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 'fuck 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
