Get A Job: EverQuest

I had a longish trip to make this morning. It took me out of the house for most of the day. Before I set out, I still managed to make time  to log in to EverQuest and set my Overseer dailies. I'm that keen.

Just as I was about to hit "Play" I noticed a new item in Latest News. It was short and strange: "The Nameless are searching for new blood" is all it said.

An event of some kind, perhaps? Possibly some kind of invasion? I hoped so. I like those. And I knew who The Nameless was. Or I thought I did., although the plural verb threw me a bit.

As well as being the name of a server, "The Nameless" is the name of an elder god in the Norrathian pantheon. Kind of. I think. Actually, I've never quite known exactly what The Nameless is. Allakhazam's entry doesn't exactly make it any clearer, either:

Even though I was in a bit of a rush I clicked through to see what it was all about. And it turned out to be... a job. Three jobs, to be precise. I definitely wasn't expecting that.

At first I thought the whole "Nameless" gag was just Dreamweaver being cute. Judging by the way he can't stop giggling when he hosts the Kander's Candor podcasts I would guess he's quite prone to fits of cuteness.

After I thought about it for a moment, though, it occured to me that perhaps what he was doing was obliquely explaining the underlying mystery of The Nameless as may always been understood within the company itself.

It seems no-one at Verant (or SISA or 989 Studios or SoE or whatever the hell they were calling themselves back then. You think Daybreak/Darkpaw is confusing? Nameless is clearly the last thing that company has ever been.) was expecting anyone to take the game they were making seriously. Half the Norrathian gods have anagrams for names that roughly describe their sphere of influence. Tunare/Nature, Ec'i/Ice and so on.

Even the less blatant - Solusek Ro, the sun god, for example - are punny. Sol Ro, as it's almost always shortened by players, concatenates the name of our own sun with that of the star around which Superman's home planet, Krypton, spins. Span. Is Krypton gone these days or back? I lose track...

The idea that the most mysterious and powerful of all the godlike beings, the one that "causes universes to exist" but "is unknown to most of Norrath" would be the developers behind the game fits very well with the general naming convention they appear to have been making up as they went along. If it isn't the explanation it should be.

I didn't have time to click through the hyperlinks to the job descriptions this morning but when I got back this evening and logged in to collect my Overseer xp, I popped onto the forums again to take another look. The links go to a page I really should remember to check more often: Careers at Daybreak.

If anyone's got a hankering to work there, now would seem to be a good time to apply. The three roles picked out in the forum post all involve working on EverQuest specifically but there are twenty-one jobs available in total. As I say, it's been a long time since I last looked so I don't know if that's typical or exceptional.

The thing I found most interesting were the nine openings for work on an "unnanounced project" at the Austin, Texas studios. I really can't keep track of this stuff (who can?) but I did remember that the DCUO team is based in Austin. I seemed to remember Jack Emmett saying something about it when DBG did the three-way shimmy earlier this year.

Not entirely sure what that means. (Particularly the bit about carving themselves out, which sounds unconfortable to say the least). Does Dimensional Ink "own" the whole Austin operation now, in which case the unnanounced project would presumably be theirs, too. Or are they sharing office space with some other, as yet unknown, Daybreak affiliate? Maybe, oh, I dunno, Nameless Games?

Whatever, it is a little bit intriguing, even if I don't think it's news, as such. I'm fairly sure we already heard about the unnamed project at some point. It's just that things that don't have names are easily forgotten. It's worth reminding ourselves now and again that something might be going on behind closed doors, just so we don't all hurt ourselves falling off our chairs in surprise when something playable finally appears.

As if that would ever happen.

DBG? No, DG, RPG, DIG?

Just going to put this up to mark the day everything changed and everything stayed the same. 
I'm sure everyone's already seen the announcement via whichever hyperactive MMO news site they use. Here's the straight, professional reportage minus the tedious snark. Oh, wait a moment... that was snark right there, wasn't it?

The gist is this: Daybreak Games is splitting into three new, quasi-independent Studios: Dimensional Ink Games, Darkpaw Games, and Rogue Planet Games. DCUO, which seems to have drawn the short straw where naming is concerned, goes to DIG; the fortuitously yet somehow wholly inappropriately acronymed RPG gets Planetside, while the innocuous DG becomes the new home for the EverQuest franchise.

Planetside is more than welcome to wander off and do its own thing as far as I'm concerned. I did try playing it once but I never really got on with it. I wish them well and wave them goodbye.

Jack Emmert, the erstwhile head of Daybreak (I think - it's so hard to keep track), takes control of the superhero success story. His team are also already working on a new "action MMO", title and subject unknown. I still play DCUO occasionally and would like to retain the option so I have a small dog in that fight.

My main interest lies inevitably with Darkpaw Games, headed up by the estimable Holly Longdale. Having lived through twenty years of highly variable management under numerous versions of Verant, Sony Online Entertainment and Daybreak, I can safely say the last few seasons under her stewardship have been some of the most stable and satisfying I've enjoyed to date. I'm very happy to see her and her team given autonomy to carry the existing games and the franchise forward.

There's a Darkpaw Producer's Letter up already. It doesn't give an awful lot away, unless you're gagging for an EQ T-shirt.  It does, however, say very much what I'd want to hear, as this paragraph suggests:

"Immediately, and in practical terms, our focus is on the fans and investing in our current games and the business of starting new ones. We’re already executing on the plans we had for 2020, like expansions and events for EQ and EQ2."

I read that both as a promise of Business as Usual and confirmation that we will get the usual annual expansions at the end of the year and maybe even a new EQ title someday. That's as much as I'd hope for and more than I would have expected a couple of years ago.

The letter also assures us that

"Currently, nothing will change for your accounts and membership."

Note the leading adverb. Given the supposed independent nature of the three new studios I wouldn't give too much for the continued existence of the All Access Membership. Time will tell.

Anyway, I have Overseer Missions to organize so I'm going to leave it at that for now. I think this looks a positive move, especially for the EverQuest games. Only time will tell if my optimism is well-founded, but things certainly look more promising than they did a while ago.