Amazon Making "Melee-Oriented" PC Game, Hires Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer

Amazon Game Studios may have lost some of its top talent recently, but the company continues to move forward on its new PC game. Now, we've learned that the Seattle-based company has hired ArenaNet veteran Eric Flannum, who is working at the company as creative director for the project, labeled a third-person "competitive, melee-oriented" title that aims to use Twitch to "radically evolve" gameplay.

Flannum confirmed his exit from ArenaNet on Linkedin, while the description of the PC game comes by way of this recruitment post written by Flannum. We already knew that Amazon was working on its own PC game, described in June 2015 as "ambitious," but today is the first time we're hearing more about it.

"We're currently building awesome teams with the aim of radically evolving gameplay using Twitch, the Amazon Web Services cloud, and technical innovation," Flannum wrote. "We believe games can be a driving force in uniting people and driving technical and artistic innovation."

Amazon's new PC game aims to explore the third-person, competitive, melee-oriented genre "in an entirely new light." No further details about the project are available. Amazon is currently looking to fill more than 10 positions for this new project across the engineering, art, and design disciplines.

Flannum worked at ArenaNet for more than 10 years, most recently serving as lead designer on PC MMO Guild Wars 2, the base game for which recently became free. He joined Amazon in September this year.

Last month, key Amazon Game Studios developers Clint Hocking, Erik Nylund, and Jonathan Hamel all left the company. Just two weeks ago, Amazon announced a new, gaming-focused Fire TV set-top box, which sports 75 percent more processing power and 2X the performance of the existing unit.

In August 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch in a $1 billion deal.

Via: Gamasutra