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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
> 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
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?
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.
Ultima V shipped unfinished because they had no other choice.
: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.
Really? What a fascinating assertion. I don't recall many complaints along these lines from U5's players, and (having been the lead programmer on the project) I seem to be missing the usual feelings of resentment and anguish that accompany the forced shipment of an unfinished game. Can you refresh my memory here?
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.
Not to apologize for U8 -- I wasn't involved in it, and never got around to playing it -- but you're being a little dramatic with your Monday-morning quarterbacking. From Richard's point of view, it was scary as hell to watch his dev budgets climb supergeometrically with each successive title, while sales figures remained pretty much where they peaked in U3. By the time Origin started work on U8, it was clear that drastic changes were required to keep the series financially viable.
My understanding is that U8 actually sold pretty well, but few of the old-school people, including Richard himself, were ever happy with the final product.
After that flopped, instead of accepting that he made a big mistake in abandoning the existing Ultima fanbase he blamed EA.
I believe Richard has expressed his regrets and taken responsibility for U8's problems on more than one occasion. Certainly the design direction in U9 (bugs notwithstanding) took U8's criticism to heart.
EA gave him five years to create Ultima IX and he still screwed it up.
Making Ultimas is hard. Try it sometime.
Okey-dokey, then.
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'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!
Ugh, sorry...I forgot how /. does formatting.
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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