A video teaser of BioWare’s next game and some interesting analysis of what it might be have floated to the surface of the internet.
You’ve probably heard that BioWare is hard at work on a new game that will be unveiled at the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, taking place on December 10. A single, not particularly informative screenshot was released with last week’s announcement of the forthcoming announcement, but now we have something a whole lot meatier: a gameplay video clip.
Oh, who am I kidding? It’s two seconds of gameplay buried inside a 24-second VGAs ad, hardly better than the image of some idiot sprinting down an invisible vertical wall. But here’s something that is: speculation posted on NeoGAF [via Superannuation] that the new project is actually what used to be Mercs Inc., a planned third title in the Mercenaries series.
Here’s the reasoning:
- Visceral Los Angeles is no more, apparently as evidenced by its absence from the list of studios on the Visceral careers page.
- Visceral Los Angeles was formed from the remains of Pandemic Studios, which at one point was part of BioWare.
- Visceral Los Angeles, and Pandemic before it, was working on Mercs Inc. before it became a Frostbite 2 game.
- “Conceptually,” Mercs Inc., as seen in this YouTube video, looked very similar to the brief flash of footage shown in this VGAs ad.
Will BioWare serve up some open-world military mayhem in its next game? This is the kind of speculation that I can really get behind: thoroughly researched by someone else. And although the video is admittedly a joke by any measure, at least this demonstrates that it’s not necessarily entirely useless – which is more than you can say about the VGAs.
