While several former Evolution Studios developers joined Codemasters to work on ONRUSH, three leads who were behind Motorstorm and Driveclub decided to form a brand new independent team, Wushu Studios, which is being announced today. These leads are Alan McDermott, the new studio lead and former audio director at Evolution; Nigel Kershaw, Wushu's Design Director who worked as Game Director on Motorstorm: Pacific Rift; and Stuart Trevor, the Art Director who also contributed with his artwork to popular IPs such as Dark Souls and Saints Row.
Headquartered in Liverpool's Baltic Triangle, Wushu Studios currently consists of 11 developers "and expanding". The press release notes the team's goal to try and move away from the "AAA grind" in an effort to create games based on interesting mechanics and capable of delivering refreshing experiences to gamers. They're now working on a brand new IP which will be an "unexpected take" on the Sci-Fi genre; prototyping began last September with the Unreal Engine 4.
Studio lead Alan McDermott said:
Our core team at Wushu have worked together closely on numerous projects over the years so there was no downtime in figuring out how to work together, we just fell straight into a groove kicking around game ideas that appealed to us as players and developers. We firmly believed in the idea that our initial concepts needed to be gamepad experiences as quickly as possible, so we turned to Unreal Engine for its amazing rapid prototyping capabilities. This approach has helped us figure out which of our concepts would allow us to flex our creative muscle most. It’s definitely not what people will be expecting to see from us; it’s absolutely not a racing game!
More information is expected to be released in the coming weeks and months, though experience tells us that it may be a long while before we hear anything about a release date as development only began a few months ago.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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