Gamasutra - Iron Lore Vets Form Crate Entertainment

Gamasutra is reporting that ex-Iron Lore vets (Titan Quest) Arthur Bruno and Eric Campanella have formed Crate Entertainment and bought back Black Legion, a console action/RPG that Iron Lore was trying to shop to various publishers:

Crate purchased the rights to two games that were under development at Iron Lore, including a project titled Black Legion. The title is an action RPG for the Xbox 360, and Crate is currently shopping a demo for it to game publishers.

"One of our real goals is to take the solid game play we established in Titan Quest and repackage it to make it sort of grittier and more appealing to the mainstream audience," says Bruno. "We’re trying to evolve the action to something that will bring the RPG to its next level."

More information.

Here's an idea - if you implement a DRM solution, make sure when it activates the user knows it and doesn't think it's just a bug!

And don't fix the long load times by writing code that causes rubber banding and makes it worse.

Still, in many ways what a great game that was. I suppose a Titan Quest II is out of the question—it probably belongs to THQ and will never see the light of day. I'll be happy to look at anything these guys do for PC, though.

Here's an idea: Develop for the XBOX 360, so you'll have more sales, built in copy protection, and an audience that doesn't have a huge sense of entitlement and 100 different explanations of how it's your own fault your game got pirated.

Originally Posted by Yeesh
Here's an idea: Develop for the XBOX 360, so you'll have more sales, built in copy protection, and an audience that doesn't have a huge sense of entitlement and 100 different explanations of how it's your own fault your game got pirated.

I certainly hope that wasn't directed at me as I neither pirate nor have a sense of entitlement. I just find it ironic that the very thing that was supposed to keep piracy at bay, was blamed by t he developers for loss of sales when it was reported in reviews as a bug rather than what it actually was since it was so poorly implemented. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.