Departures - Four ArenaNet team members joining Undead Labs

Four ArenaNet team members joining Undead Labs

From wiki.guildwars.com:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Feedb...ke_O'Brien

Hi all,

Today I’d like to take a moment to say goodbye to James Phinney and some other friends who are leaving ArenaNet this week.

I’ve known James since 1995, and have enjoyed working with him over the years. He was a long-time key contributor at ArenaNet, and was the first lead designer on the Guild Wars 2 project starting in 2007.

In July 2009 we asked James to take on a more studio-wide role, while Eric Flannum took over as lead designer of Guild Wars 2. After that, James wasn’t directly involved in the day-to-day development of Guild Wars 2, and Eric made the game his own. I’m sure you’re all familiar with Eric’s vision and passion through all the interviews he’s done over the past year.

James Phinney is a great designer and deserves a game to call his own again, so I wasn’t surprised when he told me he’d be joining Jeff Strain’s new company to lead the design effort there.

Joining him there will be Richard Foge, another friend and designer who worked with James while heading up the design of a prototyping effort here, and Scott Albaugh and Doug Williams, two of the artists on that effort.

Of course we’re disappointed to see them go, but I also know these guys are each individually huge zombie fans and are going to work on a zombie game, so I’m excited for their opportunity and wish them all the best.
--Mike O'Brien 20:22, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Doug Williams
http://dougblot.blogspot.com/

This Friday will be my last day at Arena Net. After seven years of Charr, Icons, Poobags, Dragons, delivered lunches, Battlefield Desert Combat grudge matches, 4 shipped games and Kekai's sweet smile, I'll be moving on.

My new gig is going to be at Undead Labs as the art director. Given the fact that I love the zombie genre (and have since 1988, when Curtis Pitt rented Dawn of the Dead for his slumber party) and pitched my first zombie game in 1997, with a slew of other pitches over several years (Three alone at Arena), you'd think this would have been an easy decision. It wasn't.

I went back and forth for a long time. It's selfish, but I wish Arena had fallen apart. I wish the projects became shitty and the people soulless shells that just punched buttons on their keyboards. That way I could walk away from this place with a '**** you' and not look back. It didn't. Instead it stayed amazing, and even more wonderful people joined. So now leaving is hard, and it'll takes a few weeks at the new job to fully accept my own decision.

The people here are tremendous, and their talent is unmatched in the MMO world. Having played Guild Wars 2 I can honestly say that the whole fantasy MMO genre is about to have it's teeth knocked out. The only teeth that will be left are the ones that it'll be choking on. Then it will die, and all that will be left is GW2. It's epic. As epic as Greg's overpriced French Dipped sandwiches.

So that's that, it's been a helluva ride.

Doug

James Phinney
Joy, Drama, Humor, Horror, Blood, Guts and Gunfire
For seven years, I headed up game design at ArenaNet, working with a family of friends to create the Guild Wars games. I am tremendously proud of the work we did together and of the world that millions of players have lived in and enjoyed.

Still, when the opportunity came to join Jeff at Undead Labs, I didn’t hesitate. I knew I could do so safely. Guild Wars 2 is well in hand. Eric Flannum has been at the helm as lead designer for more than a year now, taking the concepts we developed at the start of the project and bringing them to life. He and I are long-time friends and partners-in-crime, working together on Warcraft II, Diablo, Starcraft, Sacrifice, and every Guild Wars release to date. I have complete confidence in the game that he and the team will make.

I am ready for a new challenge, and this is the perfect opportunity to do something groundbreaking and amazing. Console zombie-survival MMO. If your heart doesn’t race a little at the possibilities, check to make sure you’ve got a pulse at all.

Let’s start with a game that has the kind of shotgun-blast, chainsaw-to-the-head, makeshift-flamethrower, plow-through-twenty-zombies-with-a-pickup-truck gameplay that a zombie game deserves. And let’s elevate it to something more. This isn’t the story of surviving for half an hour. It isn’t about making it from one end of a map to the other. It’s about players coming together as a community and rebuilding civilization after total societal collapse.

Where will you establish your home? How many people can you rescue? Can you find sources of food and water and ammo? Most of all, how will you hold off the zombie hordes? When you’re wading in and hacking up zombies, when you’re luring a zombie horde to a booby-trapped gas station, when you’re raiding a sporting goods store for more bullets, it’s for a reason. This isn’t a canned, theme-park MMO. It’s a world to be reconquered and rebuilt. A world that actually evolves based on player actions. A world where you care about everything that’s happening because it actually matters. A world full of zombies and those who stand against them.

We’re just getting started here at Undead Labs. We still have a long way to go to deliver on our goals, but already a vision is crystallizing for a game not bound by out-dated, boilerplate MMO conventions and instead focused on all the joy, drama, humor, horror, blood, guts and gunfire that make you love zombies.

Phinney

Big loss to the development/continued success of gw 1/2 imo

It is a loss but I can only hope this will make Undead Labs first game to be stellar. I know I am excited to see the work from the upcoming studio.

Considering that Undead now has a decent amount of Anet talent, I'm starting to look forward to what they produce.

Aren't they planning on making a zombie FPS MMO for a console though? I love the zombie genre, personally (I own about 20 zombie movies and just about every zombie game in the world), but that could be really good or really bad.


Either way, it's a bit disconcerting to see a major lead developer for GW2 not see the project through to the end, even if he hasn't been day-to-day for a year. Seems to signal that he's not on-board for the future of Guild Wars, and that worries me a bit.

All the luck to them, though. I'm really interested in Undead's future.

hope they have fun @ undead labs . Well hope they make a good game. if its given good ratings ill probably buy it b/c ill know that some of the people from anet worked on it . well gl to the, too bad they cbf to finish GW2 but w/e(i doubt im even going to buy Gw2 lol)

You know what? That is exactly what came to my mind. Honestly, that really does worry me that a lead designer would up and go like that.



Hmm....

You and I have been hiveminding a lot lately. That's a bit troubling.

This is very worrisome indeed.

James will be missed, since he has been helping Robert with the Test Krewe and assisting Robert with Guild Wars skill balances, but the Live Team will work to ensure that his departure has minimal impact on anything James had been previously lending a hand on. Keep in mind that James has not been Lead Designer of Guild Wars or Guild Wars 2 for quite some time. Let's not turn this into conspiracy theory crafting or doom mongering. Eric Flannum has been leading the Guild Wars 2 team for a while now, and James's departure won't impact on the project. Each individual has professional and personal reasons for joining Undead Labs--like being incredibly massive zombie fans (I mean, who doesn't love zombies, right? ). Like Mike O'Brien said, we wish them all the best, and can't wait to see what Undead Labs has in store.

I was worried when Jeff Strain left, and now this... positively dire.

It seems being promoted upstairs away from the actual game development leads to job dissatisfaction.

Maybe the people who don't actually work on the game have to do something?

On a side note:
Does this mean there is a position open, and where can I send my resume

Oh, sweet Moses! Now I'm worried about GW1 and 2! Seriously? Less help with skill balances? My expectations for skill balance releases just got pushed back a month

Is a year really "quite some time" for game development? I guess it is...

And I don't think anyone is conspiracy theorying about the final product. I'm sure it'll be fine. It just sends poor signals out there when a guy who's been with a game since the beginning leaves before the second version is released.

It almost seems to telegraph, "I am not willing to put my name on this."

I am sad to see them go....I have no idea what the future will hold so I will not start on the theories already mentioned.
time will tell.

Odd that he got a promotion and then decided to go back to being a lead designer. But you know what, it isn't that odd. He wanted to do what he loved and that is obviously being a lead designer. He likes zombies and there was an opening and he jumped on it. Let's put a moratorium on all of the conspiracy theories and if you are really that concerned wit GW2 not being that good, at least stop wasting our time with your mad ramblings. That, or don't buy GW2.

Linsey recently left the team and was replaced by John Stumme. Can we expect someone else to be coming to the team to counterbalance James' departure?

[conspiracytheory] Pure speculation here: Why do I get a tingling sensation that all the "shifting around of team members" might be in light of this surfacing drama unfolding within NCSoft? I even suspect that there might be alot more going on behind the scenes that we'll obviously never hear about unless there's a leak onto a website somewhere on the internet. Hmmm.... [\conspiracytheory]

Maybe Linsey is replacing James? Or was she going to do something completely different.

Amen. As a (non-game) developer myself, more than once I've threatened to resign rather than be "promoted" to ...*shudder*... management

This combined with whatever they may have been doing to the GW servers sounds to me like the end of days. Who knows though? Coincidences do happen.

Exactly what I was thinking. Now there are some vacant jobs and someone new will be hired, right?
I'm happy for them as they're going to do what they like most, but still the sensation is we're starting to be abandoned puppies (just a sensation, not a consirancy theory ).

So I hear staying on topic is pretty cool.

Good luck to your future undertakings, may it be a fruitful and rewarding ones And thank you all for making guild wars1&2 so much fun!!!!!!!

hope you put as much into the zombie game I will be looking out for it.

Starting to feel a bit like a sinking ship. Into the life rafts.

Seems like major cutbacks.

Closing servers, slashing the payroll, end of Guildwars is nigh.

These guys bounce around all the time. How many people left Blizzard to move on to different things? Blizzard is still here, do not see ANET being any different.

Usually they only fail when the game they left to make sucks. Hellgate comes to mind. ANET seems to be doing better than most MMO's.

Steve Jobbs was even kicked and returned. I am not concerned.

Sad too see him go also but i guess they wanna do something fresh and new.

But i doubt Anet wont go under because some people leaves. I think they still have done an awesome job on GW2 and I hope it will continue in that direction.

But i hope they find a new assets to the company who can work and make a nice effort into the new game or helping out The Live Team.

and gw hasn't received a good update for quite some time. coincidence?

and now doug is leaving to go too o.0. Now i think we know why we got new admins.. amybe.. yes? haha. just a guess tho

I wish all good luck in their new endeavor. It is not surprising to see some of the old team move on with their former employers, it happens in business all the time.

War in Kryta says hi.

He may have been referring to pvp, in which case QFT.
If not, WiK wasn't bad, but it wasn't spectacular. It was basically a grind, but it was relatively acceptable because it was a short grind.

He said a GOOD update. Still yet to get one of those.

^ this. Today's update is a perfect example.

What about the fact that gw2 is near? so he can move on to new things? gw2 demo is supposed to be playable public at gamescon 18-22 of August....

I know it's too soon to judge GW2, but I think I'd rather stick with GW. Besides that, GW still does/will need support.

there will always be people playing gw1, but eventually most will move to gw2. Gw2 is the future, gw1 has been... =)

Like I said, it's too soon to judge, especially with limited information. That being said, what I've seen looks too WoWy for my taste. From the limited descriptions of the pvp, which is the only thing I'm going to spend money on a new game for, it does not look appealing. My biggest hope is that when GW2 opens, they put pvp'ers in charge of GW balances and give us a haven where we can drive the format to where it should have been and give them a model from which to create uber-PVP in GW3. Pipe dreams, I know, but it's good to dream.