Following our takeover from Futurlab, we welcomed Bethany Aston from Team 17 to the Plusnet Twitter feed to field questions from the gamers in our community. Bethany is the Senior PR Executive for the company who brought us the now famous Worms series amongst many other games. Starting her gaming career on the Amiga with titles like Zool, Lemmings, and Titus the Fox, Bethany was introduced to RPGs with Final Fantasy VII on the PS1, leading onto titles like Star Ocean: The Second Story, Grandia, and numerous other games from the Final Fantasy series. She’s currently hooked on Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS - a varied and respectable selection of titles! Highlights of her time at Team 17 so far include taking the giant worm costume down to the Eurogamer Expo – unsurprisingly the gigantic worm suit always gets a good reaction (it was even mentioned in the Q&A!). Following the first tweet in the session, which came from within Plusnet, the floor was opened to fans: @MRFITFCTiger asked: How difficult has it been to retain interest in the Worms Franchise all these years?
The team works really hard to keep Worms fresh but the classic formula intact. I think we've got a great balance of that here and we're really lucky to be making Worms still, we all love playing it here so we're making games for us as much as the fans!
@JJ_Perl asked: Any chance of an iPad version of Project X?
No plans at the moment but never say never. We've been looking at our back catalogue (Alien Breed, Superfrog HD remakes)
@hardistymark asked: could you bring the Eurogamer worm to Sheffield next year for @gamesbritannia Live?
You can contact us about Boggy B at pr@team17.com (For those of you who don’t know, Boggy B is a 6 foot worm.)
@chrisleeis asked: my friend is convinced Worms is out to get him. Can you please confirm no team is biased in the initial worm placement? =P
Everything's random. Your friend could always turn off teleport in and decide his own placement
@nelsonjd76 said: just want to say thank you to Team 17 for making Alien Breed. I absolutely loved that game, and asked: Any chance of it on Xbox One?
Thank you! We're glad to hear it. No plans at moment but never say never.
@nelsonjd76 asked: which of the next gen consoles are you more excited to create and develop for?
We're a founding member of the ID@Xbox program and on great terms with Sony too. We've got both PS4 and Xbox One kits and we're exciting to be developing for both.
@ orbrey asked: D'you think there's still a fair amount of mileage left in the Worms franchise?
We're really lucky to have such a great fanbase for Worms. We're all players of it here too! We've got lots of post release support planned eg for Worms Clan Wars on PC we added Speechbank Editor for Steam Workshop.
@Sarkies_Proxy asked: do you miss Spadge? Why do people say you're from Wakefield not Ossett? Any non-Worms games? SteamBox thoughts?
We still see Spadge. We were in Wakefield originally prior to Ossett, at the end of last year we moved our HQ over to Wakefield again. Non-Worms games, we've recently released HD versions of the 1991 classic Alien Breed and 1993 classic Superfrog. SteamBox looks exciting.
@chrispurvster asked: Any plans to release the original Worms on XBOX arcade?
We did 'Worms' on XBLA back in 2007. No plans to currently do the 1995 version though.
@leviaxxan asked: What do you think is going to be the next innovation in gaming?
There's loads of cool stuff happening right now. For us personally we've got PS4 and Xbox One kits which we're playing around with and finding out what feels right with that tech
And we're done! Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions Team 17. We hope that everything goes well in the future for Team 17 and look forward to the next releases in the Worms series!