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Lord British Gives UO2 the Axe
Ashram writes "Well, I didn't want it to be true, but apparently the folks over at Electronic Arts have announced on the Origin website that they are halting production of the game until further notice in order to improve the currently existing Ultima Online game. All I can say is that I've been waiting for this game for a while, and now to see it gone leaves me feeling empty." Origin was going to be 3-D, correct?
..rather, EA "The Guardian" did.
Face it...Origin, as we knew and loved it, died the moment Electronic Arts swallowed them. Ever since, with the exception of the Crusader games, they have released nothing but garbage.
Richard Garriott had nothing to do with UO2..he was long gone before this fiasco came down. The name "Lord British" doesn't even belong to EA, so please do not confuse Lord British with EA or the current perverters of the Ultima name. Origin died in 1994, along with Ultima. :(
Sigh...does anyone around here still remember the days when Electronic Arts was a home for electronic artists? Back when Trip Hawkins had a dream for making computer games that approached art. This era gave us gems like Archon, The Bard's Tale (which helped launch Interplay as an independant company) and many others.
Nowadays EA would have swallowed Interplay whole and thrown Brian Fargo out on the streets.
"Under my guidance Britannia will flourish and all the people shall rejoice and pay homage to their new...GUARDIAN. Know that you too shall kneel before me Avatar...for I shall be your provider...your companion...and your MASTER." -- The Guardian, a character directly inspired by the attempted takeover of Origin Systems in the early '90s. Why else do you think the three generators were a cube, a sphere and a pyramid?
and this just proves it. They would rather give their existing customers something new to play with, instead of trying to win over new ones with shiny new technology. Makes perfect sense, and proves a 3d game dosen't have to exist for people to enjoy it.
I still dislike the fact that Blizzard canned Warcraft Adventures because "it didn't utilize modern technology well enough". So instead they made Diablo II, a game that looks a slim bit better then the first and needs 256MB ram to run at a decent speed in multiplayer.
The first Ultima, written on a 48Kb Apple II in about 1978, was 3-D
Well, sort of - the dungeons are 3D wireframe in Ultima I (which came out in 1980, a year before Wizardry I), but the world map (where you spend most of your time) is in 2D overhead view, just like later games in the series.
I'm not sure if Aklabeth, Lord British's first game (and prequel to Ultima) had any 2D elements or whether it was a pure 3D dungeon crawl.
Personally, even back in the early 80s I was never a huge fan of those 3D first-person dungeons, espescially since there was no automap and you had to sit there plotting out each level with graph paper. Remember "mapping gems"?
Bard's Tale was even worse, but I played through and mapped that whole game on graph paper, so I mustn't have minded too much. Likewise for Dungeon Master (1 and 2). One of the things I liked most about Ultima Underworld was that it had a cool automap with notations etc. Ultima Underworld was a cool game engine for it's time (and a good game to boot).
Thank God. My grades are spared for at least another semester...
Eric
Make it idiot-proof and someone will build a better idiot.
From TheOneRing.net....
EA acquires rights to Lord of the Rings games...
Under the direction of Imhoff, the licensing department has already attracted key licensees such as Toy Biz, which has the master toy license; Electronic Arts, which is developing and distributing video games based on the franchise; Applause Inc., which has the master gift license; and HarperCollins UK, among others."
http://headline.gamespot.com/news/00_03/30_pc_outd adoh/
Electronic Arts and Origin Systems have announced a plan that will increase their focus on Ultima Online and halt production of OWO: ORIGIN (UO2). The reason is simple, rather than creating OWO: ORIGIN (UO2) as a parallel world competing with UO, we've decided to put those resources into growing and improving the core offering for Ultima Online's 230,000 loyal subscribers.
In the near future and with the release next week of Ultima Online: Third Dawn, players will see new lands, new creatures, and a world that is continually evolving within Ultima Online.
Latest update as of 3:30p: Massive layoffs throughout EA. 85 from OSI alone. Kesmai also gutted (at least 40, Battletech and Air Warrior 4 both cancelled) and 80 elsewhere in EA. Harry Potter cancelled. Jack Heistand (OSI's CEO) gone. Gordon "Tyrant" Walton moved to Sims Online.
Petition for UO2/Origin
They are stopping development of what they have been working on for years so they don't compete with their older product? Did competition with earlier products stop id from releasing Quake 2, in fear of losing sales on Quake? Does Ford not release new cars every year, even if it reduces the number of previous models sold?
Anyways, most UO players are just waiting for something else to come up. Once Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, Neocron, and all the other upcoming MMORPGs come out, UO will be dead. This is a bad move by EA.com.
There, I said it. This isn't bad news, it's good news, and I'd reckon a lot of other UO players feel that way. In the past year, the current incarnation has seen many times more than its share of serious bugs. Bugs that were left unchecked and went unfixed for far too long, even when being reported by tens or hundreds of people a day.
Why did this happen, why did UO in its current state fall into such a lapse of disrepair? Because they took half the UO development team and put them to work on UO:3D and UO2. They claimed they had separate dev teams - and yes, there were even some new faces working on UO2 - but eventually the truth came out.
One of the bigger flops of late, a "Veteran Rewards" program, was supposed to come out last fall. The program was launched in January, and pulled a week later because it was so bug-ridden. Months later it still hasn't been finished, and the reason? Yeah - "Our development resources are better spent on stuff like UO:3D and UO2." So much for all these different dev teams they were boasting about.
At least now they're presumably going to focus in one place; it's better to do one thing well than to do several things half-assed. This was a move they needed to make, and I think they probably (finally) wised up to that by looking at the churn rate of long time vets. They've already got a core playerbase, they need to work on keeping us happy, paying customers before branching off to bigger and (better|worse) things.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Electronic Arts backstabs Ultima Online 2 for 412 points of damage!
Ultima Online 2 has been slain!
Yes. Here are some downloadable video files. Unfortunately, the original trailer for UO2 (later renamed Origin) isn't listed on that page. It was quite well done, corregraphed to music and such, and showed some footage of the movement capture techniques they used for the humanoids, various combat scenerios. I just uploaded this video on some of my webspace,
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
Didn't LB leave origin a while ago? and wasn't that the reason for the name change from "ultima online 2" to "origin:worlds online"(or something like that) -nick
Richard Garriot is one of the best game designers of all time, and he deserves a bit more respect.
The Faxman