SCEI Reels In SOE; Can I Get A Champions 3?

By Paul Munn | March 17, 2008

Last week we found out that Sony Computer Entertainment International has decided to reel in Sony Online Entertainment and bring it in-house. Kaz Hirai will add it to his already considerable stable of responsibilities, what with Phil Harrison having left just the other day and left the head of SCE Worldwide Studios in his lap. So what should SOE do first now that it’s part of Sony proper?

It should undo the crime against all gaming that is not having bought Snowblind after not one but two very successful Champions of Norrath hack-and-slash RPGs. At the very least SCE needs to reach out and find the remnants of Snowblind and hire them to make a third Champions game, this one for the PS3 with a big helping of current-generation features. Having the hard drive and the Blu-ray drive means not having to worry about textures being too big for a DVD disc the way Champions: Return To Arms necessitated a dual layer disc. Having much better networking should make bringing back online voice chat even easier. Imagine launching it from Home, or even an online lobby with voice chat and fully configurable game settings to let us pick and choose our characters, level them up, and get that one last bit of tasty loot.

In short I really miss a great hack-n-slash game like Champions and the Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance games before it. The PS3 desparately needs one. The Dark Kingdom game that appeared at launch was just a poor imitation of these older PS2 games.

P.S.: Bring back USB keyboard support too. Few things were as funny as being able to type in color commentary while we quietly watched the often cheesy in-game cut scenes.

Source: Joystiq.