Posted by
chrisd
on from the who-doesn't-want-a-moat-after-all dept.
Our friends at Salon have an article "The Return of Lord British" about what Richard Garriot has been up to in the last year since he's left Origin. It is mostly about Lineage (a mmporpg?), but it touches on EA mismanagement (new tagline "We create write-offs").
can't hope to succeed
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
His games were stellar when the platform didn't have all the bells and whistles, today they are nothing compared to Neverwinter etc. (just imagine playing something like Never on an Apple II... woulda creamed your jeans ). He was a pioneer in the day (god bless the man for distractions in grade 5 [ultima I]) but sadly I think there is little he'll do that will seem as great as it did back then.
I'm annoyed British thinks that different problem-solving approaches outside of Asia would hamper the game. That players in America are (perhaps) less willing to pledge their loyalty easily or submit to authority doesn't mean that Lineage would suck more here.
Maybe that means that American players respond better to causes than fealty, or that they tend to form or volunteer for skills-based groups to accomplish specifc tasks (for varying motivations) and vote for the person they think can best lead them. The citizen-soldier ideal America fields results in vastly superior lower-level performance as units can react to events they face quicker and better than, say, heirarchial-based phalanxes or some shit.
The point being that looking at cultures as impediments to success rather than seeing that as a challenge to improve gameplay is narrow-sighted and wrong. If he can't figure that out about his own country of residence, I think he's blinded by his own success.
The point being that looking at cultures as impediments to success rather than seeing that as a challenge to improve gameplay is narrow-sighted and wrong. If he can't figure that out about his own country of residence, I think he's blinded by his own success.
Maybe because he sees Lineage as a game catering more to Asian (Korean) tastes than American? Maybe Lineage was developed to work with Asian tactics and overlooked American? Maybe that's why Lord British is there, to balance it out?
Utter crap...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
U7 and SI were probably the -best- ultimas in the final series. Ultima VI was clumsy and incomplete by comparison (the whole Scara Brae "bug", for example).
U7 and SI saw the involvement of Warren Spector (who later went to Looking Glass where the true spirit of Origin was kept alive), and had probably the best storylines of the entire series. The only -good- to come out of Ultima VI were the highly underrated spin-offs, the Worlds of Ultima games (Martian Dreams and Savage Empire, both based on the U6 engine).
Crap? Hardly. These were classics. Why do you think the outrage against the horrid Ultima: Ascension was so great? U:A didn't even come close to living up to the standard set by U7.
And have you forgotten the Ultima Underworlds? They were post U7 and are legendary. Ultima Underworld 1 was the -first- 3D engine on the market (beating Wolf3d by two months), and was a joy to play. UU2 had probably the most intricate story in a 3D RPG I've ever encountered. These games were the spiritual predecessors of Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock and Deus Ex.
These games were -not- crap. They were great IN SPITE of Electronic Arts' meddling. Things went downhill with Ultima 8 simply because they wanted to "expand the userbase" by dumbing the game down into a Super Avatar Brothers-style game. Even the U8 engine wasn't wasted in the end: it was successfully used to create another fantastic game called Crusader: No Remorse/Regret.
Re:The Play's the Thing
by
DrCode
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think your post should have been modded higher.
I keep thinking about how the computer games industry compares to fiction publishing. Imagine walking into a book store and only finding 100 titles on the shelves. Suppose you bought the latest Steven King novel, and found that it was filled with 80 pages of full-color pictures, but only 10 pages of text, and cost $50?
Slashdot Mirror
His games were stellar when the platform didn't have all the bells and whistles, today they are nothing compared to Neverwinter etc. (just imagine playing something like Never on an Apple II
Maybe that means that American players respond better to causes than fealty, or that they tend to form or volunteer for skills-based groups to accomplish specifc tasks (for varying motivations) and vote for the person they think can best lead them. The citizen-soldier ideal America fields results in vastly superior lower-level performance as units can react to events they face quicker and better than, say, heirarchial-based phalanxes or some shit.
The point being that looking at cultures as impediments to success rather than seeing that as a challenge to improve gameplay is narrow-sighted and wrong. If he can't figure that out about his own country of residence, I think he's blinded by his own success.
U7 and SI were probably the -best- ultimas in the final series. Ultima VI was clumsy and incomplete by comparison (the whole Scara Brae "bug", for example).
U7 and SI saw the involvement of Warren Spector (who later went to Looking Glass where the true spirit of Origin was kept alive), and had probably the best storylines of the entire series. The only -good- to come out of Ultima VI were the highly underrated spin-offs, the Worlds of Ultima games (Martian Dreams and Savage Empire, both based on the U6 engine).
Crap? Hardly. These were classics. Why do you think the outrage against the horrid Ultima: Ascension was so great? U:A didn't even come close to living up to the standard set by U7.
And have you forgotten the Ultima Underworlds? They were post U7 and are legendary. Ultima Underworld 1 was the -first- 3D engine on the market (beating Wolf3d by two months), and was a joy to play. UU2 had probably the most intricate story in a 3D RPG I've ever encountered. These games were the spiritual predecessors of Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock and Deus Ex.
These games were -not- crap. They were great IN SPITE of Electronic Arts' meddling. Things went downhill with Ultima 8 simply because they wanted to "expand the userbase" by dumbing the game down into a Super Avatar Brothers-style game. Even the U8 engine wasn't wasted in the end: it was successfully used to create another fantastic game called Crusader: No Remorse/Regret.
I keep thinking about how the computer games industry compares to fiction publishing. Imagine walking into a book store and only finding 100 titles on the shelves. Suppose you bought the latest Steven King novel, and found that it was filled with 80 pages of full-color pictures, but only 10 pages of text, and cost $50?