The name of Bill Trost will likely strike familiar to older vets of the MMORPG genre. He was one of the original design leads for EverQuest, was also the creative lead of Defiance, has helped ship 13 different games over the course of his 20 year career, and most recently was taken on as a creative director at Amazon Games to help build out titles like New World. However, Trost announced on LinkedIn that he will be leaving his post at Amazon and take the role of lead designer for Ashes of Creation.
“After over six years at Amazon Games, working with several awesome teams on quite a few exciting projects, especially New World, it’s time for me to embark on a new adventure,” Trost writes in the post. “Ashes is an ambitious game and there are tons of challenging problems to solve, but that is the fun part of game design. I can’t wait to be able to get lost in the world of Verra with all of you.”
Trost’s post also discusses his growing relationship with AOC’s creative director Steven Sharif, his initial skepticism of the project, and his growing excitement at how the developing MMORPG has progressed. “The beautiful, deep world, the gamer-first attitude, and the openness of the team were all things I wanted to be a part of and so when the opportunity arose, I jumped at it,” admits Trost.
Readers will remember that Amazon Games was hit by layoffs in April – layoffs that didn’t affect the New World team but did affect the team working on what was at one point John Smedley’s unnamed sci-fi MMO. (Smed left Amazon earlier this year; we don’t know for sure that Trost was working on that game, but he was the former creative director at Smed’s Pixelmage Games, which was folded into Amazon when Hero’s Song was canceled, so it’d make sense.)
Meanwhile, AOC has yet to reach its second alpha test, though it has put out numerous previews from within the build, while Sharif remarked that the next phase is “not years away […] but also [it is] not right around the corner.”
