Veteran MMO Developer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street announced his new games studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle, earlier today on Twitter. Fantastic Pixel Castle appears to be a first-party studio that is being fully-funded by NetEase, who has been ramping up their investment in MMO companies recently. According to Street, Fantastic Pixel Castle is already working on an epic AAA MMORPG codenamed Ghost.
A studio full of veterans
Looking over the “Our Team” section on the Fantastic Pixel Castle website, it looks like the studio already has a ton of talent. Studio Head and Game Director Greg Street himself has worked on World of Warcraft, Age of Empires, League of Legends, and the highly anticipated Riot Games MMO.
Another World of Warcraft is Brian Holinka who served as Lead Combat Designer on WoW for over a decade.
Other industry veterans listed include Bart Tiongson, Candace Thomas, David Kubalak, Ed Altorfer, Graham Berger, and more. Overall it looks like a very talented team at Fantastic Pixel Castle, so I’m excited to see what they are working on.
Codename Ghost
Details on the in-development MMO codenamed Ghost are sparse, but Street and the team have a stream planned for November 8 at 2 p.m. ET to reveal more details on the project. According to Street the MMO is very early in development, so fans should not expect any sort of gameplay footage, but rather more details about systems and design philosophy.
In Ghost, players will travel to world shards to power up their characters, bring back resources, and build their own civilization. In turn, the city will grow and evolve based on choices and actions of the players across seasons.
Based on a section on the website, Ghost will originally launch on PC, with the goal to ship on consoles at a later date. The team also plans to ship their game globally and localize it into many languages.
