Spector, Garriott on Games

Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has two interesting interviews up. Richard Garriott of Ultima fame talks about leaving Origin, getting bought out by NCSoft and becoming a pitchman for a popular Korean MMORPG trying to make it in the states. He also mentions his new game, Tabula Rasa. The other interview is with Warren Spector, who opened up a bit on the Deus Ex sequel Invisible War, while also commenting on linear games, anime style games and what the future holds."

Comments

Cool.

[AndrewM1]

I think that this game, Tabula Rasa, Is going to be a best seller. Look at it. It's made by a guy with a solid reputation (He brought us Ultima!), and by combining that with today's cutting-edge graphics technologies, It's bound to be good. I don't play any games like this, but I know people who do, and I'd bet they'ed sink thier money into this. Rock on, Richard!

Re:Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing we won't run into that horrible mistake with Duke Nukem Forever or Team Fortress 2. Whoops, our 3D engine is horribly obsolete because we spent a year writing our fifth, seriously, last one, physics modeler. And then we'll have to get the art team to redo everything. Hey, anyone looked at the sound code since 1997? And what's all this vapor doing in here? Someone set off the fire sprinklers?

Deus Ex

[T-Kir]

I started playing Deus Ex again this past week, and apart from it crashing constantly (either my 9500 Pro/Catalyst 3 drivers/DirectX 9) the other thing that struck me was how more real the game felt with all the political stuff going on now, just swop the Liberty statue with the Twin Towers, the extra laws being brought in to combat terrorism, et al.

Very scary indeed :(

Some of Garriott's comments are just bizarre to me

[WesternActor]

And as Ultima 8 got into scheduling trouble, as every Ultima always did, rather than make a decision as we had in the past to hold the game until it was polished, we began to cut things out to stay on schedule. And we cut and we cut and we cut and the game that was finally released was not only shipped early even for the cut version (and therefore buggy), but also had its guts ripped out as far as being an Ultima.

and

So, Ultima 9, throughout its development, was the bastard child of Electronic Arts and suffered from that lack of support. But we persevered anyway, and I think it came out pretty well. There were some areas I wish we could have taken the time to make better, but considering the rocky road of internal support it had, it actually turned out quite nicely.

I guess I pretty much have the opposite feelings about his games. I thought Ultima VIII, for all its problems, was at least interesting and playable, and it kept my interest right until the very end. I didn't think there was much of anything worthwhile about Ultima IX at all, and I gave up somewhere near halfway through. It seemed to take great job in subverting everything that had made Ultima what it was for almost two decades.

Nothing in that game seemed to resemble anything I was familiar with, and I'd played all the Ultima games (including both Ultima Underworld titles, Savage Empire, and Martian Dreams). Ultima VIII was completely different from what had come before, but it had to operate under a different set of rules, because it took place in a different universe/dimension as far removed from Britannia as Earth was. Ultima IX could utilize no such excuse... It just made no sense, and was boring as heck, despite being graphically superior to... well... almost everything.

I agree with Garriott about Ultima VII being the Ultima of Ultimas, though. Those were the days!