BLAST FROM THE PAST

The trailer you see above is for the just announced Dawn of War III from Relic Entertainment. DoW III is a sequel to previous two games in the franchise and continues to be based on the Warhammer 40K universe.

You might recall I started working at Relic Entertainment in September of 2013. At the time I couldn’t say what I was working on but it was this game. When I arrived, the game did not have a title and they weren’t sure if this was going to be a true sequel to the previous game. Though the game was undoubtedly going to be set in the Warhammer 40K universe, there was some thought it was going to be different enough that it wouldn’t fit into the Dawn of War mold. With the announcement, it’s clear that they’ve decided it is a true sequel.

The timing of this announcement makes it the longest period I’ve had to wait for a game to be made publicly known by a wide margin. All the games I’ve worked on were announced no more than twelve to fourteen months after real production had started. This game needed two and a half years before they decided to reveal it to the public.

I was at Relic for barely five months and it was not a contract job. I left because I wanted to. You can probably infer how much I liked it there. As this is the Internet I will not go into any specific details about the job.

It was really interesting watching the trailer. First, it was just neat to see what they decided to name the game. Second, I’ve never felt so much detachment from a game I worked on. It was like watching a trailer for something I had nothing to do with. That makes a lot of sense because I’m guessing not a single line of code I wrote in those five months made it into the current iteration of the game. Again, I can’t go into many details but after I left, there were some significant changes made to the code base and a lot of work went out the window.

Since none of my code is in the game and I was there for such a short period of time, I don’t expect my name to be in the credits. I certainly won’t be invited to the wrap party. I’m ok with that though. I hope the game is a success.

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