Mythic's Mark Jacobs leaves EA

by Lesley Smith on Jun 24th 2009 12:00PM

Fantasy, Events, real-world, MMO industry, Warhammer Online, News items

Mark Jacobs, the former General Manager of Mythic Entertainment and Lead Designer of Warhammer Online, has left EA on 23rd June, the company announced today. This comes as part of restructuring plans within EA which includes both Mythic and BioWare and have culminated in the formation of a new, as-yet-unnamed, studio which will focus on RPGs and MMOs.

The new studio will be led by BioWare co-founder and General Manager Ray Muzyka, who will become Group General Manager. BioWare's other co-founder Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer while Rob Denton will succeed Jacobs as General Manager.

You can certainly expect more from us as this story develops.

[Via The Examiner]

Source

Tags: bioware, bioware-mmo, breaking, breaking-news, breakingnews, electronic-arts, greg-zeschuk, mark-jacobs, mergers, mythic-entertainment, ray-muzyka, rob-denton

Reader Comments (82)

Man...part of me feels like he got what he deserved, if EA really did "ask him to resign." One of the cockiest and narcissistic game developers I've ever seen. But on the other hand, I hope that Mythic's games don't suffer because of the regime change. I'm really hoping that we'll finally see a positive change with Warhammer Online, and that maybe they'll throw a bunch of money at marketing to try and win back old subscribers.

I guess we'll see.

So does this mean BioWare's future MMOs are going to suck now? ;)

The game is designed without safeguards against population imbalance. WAR lost a lot of subs just over the fact that people felt overwhelmed on the outnumbered side, or bored on the overpopulated side. As you might expect this has a see-saw effect where a lot of one side quits, then a lot of the other side quits, until you are left with about 5 med pop servers.

The developers insistence on pushing out new content and classes instead of fixing, balancing, or bugfixing old content and classes. Cranking out 4 new classes while ignoring balance and bug issues with the launch classes, and cranking out new zones while ignoring the fundamentally badly designed T4 RvE game simply amounts to a bread and circus trying to lure back customers into mistakenly giving up another $15.

The PvE in this game is completely awful. Most 6 man instances are incredibly boring, buggy, and brain numbing. It can't hold a candle to better PvE MMOs (WoW, LOTRO, DDO) and frankly it shouldn't have even tried.

RvE is still a huge problem. The endgame consists of PvE encounters. LOTD is the complete opposite of RvR - one side goes into the instance and PvEs, while the other side grinds PQs outside.

The combat system is too simplified and rewards zerging.

Itemization remains a mess and PvE is still required to get the best gear, not to mention being faster to obtain than PvPing.

Anyway.. they blew it and their game sunk.

Previous 20 Comments