Just a few weeks ago, new job listings at Warner Bros. stated the company was focusing on live service titles. Now we’ve got more of an idea of what that will mean. As spotted by Twitter user @MauroNL3, more job listings have described how Warner Bros. Games San Diego will be working on a “new AAA, free-to-play, cross-platform game” that will be released on “multiple platforms including the new Gen-9 Consoles”.
Little about the game itself is known, although it will be a AAA action game with multiplayer levels that are intended to be “fun the first and five thousandth time” because of their replayable moments. The Senior Level Designer post also states the map will be “mostly static” and they’re wanting to “integrate aspects of iconic locations into gameplay set pieces”. The Senior Combat Designer is tasked with creating abilities and combat systems across multiple characters, each of which will have “varied, unique, and balanced abilities and move sets”. The game will also be a live title with some form of economy system according to the listings for Product Manager and Game Systems Designer.
The Gen-9 consoles are the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The Senior Platform Engineer vacancy also asks for expertise on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or Nintendo Switch; knowledge of PC development practices; and would ideally be knowledgeable of iOS & Android SDKs too. The game engine that will be used to accommodate all of these platforms is Unreal Engine 4. The plan is to also use Amazon’s web services and their server hosting service GameLift according to the Server Engineer vacancy. Amazon GameLift is a service that provides servers for “session-based multiplayer games”.
The title is in the very early stages of development, with the new Producer required to take the game from “pre-production through to release and into live operations”, so we’re not likely to hear much about it for a while yet. San Diego is a relatively new studio itself, founded in August 2019 to primarily focus on free-to-play mobile games; that focus now seems to have shifted. This may have something to do with a leadership shuffle at parent company AT&T. After putting Warner Bros. up for sale, AT&T then decided the gaming company had plenty of growth potential that made it quite a valuable asset and decided to keep it instead.
[Source: WBGames Careers via Twitter]
