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Lord British Talks About EA, UO,& The Future
Warrior-GS writes: "Richard Garriott (aka Lord British), the creator of the Ultima universe and Origin Systems, is not longer under NDA after his departure from Origin and Electronic Arts. He gave his first interview about what he thought were problems at EA, where the Ultima series was going and what his future holds, especially now that many of his old co-workers are no longer employed, thanks to recent EA layoffs. You can find the interview at GameSpyDaily."
Honestly, I didn't expect RG to say too much. I think too many people wanted him to get down on his hands and knees and beg forgiveness for the disaster of Ultima: Ascension...well, it's not going to happen.
What is painfully clear, beyond EA's continual negative influence, is that Richard Garriott was sick of his own creation. The pinnacle Ultimas (U VII and Serpent Isle) were headed by Warren Spector (Deus Ex and so much more) and a team of really creative folks...RG only had peripheral involvement. Ultima: Ascension, even given all the problems EA threw in it's way, is still a testiment to RG's apathy towards his own creation.
RG says he didn't want to keep doing Ultimas; what most people don't know is that he DID commit himself (to the fans) to one last Ultima, Ultima IX...included with the Ultima VIII megapatch was a little file called FANS.TXT, in which Richard Garriott essentially apologized for the terrible mess that U8 was, and promised one last "great" ultima. He said that Ultima 9 would return to it's roots and be an epic game the bards would sing about for eons. THIS is why the fans are angry with him...he broke his promise.
All this is in the past, however....Origin is dead, Ultima is dead and it's time to forge onwards. One thing is very clear though: Richard Garriott will have to prove himself once more. The longtime fans aren't just going to jump onboard whatever new project he's working on... it's clean slate time, and time will tell if RG is truly Lord British, or just another John Romero.
--Radagast, sometimes historian of Britannia
and music prefrences that follow you around.
My old neighboors used to have something like this. They cranked the volume and anywhere withing three houses away they could always hear their music.
Thief was done by Looking Glass, and published by Eidos.
Daikantana was done by ION Storm, and published by Eidos.
id's stuff is published by Activision now.
Basically, all the large publishers seem to suck (ie, anything for the allmighty dollar buy hey, their shareholders love it and that's the point of running a business, as far as large businesses are concerned).
- chrish
Ultima 9 is the most misrepresented game in history. It is also the most entertaining game I have ever played. The Ultima 9 world is the most immersive, the most free-form, and the most beautiful game world I have ever played.
The initial poor reception of U9 got the game thrown out of the gaming community's consciousness. How many games have been in development for years just to end up as PC Gamer's flavor of the month one month and forgotten about the next month. If you love a beautiful RPG with a real story, then give U9 a try.
Who is making today's adveture games and story-based RPGs that aspire to be more than a "Quake plus inventory"? I am excited that RG is going back to doing what keeps school students away from their homework - making original games!
Don
Mind you, it's still possible to have quality and originality come out of an EA. SSX is a hell of a lot of fun, for instance. But it's more evolution than revolution. The truly original stuff always comes from a Bullfrog or an Origin...
Bullfrog is owned by Electronic Arts, and indeed has been for some years now. Peter Molyneux (the original creative mind behind Bullfrog) became completely disenchanted with the E.A. way of running his company after the sale, and decided to go it alone with a new company called Lionhead games. They've just released their first game, Black & White, which is currently receiving some truly amazing reviews from the computer games press.
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
> You don't see Bill Gates house built like a circut board with PCI boards for walls.
No, just broken windows everywhere he turns.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Why do so many young people feel the need to stay glued to their screens playing mindless drivel games like 'Ultima online', 'Baldur's Gate', 'Tekken Tag' and 'Kamakazi F-zero US destroyer' ? "
Maybe doing work all the time stinks. Most of the really interesting stuff in CS is kept difficult to understand or code and never makes it's way out of technical journals.
" I would not mind if it were just stupid redneck Americans playing these games, but even educated nations such as Great Britain and Japan now seem to be obsessed with these semi-pornographic games."
Not every American is a red neck and quite frankly I find it hard to believe that people in Europe don't have people of that class.
"All this simulated violence day in, day out cannot help but influence children and young adults into becoming Columbine-style misfits. I don't want my country to be populated by moronic juvenile adults whose idea of fun is dismembering a computer-generated image of another human being."
Oh sure the European who thinks nothing of the most intellectual persuits? Come on Europe is usually at the forefront of controversial philosphical and intellectual forces that are usually not all that good for mankind (ie. Communism, Faciasm, Dadaism, etc).
"It would be nice if slashdot would for once post an article that was critical of violence in video games."
Maybe because not many people believe it really has any statistical correlation and that most of the violence is maybe statistaical outliers and not worthy of consideration in a scientific manner? Oh that kind of information.
"Anyway, don't think I am some religious nutball. I last went to church over 2 weeks ago, I just feel I have to add my voice to the growing millions who feel video games have gone too far."
As a European you have a greater propensity to know about your own ancient histroy. So you missed church one week to watch a cricket match and drink beer. Do I really care?
There has been much more problems with so called "Christian" values and the world. Take a look at the Byzantine empire. Basically they used all the tactics of Snidly Wiplash and angered a great many people to get what they want. Basically they bribed their way to survive. The end was also ghastly.
Point being religion is not a good basis for a rational person to base his life on.
"The graphic portrayal of gory slaughter of innocent men, women, children and animals in these so-called games is a sick indictment of America, and in my opinion only a culture as bankrupt as the USA's could have spawned such unspeakable filth."
Oh come on this isn't some game like "Home Invasion 3d" or some such. The people who get killed are usually very deserving of getting killed. Quake has a very easy to villify group called the Strogg who committed a massive group of hostile actions culminating in the invasion of earth and it's territories and killed millions. Then they killed the invasion force sent to eliminate them. They fight at every turn and then decide to torture/execute the downed pilots. What more of a rational justification do you need for killing them? Of course the European thing would be to have tea and crumpets with them and do a little psychoanalysis but that dosn't fly in most logical circles.
"I think its about time Britain banned all American video games, until the producers demonstrate a little social responsibility. Only then will their hands be free of the blood of the children."
Again no statistical correlation to anything at all. People will be more likely to shoot others if they have been mercissely bullied than if they play a round of Quake.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Nope. Your country has moronic juvenile adults that crush people to death at football matches. Let's don't even go into that whole Northern Ireland thing.
I'll take the skinny geeks that play Quake over 250+ pound football (soccer) hooligans any day of the week.
If you think video games have gone too far, don't buy them. If you can't tell the difference between what is real and what is not, don't expect those of us who are well-adjusted to pander to your offended sensibilities.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I agree wrt U5, it's one of the most finished games I've played.
I think it's my favorite of the Ultimas, the 3d ones (imho) were lousy. U5 had a nicer interface than 4, where you could target a monster in combat and hit it even if you or it moved, or if it wasn't in one of the four cardinal directions. Very nice stuff. U4 was also a bit heavy on the virtues, very (very!) hard to keep in control. (Accidentally talk to a beggar? Gotta give him something, or you'll lose virtue.)
I can't really disagree with the original poster re: later Ultimas. U7 or 8 (the last one I played in mid 94 or so) was so buggy it would barely install, let alone play. It also had interface issues (too much mousing required, lame pack-style inventory, etc) but those might have been okay if the game was stable enough to play.
I played U1 (a tiny bit), U3 (quite a ways), and U4 and U5 to the finish. I don't know where the interface in the later games was introduced.
I really think there's no excuse for releasing a game as buggy as the later games. I don't care how broke you are, provide the product described on the box or don't provide anything. I work in a phone company and we provide a system with guarantees, it can't drop every 20th call just because we can't afford to find the bugs.
I never tried later ultimas because I'm really a fan of the non-realtime, SSI or OSI late 80s games, where there's no emphasis on clicking on the monster, or anything. As such, most of the later stuff is a bit accademic.
But, U5, now there was a game. Wow!
I almost flunked grade 8 because of it. And I wasted tons of graph paper.
Hey, maybe you'll find this funny... U4 was the first game I really tinkered with. I was fiddling with Copy2+ one day in the sector editor, and I was scrolling down a sector. It seemed odd, but a pattern of bytes caught my eye. Turns out that it was the shape of one of the little islands (off to the far east, Moonglow, was it?). I figured out roughly where I was and with a bunch of searching (later I learned how this related to sextant coordinates (in U4 or 5, don't remember)) I found the bay outside of British's castle...
That was cool, it let me make a perfect map of any area. But, even better, it let me edit the map. (I backed up the disks first.) I put roads of grassland between all the cities, especially the annoying ones (north-west, surrounded by forests). Then, while experimenting with what values equated to what landscape, I noticed more things, towns, castle segments, horses, and ships (and more).
I was trying to determind which of these tiles could be walked across (building bridges to the islands) and I walked on the horse... I hit 'B'oard and lo and behold, I was on the horse... I walked off the tile and was still on the horse, but it was also still there.
So then I went around, putting a horse outside of every city and a ship next to the closest water.
Insta-transport.
I noticed, when trying to collect huge numbers of ships, that a whirlpool would start to swallow them when I got 12 or more on screen at once.
Tons of other cool stories, but basically, U4 and U5 are the games that got me interested in how they're done, instead of just playing them.
Don't you think thats a little extreme?
Nah, it's not as extreme as it sounds...if you look real close at all the secret doors there's a little dot in the middle of them.
God forbid that he enjoy what he does for work so much that, he plays with similar stuff at home!
BTW the Gates house has somethingn like 200 servers doing changing art gallerys and personal temperature and music prefrences that follow you around.
sounds pretty fucking similar to me
And a true Ultima fan will understand the significance of this.
:)
Play with my webcams and lights here
Don't you find it at all concidental that when EA did finally step in, the Ultima games became the worst they have ever been? Once they step in, we get the 'abortion' Ultima 8 and totally disgusting Ultmia 9 (which I'm sadly currently playing, just so I can finally say I beat them all, ugh).
I've never had any major problems with any of the older Ultimas. Sure, there was stuff like the 'lose keys' bug in Ultima 9, but considering the scope of the game, that's understandable - but there has been nothing even close to as nasty as what I'm up against in U9...
Why do you blame RG for bankrupting Origin? Many/most people consider U7 to be the best Ultima, so obviously he didn't do that much wrong - if it's sales, then how is it RG's fault? Was he supposed to consult the gypsy or something before letting it out the door? And do you have proof that it's RG that decided to make U8 the way it was and not some marketing droid? And you complain that U6 shipped buggy - uh, what game doesn't? Sure, it's a damn shame we have to put up with it, by why blame RG? Even your venerable Spector ships buggy games... (not that he didn't do work on U6 and U7-p2 anyhow, both buggy). My god, actually, every game he made has bugs, wow! Thief crashed on me quite a bit...
Anyhoo, you don't seem to have much proof anywhere that RG "drove Origin into the ground"... (and you seem very upset with him for some reason, attacking him personally by calling him unvirtuous... what did he ever do to you?)
I think having EA's deeper pockets allowed RG to try dumb things.
Well, considering it took Ultima VII 1 million dollars to make, I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from. With one million dollars, even today, you'd be able to make any game you'd want... Are you saying RG purposely abused EA's money to create games that he wasn't sure would stick?
If a store selling purple lingery goes out of business, do you blame the owner or might it just be the fact that nobody was buying anymore? He spent a million dollars on a game, and, unfortunately, the major RPG rut was already beginning... is it his fault the number of games sold wasn't as high as expected? I agree that he's to blame for some things, since he WAS in charge, but sometimes outside influences play a much more important role.
Don't you think thats a little extreme?
You don't see Bill Gates house built like a circut board with PCI boards for walls.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
We did not have the management bandwidth to grow intelligently.
"Management Bandwidth" - now there's a concept! Why do I keep thinking I got stuck with 1200 baud?
Has anyone noticed this problem with EA Games? A small, successful company comes up with a really well designed game (Ultima IV, Ultima Underworld, Thief, etc). EA buys the company and starts wrenching the life (money) from the franchise. A few years later the company gets funding cut by EA.
To me this is yet more evidence that makes me believe EA knows very little about how to run businesses. They exude the mentality that "Lots of Hype for a well known Franchise makes oodles of money." Witness Daikatana... The fact is that only fun games can make serious money.
Would you kill a cow for $100 in meat today, or milk it for $1000 in the coming year? EA's Business practices are not geared towards the long term health *or* profitability of the Computer Game market!
One more reason to buy id software games. They're not owned by EA-- it's just a bunch of guys who like making extremely vicersal games.
-Ted
We all know Lord British was assassinated in 1997, at the hands of a lowly thief named Rainz, while attempting to give a speech to the denizens of the Ultima Online beta. What are you saying, he didn't really die? I SAW IT HAPPEN.
This low-level thief filched a firewall spell from a random knight, cast it, and suddenly, a wall of flame appeared out of nowhere before the real Lord British.
Then, with the hardened arrogance that several years of omnipotence might visit upon any of us , Lord British cried out, "Ah ha ha! You can't kill me!" as he wandered into the flames. Where he died instantly.
I barely escaped with my own life, since Lord Blackthorn, British's right-hand-man, completely panicked and summoned four daemons from the bowels of hell to unleash demonic slaughter on the mass of innocent bystanders. What an atrocity! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
So who really gave that interview? Because Lord British is a dead man. Miss him. Miss him.
The company shifted to a new engine that offered a pseudo-3D orthogonal projection with Nethergate. Nethergate was also innovative in that it allowed the player to roleplay either side of the conflict. Now they're working on re-releasing the Exile games using the new engine and under new titles. Avernum and the recently released Avernum 2 do not disappoint.
Although I have linked to the Windows versions of the games, Spiderweb actually develops and releases for the Mac first, and later ports its games to Windows. They also distribute a number of games that they do not produe, but IMO they're nowhere near as good.
All Spiderweb games are shareware, and you can play a fairly substantial portion of the game before having to pay. So if you miss Ultima, give them a try!
And the brethren went away edified.
A few years ago, right when Origin was selling to EA, I visited a game company created by ex-Origin staff who were running away. Their claim was that Origin was beefing up the staff with random people to bolster the sale price to EA!
So is EA really the culprit? Some people who owned Origin (hint, hint) got lots of extra money this way.
According to "Lord British," they didn't have the management bandwidth to pull it off. Who's fault is that and why did they do it?
It would be interesting to know how long "Lord British" had to stay after being bought out. Did the time just so happen to expire recently? (-: Maybe he's taking a page from Peter Molyneux, who sold Bullfrog to EA for outrageous fortunes, waited for his three years (?) to pass, then scrammed.
Ultima V on Apple II with sound card.
Very immersive world with even more immersive music. I still can hum all of them after all these years. Gotta be it.
No kidding! Just reverse-engineering one is a big task!
Ultima7 was the first CRPG I ever played; and starting out, I didn't even know what it was. My previous game-playing experience was with Sierra's adventures, so I thought that Ultima7 was just another mystery adventure, with Trinsic as the 'universe'. It was quite a shock when I found that Trinsic was only a tiny part of Ultima's world!
Richard Garriott has been more and more disconnected from Ultima since U7:Black Gate. That's understandable since I'm sure he's tired of Ultima and wants to create something different. I can respect that, but the bad things he has done really puts a smear on his reputation.
The thing that bugs me is that the man finally drove Origin into the ground and he _still_ blames EA for his own mistakes. Ultima V shipped unfinished because they had no other choice. Ultima VI shipped buggy to meet the following week's payroll (ask Dr. Cat). Ultima VII drove Origin to the point of death and EA stepped in and saved Origin.
When RG decided that expanding the market for the Ultimas was more important than anything else we got the action/RPG abortion called Ultima VIII: Pagan. After that flopped, instead of accepting that he made a big mistake in abandoning the existing Ultima fanbase he blamed EA. That's where all of this 'Origin's problems are EA's fault' started. It was always EA's fault, never his. The man who created the Virtues, who brought morality and ethics to the computer gaming industry wasn't willing to accept responsibility for his own actions.
EA gave him five years to create Ultima IX and he still screwed it up. He fired good people. Move the entire U9 team to work on Ultima Online (ignoring Brook's Law). Hired a RTS guy to create the capstone of the Trilogy of Trilogies. Fired his design team. Ignored what the fans cried out for. Didn't bother to talk to anyone because he feared the "wilds of the Internet". And on and on and on. And when he shipped a buggy beta as the final product he blamed EA once again. No wonder they booted him.
Hell, don't even get me started on the whoppers the man has told: UO: There is no lag. U9: Well tested and debugged. These are not the actions of an ethical person, no matter how much the later Ultimas deal with those same issues.
All in all, it makes me sad that people like RG who -- however talented as a storyteller -- couldn't manage a one car funeral procession gets this attention when truly deserving people like Warren Spector who *can* manage, promotes the teams he works with instead of himself, and is very creative.
:sigh: When I was playing the original Ultima on my Apple ][ and waiting for Ultima ][ I never realised that one RG would make himself into a John "Daikatana" Romero.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
Thanks! I suspect U5 was the biggest, most complex consumer application (not just game, but app) ever built for an 8-bit micro. A few games (like Time Zone) shipped on more disks, but U5 had a heck of a lot more code than anything else I ever saw on the Apple.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
It's sad, just as Thief was tossed aside like an old toy, so has the name 'Ultima'. It used to mean a wonderous world of adventure, then it just turned into a moneypot. Richard Garriot was a genious of his own right. I remember watching a special on him about 6 years ago, where he designed his own house. Everything was in a medieval tone, and the place was filled with hidden passages and secret doors. This guy wasn't just in it for the money, he truely loved his work... then big bad EA came and gobbled him up, and spit him out like so many other companies.
Sigh
I do have to admit. I bought IV when it was new on shelves, and could never quite beat it. A few years later, when the Internet was, I decided to read a FAQ, and found out that the game shipped with a bug that prevented an event from happening that needed to happen so you could advance. That was annoying. Oh, and even with a CPU inhibitor, you can't play it on modern hardware.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
RG: Very proud to help them learn and grow and yet also often sad to see them leave the fold.
:).
Hmm...spoken almost like a character from Ultima
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I'm a touch disappointed with the interview. It was stuff I pretty much coulda told you about last year. I am more interested in what company he has started, people he'll be hiring, any more info on project "X", what genre of game he'd like to work on (I'm guessing he'll avoid RPG like the plague), stuff like that. For his first interview, the questions they asked weren't very good.
/. interview of the 'ol Lord British??
Perhaps Taco or Hemos can work their magic and get a
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I think that a good poll question would be "Which episode of the Ultima series was the best?"
(BTW, the answer is obviously "Ultima IV")
Ah, Lord British... there's a name that brings me back. Not that I played any of the games mentioned thus far.
I remember his name from AutoDuel (a bit more info), a conversion for the Apple ][ (well, the one I played) by Lord British and Chuckles from the Steve Jackson Games PnP game Car Wars.
Why do I mention this? Becuase AutoDuel was the greatest game of all time. It was Road Warrior meets the eastern seaboard, and was great fun. Of course, my original 5.25" disks got corrupted, but I still have it on an Apple ][ emulator. I don't play much anymore, but it was a fantastic game.
I thought there were plans to make an updated version... did anyone hear anything about that? This was a few years ago. Google hasn't turned up much...
Ugh, sorry...I forgot how /. does formatting.
---
I read this article yesterday, and then I did some googling to dig up some stuff on Project X. Here are some nuggets I found (sorry, I don't feel like re-finding all the links to articles I read):
-X will be an online community like Ultima Online
-X will be value based (like Ultima), and the world will dynamically reflect the number of good and evil people in different areas (he respectfully tips his hat to Molyneux)
-X will be set in the relatively near future with a SciFi background
-X will integrate Ebay-esque functionality for buying and selling virtual property; British believes that some people will choose to make their living in X
-X will try to be more inviting to casual gamers by not rewarding hard-core gamers who devote their lives to the game; British's clue was (and I paraphrase) "think of your best friend, who isn't necessarily someone you spend the most time with"
-X will place a strong emphasis on fashion
-X will have a target audience of both males and females
-X will have a primary seamless world environment (like UO) as well as "missions" for parties to embark on (which can also be player-created)
-British fancies tele-immersion technology, so although he denies knowing about the "story-telling" approach used by Neverwinter Nights, I'd expect him to return to his D&D roots by making X more of a role-playing experience That's all that comes to mind right now.
KP
É que os desafinados também têm um coração