Blizzard confirms third dev team; Working on a new game

E3 2007 coverage over at Gamespot and IGN has been handled really well this year. Thanks to E3's new (and underwhelming) format, the number of sneak-peeks and hands-on previews at Gamespot alone were enough to satisfy my cravings for the rest of the month. However, it seems that, while both Gamespot and IGN might have had the best hands-on experiences this year, neither really managed to get their hands on any extraordinary news ... something the smaller sites have managed to do.

Case in point: The Carmack story over at Gamepro, and now this story over at Gamasutra:

Talking to Gamasutra, Frank Pearce, founding member and senior vice president of product development for Blizzard revealed that the company has a third team hard at work on a new title, separate from World of Warcraft and StarCraft II.

According to Pearce, the company's current employee headcount worldwide is 2,700. Not surprisingly, the majority of those workers are part of World of WarCraft customer service. Dividing up the rest among development teams for WoW and StarCraft II, Blizz has 135 people on the WoW team, 40 on the SC II team and 85 people on the cinematics team. (Not surprising)

However, there is a third game development team which currently consists of 40 people, and although Blizzard wouldn't say what exactly it is they are working on, they did say it was "totally awesome".

Much to their credit, Gamasutra did manage to confirm this new game wasn't StarCraft Ghost. Is it Diablo III? Probably. Will we find out at BlizzCon? Almost definitely.