Funcom is excited to announce that ‘Age of Conan’ and ‘The Secret World’ veteran designer Joel Bylos has stepped up to take the creative leadership of the company’s newly formed, centralized live team. The dedicated live team is made up by some of the most skilled and experienced developers working at Funcom and is entirely focused on expanding, enhancing and supporting company’s three live games, ‘The Secret World’, ‘Age of Conan’ and ‘Anarchy Online’.
The establishment of a joint, centralized live team comes as a result of the organizational restructuring process Funcom recently went through following the launch of ‘The Secret World’. It is the company’s ambition that each of the three live games will benefit greatly from a shared pool of the incredible skill, competence and creativity that makes up this highly experienced group of developers. The centralized live team is situated in Funcom’s North Carolina studio, which gives the developers the advantage of working closely with the company’s quality assurance, community, customer service and billing teams which are located at the same studio.
Joel Bylos is an accomplished developer at Funcom, having been an instrumental part of creating the company’s two biggest online games ‘Age of Conan’ and ‘The Secret World’. After serving as Lead Designer on the very successful ‘Age of Conan’ expansion ‘Rise of the Godslayer’, Bylos went on to become Lead Content Designer on ‘The Secret World’ where he is responsible for creating some of the game’s most critically acclaimed features such as the investigation gameplay and the unique missions. Last year he took on the role of Game Director for ‘The Secret World’ and led the work of bringing it over to a buy-to-play business model which proved very successful with hordes of new players joining in.
"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," says Creative Director Joel Bylos. "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!"