Vicarious Visions Absorbed by Blizzard

Over the years, we’ve seen tons of great developers go by the wayside after getting a bum deal from a publisher or a bigger studio. Examples are Dead Space dev Visceral Games and Star Wars Battlefront II dev Pandemic Studios, both courtesy of Electronic Arts. Others, like Spider-Man 2 dev Treyarch, get slotted to focus on one franchise for the rest of their careers. In Treyarch’s case, it’s the Call of Duty franchise; they’re responsible for World at War and every Black Ops title.

So, the time has come for Vicarious Visions to follow suit, providing their services for Blizzard Entertainment. This is a big deal, as Vicarious Visions has endured for four console generations, churning out 10+ games a year at their peak in the early 2000s. They would later be responsible for ports in the Guitar Hero franchise and the developer behind the Skylanders games, which reached massive popularity and spawned other toy-to-life titles from Disney and Lego.

The track record from Vicarious Visions has been a high bar of quality, as their last two releases were Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 & 2, competent collections of some of the best games of the late 90s. Bloomberg News reports that the current work being done from Vicarious Visions is a remake of Diablo II. This franchise is still wildly popular and the second iteration is considered one of the best games ever.

While Vicarious Visions is no stranger to working exclusively for a publisher, one has to wonder what they’ll do past a Diablo II remake. Could Overwatch 2 get some backup from the team? Perhaps a completely new IP is in the works? Regardless, I’ll be cautiously optimistic, as Blizzard has been on a fairly downward slope for a while, and I’d be disheartened to see yet another strong game developer get axed. Here’s hoping for a great Diablo II remake!