Is Phantasy Star Online 2 finally coming over?
Just under a year ago, Relic Entertainment was auctioned off as part of THQ’s bankruptcy filing. Sega snatched them up, a move that at the time made a lot of sense: Sega was pushing their way in to the PC market, something Relic were experts at, and Sega had just struck a deal with The Games Workshop, proprietors of the Warhammer franchise, something Relic also had quite a bit of experience with. But as this NeoGAF thread points out, Relic Entertainment might be trading hulking space marines and panzerfaust tanks for something a little different.
A job listing by Relic Entertainment has gone live on a site called “Jobvite“, but instead of staffing up to produce a new game, the job description clearly states that they are looking for a Server Engineer to help them work on a pre-existing Japanese MMO.
Server Engineer
Programming/Engineering | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada | 12/23/2013Relic Entertainment, a wholly owned studio of SEGA, is the award winning RTS developer of Homeworld, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, among other games. Relic was founded on the premise that it is entirely possible to ship first class, genre altering, AAA titles, and have a life. Relic is based out of beautiful Vancouver, Canada, a city that has breath-taking mountain and ocean views, along with snowboarding and skiing, golfing year-round and amazing hiking trails. If you love games, enjoy working collaboratively with smart, creative people, and have diverse personal interests outside of work – you’ll enjoy our culture.
What you will be doing
- Ramp up and perform due diligence on an existing live MMO project in development in Japan, embedded with the live team
- Gain full understanding of the game and code architecture, content authoring pipelines, build and deployment process, engineering process, and current code status
- Establish working relationships with key members of Japanese development team
- Participate in and contribute to minor/peripheral engineering tasks on the project, as well as in daily project planning, code reviews, release process, etc.
- Create/translate documentation of existing code modules, tools, processes and work flows
- Prepare regular status and activity reports to Producer
- Prepare a full written project evaluation
What you should have
- 5+ years’ engineering experience from PC client/server based MMO development
- Ability to spend extended (3+ months) periods of time on-site in Tokyo
- Ideally fluent in Japanese and English languages
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Though the job listing does not mention it by name, it is not hard to narrow the list of Japanese Sega MMOs down to Phantasy Star Online 2. Could this finally be the first inkling of them ramping up to that North American launch we were promised two years ago? Or are they merely assisting Sonic Team in Japan with development? Or could it be something else entirely? Keep those fingers crossed.
