Climax to finish the Art of Magic
Having absorbed most of the game's original development team
Back at the end of April the future of the promising but much-delayed role-playing strategy game Magic & Mayhem : The Art of Magic seemed to be in jeopardy, after the collapse of Nottingham based developer Charybdis. At the time Virgin assured us that they owned the rights to the game and would be passing the project on to another development team for completion, but since then things had been strangely quiet. Until today, as the official Magic & Mayhem website has just revealed that Climax's Nottingham studio will be finishing the game.
Which is a little ironic, as we first found out about the closure of Charybdis when Climax Nottingham issued a press release saying that they were hiring twenty of the company's former employees to work on their own Warhammer Online project. It looks like Virgin have decided that the best way to complete the Art of Magic is to let the original development team (most of whom are now at Climax) carry on where they left off several weeks ago, but under new management. According to an update to the developer's diary on the Magic & Mayhem website, the game is now essentially content complete and seven former Charybdis employees are heading up the effort to finish testing, localising and polishing everything ready for release.
Now that the Art of Magic is nearing completion we're hoping to get our hands on some new beta code soon, as we haven't seen the game in action since last November. In the meantime, word from the developers is that a public demo could be ready as soon as the end of this month, so either way we should know soon how the game has turned out after the last few traumatic months.