Not too long ago, we reported that an English version of Phantasy Star Online 2 would be headed to Southeast Asia in 2014. It was a little disheartening to hear, and it got many devoted Phantasy Star Online fans contemplating how/when to import. While you’re all racking your brains about the Philippines and similar circles that SEGA’s reaching out to, I have a bit of hope for a Western release in the form of…well…a career opportunity ad.
I can hear you. Wow, Phantasy Star Online 2 fans in the West must be desperate for news at this point. To be honest, we kind of are. But it seems like this may be something to go on. The following comes from an ad posted by Relic Entertainment, a studio that SEGA acquired after THQ’s untimely exit. I’ll highlight the part I’m interested in the most:
Relic 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… 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
All right. “Ramp up and perform due diligence on an existing live MMO project in development in Japan.” What’s the only live MMO that SEGA has up their sleeves right now (that we know about)? You guessed it. Phantasy Star Online 2 may see a Western release, after all, lest this ad be mentioning a project we don’t know about yet. There hasn’t been any announcement or even a slight nod from SEGA’s camp about any of this yet, but…what’s that line I always use?
Hope springs eternal.
We’ll offer more information as we have it.
