BioWAAAGH!
A lot of people have noticed the announcement we made earlier today regarding Mark leaving Mythic and EA creating a new MMO/RPG division that’s made up of Mythic an BioWare. Regarding the former, the official statement is pretty straightforward. I encourage anyone who hasn’t read it to do so, as it offers some useful details related to what’s ahead.As for Mythic itself, I’ll just clarify a few points that have been repeatedly tweeted, IMed, emailed, called in to me over the past few hours (sorry for not responding, we were watching “Transformers 2″):
1) No one else is leaving the studio. Apparently, someone was spreading nonsense rumors earlier about Paul or Adam or Carrie or myself being sent to Austin. Lies, lies and damn lies. I haven’t been able to find any such rumors myself, so who the hell knows - maybe the rumor ABOUT the rumor was a lie. Always remember - there are a limitless number of people online with comparably limitless free time and a weird love of just making things up.
2) We’re all really excited about working alongside BioWare as part of the MMO/RPG division. While we’ve got a lot of experience ourselves and have learned a lot of lessons (some harder than others), it’s exciting to know we’ll have the folks at BioWare right there with us as we move forward as a company. I’ve been lucky enough to meet Ray and Greg a few times in the past and they are clearly passionate about MMOs and games in general. Their affection for us was very clear today and I think they really made the team feel comfortable and supported. And, for the record, that attitude is nothing new. When we launched, BioWare was the only other studio that sent us something as personal and cool as this.
3) While we are working alongside BioWare and with Ray as our group GM, we are still Mythic. Our core operational leadership remains the same, our production and development staff remains the same. Our plans for WAR remain the same (and you’ll hear more about them shortly). Speaking of which…
4) Regarding the future of WAR, Jeff’s next Executive Producer’s letter will come out tomorrow and has a lot of new details explaining what we’re doing to tackle the “Top 5″ list he mentioned previously.
So that’s that for the moment. I know there’s a lot of “Chicken Little” silliness afoot at the moment, but take all of that with a grain of salt (and then throw away the salt). Mythic is fine. WAR is fine (as are UO and DAoC) . We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us and we look forward to tackling it as part of the new RPG/MMO wing of EA.