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Richard Garriott Quits NCSoft
unc0nn3ct3d writes "In a shocking update on the seemingly endless troubles plaguing NCSoft, Richard Garriott — the king of online games, creator of The Ultima Series (and consequentially Ultima Online), as well as the recently troubled Tabula Rasa — has announced that he would be stepping down from his position at NCSoft. Apparently motivated by his recent trip into space, perhaps he has found a higher purpose while orbiting so high above the earth."
As they say, and nothing of value was lost.
Richard Garriot is something of a hero to me. He has always been first in pushing for and achieving his goals, be it the classic Ultima series, Tabula Rasa (which is a very bold, even if it isn't perfect), and his recent trip into space. I'm sure he will do well no matter where he goes, and I, for one, wish him great luck and hope he achieves his goal this time around as well.
Does this article call for a racist or anti-semitic diatribe? What a personal or disgusting description of a sexual encounter be more appropriate? What about a goatse link? Thank you in advance.
The "recently troubled" link leads to a blog posting from February 2008. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Tabula Rasa's still having trouble, but that's an interesting definition of "recent".
... I'm sure he will do well no matter where he goes...
Maybe he'll take after Richard Branson and go into space tourism?
He needs to care for the alien fetus growing inside his stomach.
The games industry has sucked the life out of any 'franchise' inherited from when the PC game market was healthy.
Tabula Rasa has zero name recognition.
The number of people who know who Garriott is, is not enough to sustain usage on an MMO.
The cost of the game was exorbitant when you have zero name recognition.
MMOs have a shelf life and expire after a (very few) years.
Therefore, why would someone do a project like this, as a pure business case? I love Richard Garriott and what he represents, but I blame NCsoft for greenlighting and funding this MMO, rather than Garriott for creating it.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This actually is a phenomenon known as the overview effect. Space travelers often report a transcendental sense of connectedness.
Damnit Richard, man! I was calling you as you passed over the UK, but you never answered. People think I'm mad when I'm looking into the sky, saying I'm trying to talk with spacemen.
Get your own free personal location tracker
RIP Lord British
- Anonymous Coward PK
What sort of troubles that aren't related to Tabula Rasa?
Is Guild Wars 2 at risk?!
They made some pretty significant mistakes in the development of that game:
1) Project Administration was bad. Apparently much of the game had to be tossed and re-written due to misunderstandings about the game requirements which were not resolved until far too late in the process. That mistake is *expensive.*
2) Dated design decision: zones. Ever since WoW gave us the seamless transition from area-to-area...creating a huge sense of immersion, the bar has been raised. Gamers feel cheated if they have to walk through some kind of doorway just to move around from zone-to-zone on a planet. Without that since of "bigness," players find it hard to justify a $15 a month fee.
3) Bad Landscape design....the landscape frequently contains huge and lengthy cliff walls...with no way to scale them. The problem with this is...if you suddenly realize that you took a wrong turn a ways back and now you are on the wrong side of that cliff wall, you have to backtrack a significant distance to get around it. That is a frequent annoyance that drives people away from the game.
4) Too little variety on the PvP. WoW battlegrounds also raised the bar. They have no equivalent. What is available for PvP in TR just doesn't stack up to player expectations.
Those are the major points on my list. There are plenty of other things that the game lacks when compared to its primary competitor...but I think these top 4 are what drove 80% of the players away. If these issues are resolved, the other issues wouldn't have put the game in the red, IMO.
s/consequentially/subsequently/
Where is this this bloody red moongate ?
... Long live the King!
Thank you for everything. The Ultima series over the years has brought me countless joy(and a bit of sorrow as well). Good luck in all that you do, Lord British.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
go and live in a monastery?
Garriott should buy back the rights to Ultima single player games and develop remakes of the Ultima series.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The Total Perspective Vortex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Gold_(spaceship)#Total_Perspective_Vortex
Think of what it does. From the book:
"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
Which is like putting someone in a space ship, have them look back at the earth, and understand how small earth is, and how small each of us are compared with the earth.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Just wondering...
who wants to bet he is going to start screwing up WoW next?
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
"He needs to care for the alien fetus growing inside his stomach."
... so he can help start the alien space invasion!... oh no!... This would also explain his sudden career change and it would also explain John Carmack's move into Aerospace!... see it explains a lot! ... they are both aliens!
:)
Maybe aliens have already replaced him with a replica?
Maybe the Armadillo's are behind it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
Then again, maybe we have both had too much coffee today.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Now that he's a Space Ace he has to rescue a princess he goes time travelling. He's just cleaning up some loose ends first.
MMOs have a shelf life? Really? Since when? Thus far, I'm not aware of ANY MMOs failing. Hellgate London probably will, but it'll be the first. Ultima Online, Everquest and the like are STILL online. Not just online, under active development. A new UO expansion was released in 2007, and there's another slated for 2009.
Thus far, it seems MMOs just keep going and going. They peak and then player count drops off, but it doesn't fall to zero it levels off and you just keep running. Even MMOs that were fucking disasters on launch, like EVE Online and Shadowbane are still running.
I'm not seeing this "shelf life" you are talking about. Ultima Online is now over a decade old. That's some staying power.
Ever since I read Heinlein's 'Man Who Sold the Moon' I've hoped we'd see an entrepreneur take on the role of 'D.D. Harriman'. Lord British would be a good fit. Hopefully the perspective he gained from his space trip is outbound rather than Earth related.
[NT]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
did he have Martian Dreams after his Ascension? Is he going to have an Exodus?
http://www.object404.com
Then again, maybe we have both had too much coffee today. :)
DDDDDDdoooonnn'nn'ttt bbeee sssiilllllllyyyy! Nnnnnoo sssssuuccchh tttthhhinngggg!!!!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Making games that don't suck.
Oh wait... that hasn't been since Ultima Online, pre-UO:R. It was all downhill from there.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Interesting that this is in almost total opposition to the Total Perspective Vortex.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Or perhaps you've been watching the X-Files recently.
I wouldn't be too worried about Armadillo Aerospace, at least yet. If the name changes to Union Aerospace Corporation or Roush, then it may be time to worry.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Maybe aliens have already replaced him with a replica? ... so he can help start the alien space invasion!... oh no!... This would also explain his sudden career change and it would also explain John Carmack's move into Aerospace!... see it explains a lot! ... they are both aliens!
Maybe the Armadillo's are behind it!
No way, man. Garriot was possessed by an alien when he went up to the ISS (it's occupied entirely by aliens now). Carmack is still human, he's one of the few who knows the truth and is trying to boot-strap a space-militia to fight off the invasion!
The enemies of Democracy are
All that was heard was Garriott's voice booming "Kal Ort Por" and a following puff of smoke.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
That's his name in Tabula Rasa.
the message it left you was "Woosh!"
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.
Software executives R moving to aerospace in droves. Once cashing in on their employees success, they almost never reinvest in the business which made their money.
The rumor is he's going to start a new Linux distro called Ohana!
Apparently motivated by his recent trip into space, perhaps he has found a higher purpose while orbiting so high above the earth. o/~ far beneath the ship the world is mourning they don't realize he's alive no one understands but Major Tom sees now the life commands this is my home I'm coming home o/~
Maybe when he realized that you could see his ego from space he decided that his work was complete?
He didn't produce the first, the most successful or even a particularly good online game: so why would he be "king"?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I hate to break it to you, but computer games were being made before 3 years ago. If you were a gamer in the 80s, you KNOW that Garriot is indeed a king. Ever heard of the Ultima series?
If you were gaming in the 80s you are either -
A) trolling hard
B)living in an ignorant state of denial
C)lying
about the "washed up has-been" crap.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Actually, we're all aliens now. You're the last human left who we've not infected. And, until you posted this message and we got your IP address, we had no idea where you were. Just stay there and wait. It will be easier that way, trust us.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Looks like somebody completely missed the connection with online games.
nt
He's not a king!
He was Lord British. Not King British.
No, Garriot is no longer the king. Sorry, to maintain the status of King in the arena, you need to keep innovating and creating new stuff.
And yes, I've been gaming for as long as people have been able to game electronically in their home.
I enjoyed his series, although I felt some of the ultima where way over hyped*. Ultima online was cool, for a while but The lag and getting jumped changing 'zones' got tedious.
*Geeks over hyping something? The deuce you say!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, you did. General British is the persona Garriott adopted for Tabula Rasa. Similar sounding enough to Lord British for it to be recognised by the fans, modern enough for it to make sense in a sci-fi setting without sounding anachronistic.
No, you just need someone to dethrone you. Ultima IV is still the pinnacle of FRPG. Therefore, Garriott is still "King".
Did you give up playing computer RPGs in the late 80's or early 90's? I can't imagine any other reason why you would claim Ultima 4 as the pinnacle of that genre. And even if one were too accept that claim, it makes Garriott, at best, the king of FRPG's. That's a far cry from the "king of online games" that the article claims. And frankly, even if I believed Ultima 4 to be the best FRPG, I would not give Garriott the title of king of FRPGs. He was dethroned when he willingly left the genre for shoddy sci-fi MMORPGs.
The aliens have his mind now, so he will do as they bid. This is what happens to all the top people, the aliens get em and suck out there ability to have will power against them.
Illuminati forever..............
He paved the way for how MMOs are to be now. Sad news, although Tabula Rasa was deadpool! Btw Check out http://www.jobstaxi.com/ New Jobs. Nixon Inc.. oDesk. Rockstar New England. FixYa. Snap. Gorilla Nation.
...the only video game developer who can truthfully say "My worst day was when I got killed by an exploiting terrorist".
Ironically, "exploiting terrorists" encapsulates all that was awesome and frustrating about UO in a compact two-word phrase.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
As a fellow geezer, I hate to break it to you, but a fair portion of the population has never seen Ultima III, and even fewer know what M.U.L.E. is.
The kids these days, nothing before Halo ever existed.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
M.U.L.E.!!! Thanks for reminding me of that awesome game. I had to go fire up my Atari 800 emulator and play that for a bit!!
"But this one goes to 11!"