Hello All !! We’ve had lot’s of questions and interest from fans and communities on the future of the games under Daybreak after the EG7 acquisition. We’ll have a community focused update later in April. In this we will shed some light on our vision for the games going forward.
Enad Global 7 tweet, April 2, 2021
The rather jaded part of me that has followed SOE and Daybreak for years was eager to snark that EG7 was following along in the grand tradition of the past companies by delivering their promised update at the last minute on a Friday afternoon. Low expectations met.
Enad Global 7
And my initial skepticism was reinforced by the letter to the community from EG7 founder and CEO Robin Flodin, which was posted on the Daybreak site. It is short, upbeat, and empty of any but the most blandly vague statements about the company. It feels like boilerplate that could have been posted four months ago. I won’t bother reprinting it here as it was so nebulous I fear it might blow away in a stiff breeze, leaving an empty space in the middle of the post.
But there was also a 14 minute video linked in small print at the end of the statement that does have some more meat to it.
The video starts with some background about Robin Flodin and EG7, then actually gets into some meaty information about H1Z1.
The PC side of H1Z1 doesn’t have a team working on it, which explains much… like why, when Daybreak introduced their new studios, that title seemed left out in the cold. EG7 put together a team to examine and asses the game, which took them a while. I can attest that taking over somebody else’s code base is a sure fire way to get most devs to start talking about the whole thing being easier to re-make from scratch. They have builds of H1Z1 and Just Survive running, which is a not a trivial achievement. Devs start muttering about starting over for a reason. They are now evaluating where to take these titles.
While there was no news and no plan announced beyond that, Flodin did acknowledge that a lot of fans were asking for older mechanics and a return of Just Survive and they were assessing how to get there. He also noted that the game had been previously handed off to another team unsuccessfully, the whole NantWorks fiasco that ended with the PC version of the game being handed back to Daybreak.
For other titles in the Daybreak stable, including LOTRO and DDO, he said that, at the corporate level, they were looking for ways to help the various teams/studios work on long standing issues… the idea of Daybreak is starting to seem a bit superfluous as anything beyond a historical reference in a world where EG7 is working directly with the dev groups… but the teams themselves are handling the directions the games are headed. Hrmmm…
He did say that the HQ was listening to fan feedback, but I don think EG7 is going to save us from LOTRO legendary item grinds and other things the SSG dev team is completely invested in, but maybe they’ll push the team towards large screen support or UI scaling.
Overall the video was a solid performance. Flodin came off well and, even though he didn’t have many answers or specific plans to share, I came away with a positive impression. It laid some groundwork, gave us a few concrete details, but didn’t make any promises that we would later use against them. I’m still not betting completely against EG7 turning into Gamigo once they hit some critical mass of studios and games, but for the moment I am feeling okay. I mean, at least he didn’t go on about synergy.
Other Coverage:
The Ancient Gaming Noob 