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Daily Briefing: Thursday 12th August
🕑 Added 2021-08-12 13:01:03 +0000 UTCMore staff ousted from Blizzard, including Diablo IV director
Diablo IV game director Luis Barriga, Diablo IV lead designer and Overwatch hero namesake Jesse McCree, and World of Warcraft senior designer Jonathan LeCraft have all been let go from Blizzard, the company confirmed earlier this week. Cory Stockton, currently a lead game designer at Blizzard, was reportedly placed on leave last week but for now remains with the company.
- Blizzard haven't commented much on the departures beyond confirmation that they took place, and a brief attempt to reassure fans (and presumably investors) of the continued health of the affected projects by outlining that they "have a deep, talented roster of developers already in place and new leaders have been assigned where appropriate." Barriga has been one of the public faces of Diablo IV since it was announced while Jesse McCree literally has an Overwatch character named after him. McCree, LeCraft, and Stockton all appeared in the infamous Cosby Suite photograph that emerged following the lawsuit.
Halo Infinite's new engine is a "mythical beast"
That's according to 343 Industries' senior software engineer Leonard Holman who, speaking in a recent employee spotlight, referred to Halo Infinite's SlipSpace engine as a "mythical beast" that "walks this fine line of intimidating future technology married to little gems of classic gameplay and subtly authentic legacy behaviours."
- The various developers at 343 Industries are understandably excited about the SlipSpace engine, which was designed specifically for Halo Infinite. A few of them have gone on record as saying the new engine allows them to achieve things not possible on previous engines, even when it comes to something like implementing and testing new ideas quicker and more efficiently. It looks like the future of Halo is bringing the best parts of its past along for the ride.
Warzone bans another 50K accounts, devs say new anti-cheat measures are coming
Call of Duty Warzone developer Raven Software enacted another ban wave this week - this time wiping at around 50K cheating accounts to bring the overall permaban total to over 500K since the game released last March. In a tweet marking the newest wave of bans, Raven mysteriously confirmed that "more importantly, we are listening and hard at work behind the scenes."
- Following this rather cryptic tweet, DualShockers writer and reputable leaker Tom Henderson suggested that Activision have an all-new anti-cheat system in the works for Call of Duty. Henderson claims that the new system has been in the works for "over a year" for the next Call of Duty title - which presumably means Vanguard releasing later this year. He also says that the same system will be implemented into Warzone, which makes sense given Activision's ongoing ambitions to craft a big, interconnected Call of Duty ecosystem.
