Soren Johnson Leaves Firaxis Games

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Apolyton reports that Soren Johnson, the co-lead designer on Civilization III and lead designer on Civilization IV, has left Firaxis Games on April 2nd, after nearly seven years working at Firaxis.

Soren Johnson has returned to the West Coast and joined California-based Electronic Arts. He previously worked there as a programming intern for sports titles Knockout Kings 2000 and 2001 for the PlayStation.

Currently, he is working on the cross-platform "Spore", which the game's designer Will Wright has referred to as a Massively Single-Player game.

Soren is a very talented game designer and made lots of truly significant contribution to the Civilization series. We wish him the best of luck at EA!

EDIT (11:39 PM): GameDaily contacted Firaxis and Firaxis Director of Marketing Kelley Gilmore confirmed Johnson is indeed leaving:

"It's a sad day for us, but we had 7 terrific years with him," expressed Gilmore. "He's an incredibly talented game designer and we look forward to seeing the wonderful work he'll produce for many years to come."

Although it can't be a good feeling to lose a key designer, Gilmore assured us that Firaxis will be just fine thanks to the many talented staff still there: "We have lots of very talented designers at Firaxis – Alex Mantzaris and Jon Shafer are leading the design on our recently announced expansion: Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. We're also working on some yet-to-be announced titles with some great designers leading development. More on that soon!"
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Well, now they have to replace Soren with Kael to make CivV as successfully as CivIV ;) :lol:

Well... good luck Soren.
 
It's tough to know how much of Civ IV was Soren's vision vs. the whole team's, but Soren's talent is clear.

I've seen some previews for "Spore" and it looks very interesting - kind of a "Sim" game. I think Soren will have some great contributions for it.

I remember reading about Soren discussing a Civ IV improvement that I think turned out to be key: removing parts of the game that aren't fun. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with pollution and entire cities in revolt as in previous Civ titles.
 
Left to work for EA?!!!!!? What a bloody waste of talent.... The world has become a poorer place, but good luck Soren!
 
EA is the worst company to make any other gaems besides simulation and sports... they kick ass on making sports and simulation games, but suck at making RPG, Strategy, and so forth.
 
That guy was lead designer on the first Civilization game I haven't liked, so this is pretty good news for Civ 5, for me anyway.

@Andy_Candy: You clearly don't understand. He left to work on Spore, what will be one of the (if not the) most influential and greatest games to come out within the next few years. The sheer awesomeness that Spore will be cannot be described in my post.
 
This makes SPORE the best game of all time, or the biggest let-down of all the time. Let's hope for the first one.
 
even bigger news is that CivFanatics got scooped by Apolycrap... maybe a merger is in order after all
 
Well that is a shame that he went to work for EA, a gaming giant that isn't able to accomplish anything good. (Every PC NHL game has progressively gotten worse since 04)

Hopefully he'll be able to make spore even better, or maybe he'll help improve the ambigous civilization stage of spore. Maybe it'll be a civ rip off.
 
HypnosTene said:
Same here. No wonder we both have avatars from civ2 ;p
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i disagree. i've played civ since version 1, but 4 was the one that really pulled me in. i've spent countless hours playing 1-3, but multiply that by 1000 for civ4
 
I'm very saddened to hear that Soren will be moving on from the Civilization series; it was his vision, more than anyone else's, that made Civ4 what it is today. I had the pleasure of communicating with Soren frequently online and occasionally in person, and was always impressed both by his knowledge of complex inner game mechanics and easy-going personality. Firaxis is losing an extremely talented developer; I hope they can find a replacement half as good.
 
I think we just lost the lead designer of the greatest Civ so far. The new key concepts were all his, plus the removal of all the annoying parts of micromanagement - that was confirmed many times by Sid and Firaxis.

I wonder if the crap they named "Afterworld" for the nest expansion is the new direction...
 
He's working on Spore! I was sad to hear he's leaving Civ behind, but to work on SPORE! :D Good luck, Soren!

SilverKnight
 
If I interpret Sulla's post correctly, it looks like Soren was already 'lost' for the expansions anyway.
 
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