG genre. And they have the clout to do it too: they have developers who have worked on games like Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic,The Elder Scrolls Online, and of course, the one game that Epic is known for — Fortnite.

Their CEO, Matt Schembari, who once worked at Epic games as a UI director, had this to say:

"We all love highly social, creative games, and we particularly love games where players drive the narrative. We are looking to combine elements from Minecraft or Roblox with tabletop RPGs to form a new way to play roleplaying games. Given our backgrounds, making a game that looks to revolutionize RPGs was an obvious choice."

Their website, the source of this quote, has a bunch of other intriguing if vague promises and goals: creating an “empathetic” studio, “blurring the line between player and creator”, promoting curiosity… all stuff that’s nice on paper but reveals very little about their actual plans. Granted, at this stage of the game it’s very unlikely they know those concrete plans themselves, but hopeful this materialize into something meaningful for them: the world could always use more revolutionary RPGs, after all.

Oh, and also, they’re hiring new people if you’re looking for work. You could certainly do worse than pairing up with these legends of game design.