Welcome Joel Bylos: Creative Director Of Funcom

Written by: QuintLyn (Twitter @QuintLyn - Google+) | February 26, 2013 7:48 am

Welcome Joel Bylos: Creative Director Of Funcom

10 Comments

Joel Bylos, The Secret World‘s Game Director has taken on the roll of creative leadership of Funcom’s centralized live team.

Funcom has officially announced that Joel Bylos will be stepping up to to be the creative leader of the company’s newly formed live team. This new live team has developed as a result of Funcom’s recent restructuring and will be responsible for overseeing Funcom’s three MMO properties: Anarchy Online, Age of Conan and The Secret World.

The team will be working out of Funcom’s North Carolina studio which happens to also house the company’s QA, community, customer service and billing teams. From the perspective of a player, this will hopefully make communication between the developers and the other teams more efficient.

Who’s Joel Bylos?

For those unfamiliar with Bylos, he has been a developer with Funcom for some time now, working on both Age of Conan and The Secret World. During his tenure on Age of Conan he served as lead designer on the expansion Rise of the Godslayer. Not long after he became Lead Content Designer on The Secret World, creating many of the game’s popular investigation missions as well as other content.

After The Secret World’s Creative Director Ragnar Tornquist decided to move on and open his own studio in order to work on a sequel to the Dreamfall series, Joel took on the position of Game Director and headed up the process of bringing the game over to a buy-to-play model.

What’s in store?

Joel Bylos: Creative Director of Funcom, has released three letters — one for each of Funcom’s MMO communities. In the letters, he will addresses the change and what he feels it will bring to each game. The letters can be found on the sites for Age of Conan, The Secret World and Anarchy Online.

Bylos also had this to say about taking on the new position:

Having one centralized live team responsible for both the health and the future of each online game means there will always be fresh ideas, years of design know-how and invaluable skill with our tools flow freely between each project. I am very excited to have been given the opportunity to lead this team going forward and we have already started mapping out a very exciting future for Anarchy Online, The Secret World and Age of Conan. Stay tuned, great things are coming!

While it can be worrisome to see a company consolidate things like this, it may be just what Funcom needs to keep moving forward with not only these projects but future ones. As a TSW fan, I’ll be keeping a close eye on how things pan out.

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http://twitter.com/Deadalon Deadalon

Funcom has probably the worst rep of any MMO game design company to date. Two first MMOs were so bad – so broken -had so much PR – and so many lies and cheats to prevent buyers of their games to actually find out how broken the games were. It doesn’t matter how good or bad TSW is. The rep will always drag their titles down. And to be fair – thats how it should be considering the horrible product that players had to pay full price for.

Thats just not acceptable and I’ve always done my part to let everyone know how badly Funcom have treated their customers in the past. Cause many of these developers and PR ppl think players forget. But when it comes to such horror as we saw with AO and AOC – then its simply something I feel compelled to talk about. Thats how bad it was and thats how badly Funcom treated their players. Simply unforgivable.
- http://twitter.com/BreakingPT Joe D
  
  Wow dude. You REALLY don’t like Funcom. You post in every game article of every website, trashing this game. You either don’t have a life or you were fired by the company or something. Crazy…lol
http://twitter.com/Deadalon Deadalon

One team… 3 games… We all know what that means in terms of content. Sounds like pretty much maintenance mode for all of them.
- Joseph Legemah
  
  yep.
7BitBrian

All I know is TSW and AoC are both very good games. I heard AoC was not at launch but it has definitely improved into a game worth playing by now. I’ll be trying out AO soon just because. I like this guy, most everything he has posted about his visions and what he wants to do with the games I agree with, so I wish him all the luck and will be spending my cash to help support the decisions I support.

Here’s to hoping they can still get at least 2 major content updates out for each game each year. I think that’s fairly reasonable for one team, 6 content updates a year total, 2 for each 3 games.

Stay awesome Funcom, you get some hate for the way AoC was released, but you stepped up and fixed that, and TSW is awesome.
- http://twitter.com/Deadalon Deadalon
  
  How many months are there since Funcom talked about sending new content patch out in TSW every month ? They are still doing the same PR even tho they know they can not deliver. Thats something that players need to know. Nothing has changed – other than new face that tries to tell you the same thing the old ones were repeating.
  - http://twitter.com/BreakingPT Joe D
    
    Well that was before Funcom lost 70% of their workforce and closed two of the their three places of operation. I’m not making a judgment about their business strategy, but them not keeping to a monthly update I’m pretty sure had something to do with the above facts.
  - http://quintlyn.com/ QuintLyn Bowers
    
    Funcom announced a shift in that when they announced the B2P system. I reported on it at the time. The “every month” patches were dependent upon a subscription based game. The game no longer has subs, therefore they have changed the update frequency.
Joseph Legemah

so instead of being responsible for tsw only he is spread thin over all 3 games.
Depravity

Wait, takes helm?;)) From where I come from, this shit is profanity at it’s best. Don’t get me wrong, I concurr, they really did take some serious helm… on top of apparently giving it as well.