As MotorStorm director joins team.
Following reports earlier this week that Lucid Games, the UK developer behind Destruction All-Stars, was no longer working on a new Twisted Metal game for Sony as previously claimed, a new report has suggested it’s now being handled by first-party PlayStation studio Firesprite Games, which only recently saw the director of MotorStorm join its ranks.
Word of a new entry in the Twisted Metal series first emerged last September, when GamesBeat journalist Jeff Grubb claimed the project was in early development. Shortly after, reports suggested Destruction All-Stars developer Lucid Games had landed the gig and that this latest instalment would be turning the car combat series into a free-to-play game.
Earlier this week, however, VGC reported a major shakeup for the project, with Sony said to have ditched Lucid Games as the developer in favour of a then-unnamed first-party Sony studio. The publication has now expanded further on its initial report, claiming the Liverpool-based Firesprite Games – the studio behind horror shooter The Persistence, PlayStation’s PlayRoom games, and PSVR2’s upcoming Horizon Call of the Mountain – is now handling the project.
Twisted Metal, 2012 Launch Trailer.
It’s unclear at present why Sony may have made the decision to switch development from one Liverpool-based studio to another, but VGC notes Matt Southern, who was previously employed as a game director as Lucid, has now joined Firesprite in the same role. Whether he was previously leading the Twisted Metal project at Lucid, or if he’ll be working as director on the title at Firesprite, is currently unknown.
While Sony hasn’t yet officially announced a new Twisted Metal game, previous reports have suggested the company is aiming to launch the title alongside its currently in-the-works Twisted Metal TV adaptation – said to be an action-comedy releasing in 2023 – as part of a new initiative to more closely align its game releases with its movie and television projects.
The Twisted Metal TV series will reportedly star Anthony Mackie, perhaps best known as The Falcon in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, as a motor-mouthed outsider who’s offered a chance at a better life, as long as he can deliver a mysterious package across a post-apocalyptic wasteland dominated by savage marauders driving vehicles of destruction.
