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Richard Garriot Leaves Origin
A reader writes, "After over 15 years with Origin Systems, Richard Garriot, the lead designer of the Ultima series, has decided to leave the company and pursue other interests. " We have no comment about Britishing. Especially CowboyNeal has no comment.
Methinks that because of this origin hath lost more than a mere eigth.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Ultima 5 was by far the BEST Ultima! They all pretty much went downhill from there. I'd like to see him do a re-make of this masterpiece with updated graphics and sound and maybe some extras!
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OK, after reading the definition of "Britishing", I have to wonder what kind of sick stuff CowboyNeal is into.
From Old Man Murray's RPG reviews:
Sick of UO? Think you could make a quick buck building your character and selling it? Until one of these games has whores you can visit, it will simply not be real world enough for erik.
Rebuttal from erik, GED:
What the hell are you talking about? The only reason I play UO is for all the "Britishing": paying real world dollars to people for cyber-sex, then player killing them as I climax. That's the only reason anyone plays UO - all the violent sex. Jesus, man, where have you been?
>Anyone thinking this is happening very close to
>april 1? I just cannot fathom the ultima series
>without its original designer.
They (Origin) have been saying that Ultima IX was the last Ultima.
I'm shedding no tears, Ultima has been going steadily downhill. Those guys clearly had no intention of making another U5 or U7; I don't know if that's Garriot's fault or the marketroids'.
Hopefully a fresh start will give Garriot a chance to recapture the magic of those first few games. I admire the guy, he's clearly brilliant, but those last 2 "Ultima" games don't deserve the name.
I wasted way too much time playing U1-U5 on my good old Apple //e. Ultima games were always about story and quality. That seems to have gotten lost with U8+.
I hope whatever RG moves onto, he goes back to the simple story/quality formula. Good luck and best wishes.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Anyone thinking this is happening very close to april 1? I just cannot fathom the ultima series without its original designer.
-Xen
As both a former competitor and colleague of Richard's, I am sad to see him leaving the fold. His work with Ultima series will always be well-regarded and honored by those of us, presently and formerly, in the craft. He was one of the first, and most certainly one of the best.
I remember fondly one DragonCon in Atlanta where Richard, playing British, and I, playing Werdna, led an audience of real-time, real-space live role-players in a "battle of epic proportion between good and evil." I still get e-mails from those who were there reminiscing about it.
To my old friend, I say, farewell and G-dspeed! You did us great honor by your works, and gave us all many hours of pleasure in the process.
First question, how is the Ultima series going to handle this? Will Lord British continue to exist in the game, as he has ever since I started playing them way back on the Atari 800?
I can't think of another game series where the presence of the games creator was such a firm and important part of the games universe. I can't imagine Origin without Lord British, I wonder what his "other interests" are (and whether they have something to do with the computer area). Does anyone know what the story behing Garriot's leaving is? Was it amicable or was it because of disagreements within Origin? (I'm hoping it wasn't a Nolan Bushnell leaving Atari, Gary Gygax leaving TSR type of thing....)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Amazing stuff. Lord British, thank you for a decade and change of incredible work. Tonight I'm gonna see if my original (!) copy of Ultima I, written in Integer BASIC on an Apple ][+, still boots. I have a feeling I won't be getting any sleep tonight. I'm a veteran of Ultima I through V, and loved every one of them. Please accept my thanks for the past, and my best wishes for the future.
After about Ultima VI, Lord British was more a manager than anything else. After that point, the games expanded technologically but went backward in many other ways. Ultima VII was so bad in certain respects that LB made apologies for it. And Ultima IX is a disaster across the board. I almost want to say that the Ultima games were never meant to be visualized in real-time as has been done with the last three games. In 3D with a directly controlled character, Ultima seems more like a poor clone of Mario 64 than a role playing game. It is time to let the Ultima series die a peaceful death.
My complaint was that the company guy seems to regard his products with a certain commoditized air, like soap or bulk goods, rather than works of art and imagination. Even referring to them as "titles" would have been an improvement in the message.
Then again, perhaps my retail years (all three of them) just turned me off to the whole SKU thing. Especially when price adjustments came out and we had to spend two hours going around the store and redoing all the hanging price tags...
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Jeff Anderson will be devoting 100% of his time to ensuring that this strategic sku is a mjor success.
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.
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Rick Hall will become the producer of an exciting new sku, which will be the most powerful new UO release to date.
If I worked at Origin, I wouldn't refer to my company's games, especially games with such a quasi-religious following, as skus. It's this commodity approach to programming that gave us things like Office 2000, IIRC.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
The cake is a pie
But the game itself was incredible.
The "living world" thing is something no other RPG seems to have gotten right. There is something very cool about showing up to town and having to wait until the store is opened, or being able to follow shopkeepers home to see where they live. And in the writing of all those little subplots, all of these NPCs were actually characters. You could ignore them, of course, but cool none-the-less.
Unfortunately, the interface for actually buying stuff was ghastly, and having to feed your troops was annoying. But the openendedness of it more then made up for it. You could just go wandering about pretty much anywhere if you wanted.
The cake is a pie
Kids today, who just pop in the CD and are playing twenty minutes later, don't realize how good they have it. I remember fighting with games for days to get them to work.
The cake is a pie
I played the first three on an Apple ][+ with 64k RAM. Those versions are more fun today than half of the games that came out last year.
The cake is a pie
There is also a Windows port somewhere. (The original won't run under any version of Windows. They uses a horrendous memory manager that not only made it hell to install under DOS, but makes it impossible to run under any modern OS.)
I don't think either port is very far along. I know that Exult is at the point where you can walk around and talk to NPCs, but the rest is not there yet.
The cake is a pie
It is such a shame because no other game has quite made it there. Baldur's Gate was close, but still just didn't have the magic that the first seven Ultima's did. They're one of the few games you can go back and play ten years later.
The cake is a pie
(It was cool that you could go hunt a deer for food, though.)
The cake is a pie
If not, don't worry about it as it was an older version, and I didn't really do any work trying to figure out what was up.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing this thing going.
Have you guys had any contact with Origin over this? I hope they don't give you any trouble. I can't imagine why, since you've got to own the game to use Exult, but you never know with big corps.
The cake is a pie
The cake is a pie
When Origin started out there was no Linux, so it's not suprising that he wasn't writing games for Linux. And it's only recently that Linux has become a viable platform for games (what with reasonable hardware support), and so it's not suprising there aren't any Ultima games.
Just because the hasn't written anything for Linux is no reason to dismiss him. /. isn't actually "News for Linux zealots", despite what you might think sometimes. The Ultima series contributed a lot to the computer RPG genre, and the platform they ran on shouldn't be an issue at all.
The behemoth-ness of Origin and Electronic Arts has crippled his ability to produce truly great games.
Oh come on. He could have seen what was coming from a million miles away, but he gave in to greed and sold Origin to (cookie-cutter, make money now, bottom-line is all that matters) EA anyway.
I followed the Ultima 9 fiasco through the past 6 years... I can see why one in his position would want to retreat to one's castle for a while and then start over with something new and interesting without such a loud and obsessed fan base. He's a really creative person - his work shows that. And I bet he'll be back with something new and interesting. Here's to his future success! E
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
They have made several references to doing their development for UO in Linux. Here is a link to the linux uo client. It may not be current enough to work though, but they do seem to try every once in a while to update it.
GameSpot has a bit more information in their article here.
Though it's mostly unconfirmed, it seems that Garriot was layed off because he and EA had differing views on Origin's future.
Here is the internal email that went out from Jack Heistand, CEO of Origin, to the troops about what was going on. It was on the X-Origin mailing list in about 2.5 seconds.
Here it is on Gamespy
Donut, Ex-Origin, who never thought this day would come.
- Man, it really sucks that Lord British is leaving Origin!
- Rock on! Now he'll get to do some real games!
This is a stark contrast to what happens when other programmers/developers leave companies. Most people assume that they'll never hear from those people again. But the second comment trend is interesting in its own right:Evidently, people seem to think that Lord British should leave Origin, if only for his own good.
Which means that if this is an April Fool's joke (which I think it is), then Garriott might want to consider it anyway, since so many people seem to think he'd be better off.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
Load up Ultima V,VI and VII and find out...his games had a decent plot and narrative and most of all were involving.
He made RPG's that weren't just hack'n'slash and you actually felt part of the story and were more involved than the other RPG's around at the time.
I mean have you ever played Buldur's Gate...Great Graphics, faithfull to the AD&D rules, but somehow it just seems too Hack'n'Slash and you feel that the you are being driven too much towards predecided set pieces in the game.
Go ahead try'em you won't be disappointed (well once you get round the usual dos out of memory problems anyway)
He's evidentally building a new house, maybe he's working on the Lord British mansion trying to get it ready for next Halloween...
Also, talking to some Origin employees, there was no small amount of unrest and unease about the EA buyout and heavy-handedness, not to mention EA's history of running game companies into the groung then moving on. Some employees even had shirts with the EA triangle/circle/square logo made out in Borg-style tech.
Maybe Garriot's looking to jumpstart a new gaming company? I'm sure he could attract a lot of the original Origin programming group out of EA.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
The Ultima series was absolutely wonderful, especially in its early days when its attention to plot (which was pretty much a dirty word in the computer RPG genre back then) and detailed background. It set the tone for later CRPGs, and I'm sure that it inspired the recent revival started by games like Diablo.
Assuming Richard Garriot isn't just going to spend his time lounging around in his big house throwing Halloween parties, I'm looking foward to what he does next. Without the pressure to do yet another Ultima game, he can turn his creative talents to producing a new game with a new setting, hopefully one even better than Britannia. Given the increased power of computers nowadays, he could really produce a detailed setting and a great game based in it.
Anyone in the Open Source community can appreciate this on a certain level; if you were ordered by, let's say Linus Torvalds, how to design your Linux-compatible software, which you came up with the original idea for, -and- you were told to have it done by a deadline or less lose all support for developing your software, how would you feel? You'd probably say, "screw that, I want to do things my own way".
Regardless of the fact that Ultima never made it to Linux (thank Origin for that oversight -- Garriot was actually a believer in cross-platformed games!), the twelve (major) games released under the Ultima banner have collectively done more for fantasy role-playing on computers than anything else out there.
Best wishes to Garriot in his future endeavours.
Daltorak
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"Never let your schooling interfere with your education" -Samuel Clemens