Just before the release of Dragon’s Dogma 2 in March, franchise creator Hideaki Itsuno expressed his desire to make something wholly new and original for his next project. Fans certainly thought he meant at CAPCOM, but the veteran game director surprisingly left the Japanese company at the end of August after a career of thirty years. His credits at CAPCOM also include Power Stone, Auto Modellista, and multiple Devil May Cry games, including the critically acclaimed latest entry.
Today, we finally learned what’s next for the maker of Dragon’s Dogma 2. Tencent’s LightSpeed Studios announced that Itsuno is the new Head of their Japan Studio. He’ll work on triple-A action games. The latter is no surprise, as that’s what Itsuno has done for most of his career, though the same can’t be said for choosing LightSpeed, which is not a household name in the industry yet.
On the other hand, LightSpeed is gathering momentum to achieve great things. Two and a half years ago, they showed off Code: To Jin Yong, an impressive-looking open world roleplaying game made with Unreal Engine 5 and set in a Wuxia-inspired world. While we haven’t heard more info on this game since that reveal, another LightSpeed team based in Los Angeles demonstrated an equally gorgeous open world game called Last Sentinel during last year’s The Game Awards. This one will be set in a dystopian sci-fi version of Tokyo. A few months ago, LightSpeed LA also announced a new state-of-the-art performance capture facility, showing that budget isn’t too much of an issue at this stage.
Based on the news announcement, it sounds like Itsuno will be coordinating the efforts of the global teams, but that doesn’t mean he won’t eventually create a new project of his own. Personally, I’d love it if he would gather feedback about Dragon’s Dogma 2’s shortcomings and try to improve upon the formula, which had definitely stagnated quite a bit in the sequel, in a spiritual successor.
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