Didn't like most of the team move to Codemasters after Driveclub?
Well, to be fair, there wasn't much of a team left by the time Sony ultimately pulled the plug on Evolution in March of 2016. Over the course of the past two years – in the months of March of 2014 and 2015, respectively – the studio suffered two major staff reductions, the latter of which impacted the jobs of 55 developers. So when Evolution was shut down, Codemasters only got to absorb the remainings of the skeleton crew tasked with maintaining
DriveClub's live-service support, rather than the core team responsible for the main game or the
MotorStorm series before it.
That said, one of the devs who moved into Codemasters' newly-established Cheshire location was Paul Rustchynsky. He became
DriveClub's game director during its last six months of production – as Col Rodgers, the project's initial game director, had to quit Evo in February of 2014 due to his son facing a life-threatening medical condition – and then throughout the entirety of its live-service support. The popularity he gained by pretty much being the face behind
DriveClub's redemption arc was likely one of the main reasons this narrative of "Codemasters taking over Evolution's talent" was first manufactured to begin with, but that statement couldn't be farther away from the truth – especially given how Rushy's following works had failed to lived up to his Evo reputation.
DriveClub's actual creator and the man responsible for the title's grand and, still to this day, unique vision was no other than long-time Evolution Studios producer and director Matt Southern, who left shortly before the game's release as part of Evolution's first round of layoffs in March of 2014, during a much greater restructuring of pretty much Sony's entire first-party studios organization – one that saw the cancellation of a new IP from Santa Monica Studio after four years in the making; the reboot of
Uncharted 4 and the subsequent departure of Amy Hennig, among other Naughty Dog leads; as well as mass reductions in the workforce at nearly all UK-based Sony development studios.
And it is Southern who's currently sitting at the director's chair on the
Twisted Metal revival. Per his LinkedIn profile, it is safe to assume that when he began work on the
Twisted Metal project right away back when he joined Liverpool-based developer Lucid Games in August of 2019, as PlayStation Productions had already begun to develop
Twisted Metal's TV adaptation earlier in 2019. The project also was (and likely still is) being co-developed by Wushu Studios, another Liverpool studio founded by former prime-day Evolution leads –
Pacific Rift game director Nigel Kershaw,
Pacific Rift creative lead Stuart Trevor, and
MotorStorm series/
DriveClub audio director and VR enthusiast Alan McDermott.
The project was eventually transferred in January of 2022 from Lucid to Sony-owned Firesprite, also based in Liverpool. The fact that Firesprite poached a lot of the Lucid talent involved with the
Twisted Metal project – including Matt Southern, who retained his directorial position – tells me that the change of developers likely wasn't due to quality or direction concerns, but rather that, this being one of Sony's flagship titles in their venture into live-service territory, they didn't want Lucid's botched launch of
Destruction AllStars to taint the enthusiasm and discourse around the return of
Twisted Metal. Firesprite had also ceased development on one of its internal projects, an online shooter of sorts, so bringing
Twisted Metal in-house perhaps was also a way to give a project to all those people at the studio who suddenly found themselves with little else to do –
Horizon: Call of the Mountain development was already in full swing and heading towards its conclusion, while Firesprite's other project, an
Until Dawn-style narrative adventure, was still very premature and not quite ready to receive dozens of people that early on.
In hindsight, it was a smart move to handle the project internally, as it looks to be Firesprite's most ambitious title currently in production and, if successful, it would help cement the studio as a powerhouse of Western racing game development among Sony's family of studios, opening the door for the return of beloved PlayStation racers such as
MotorStorm,
Wipeout or, hell, even
DriveClub, without mentioning an open-world
Forza: Horizon-competitor new IP.