Electronic Arts Shuts Down Origin Systems?
Posted by
simoniker
on Tue Feb 24, 2004 12:43 AM
from the passing-to-the-other-side dept.
from the passing-to-the-other-side dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Waterthread.org has picked up the following on the studio that brought us the popular Ultima and Wing Commander series: 'Game company Electronic Arts is expected to tell its Austin employees this week that the company will be shutting down Origin Systems, its Austin operations, according to sources. Employees will be offered an opportunity to relocate to California or accept a severance package. Company officials could not be reached for comment. Austin is the #3 location in the U.S. for game development with more than 50 companies making major contributions to the game industry, including game development, publishing, tools and middleware and chips and hardware." The Wing Commander CIC has also posted a epitaph for Origin."
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Electronic Arts Shuts Down Origin Systems?
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Damn... (Score:5, Interesting)
RIP to the best of the old-school studios, from a former OSI employee and servant of the Crown.
Everybody else just made crappy games. We created worlds.
Re:Ultima V Dungeon Siege Remake (Score:4, Interesting)
Just last week I bought Dungeon Siege, the first computer game I've bought in a year, just so I could play the fan-based remake of Ultima V featured on slashdot the other day [slashdot.org]. It was a neat concept to remake an old (but loved) game.
There's also a user created Wing Commander mod for Vega Strike [sourceforge.net].
I really dig the user-created remakes. They're just so crappy in comparison to the originals.
-----------
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* Monkey may not be available in your state. *
Re:Damn it's true... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.hexagon.tk/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 15 2003, @09:48PM)
EA kills another great developer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:EA kills another great developer (Score:5, Informative)
Watch out (re: link in parent post) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EA kills another great developer (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.whitehouser.com/)
In hindsight, though, OSI has been in decline since the U8 days. EA may have preserved OSI's existance by buying them out, but their managerial influence certainly did not seem to help the company. Everything else that went wrong in the company is, to me, largely irellevant compared to, or caused directly/indirectly by, the EA buyout.
Sadly, OSI's future probably rested on the success of Ultima IX. UO was good for them financially(or so I am told), but it obviously was not enough to make the dev house survive independant of the consolidated EA house. I still remember seeing Myst-like screenshots of the original U9 concept years ago(1995) before any serious work on UO had begun. I also remembered reading that the old U9 project was suspended to put work into developing UO, and that when focus returned to U9, the entire old project was tossed, forcing them to start anew(and then start over again and again as design concepts changes. Avatar Raider anyone?).
It would seem to me that, had they never made UO in the first place, or had they finished Ultima 9 first, the house might still be alive today. Maybe.
Re:EA kills another great developer (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday June 21 2004, @04:25PM)
UO was released with just as many bugs as U9, and _stayed_ buggy. In fact, around 2002 when I last tried it, they were still blundering through patches which broke 2 things for each 1 bug fixed. I've seen patches released and rolled back within 4 hours... during which, they wrecked pure havoc upon those unlucky to download them. Patches which seemed to never have been tested at all.
UO also was released in a sad unfinished state, which since then has become the de-facto standard release for MMO games.
For starters, half the skills were either totally useless, or useless for anyone who wasn't playing a grief player. E.g., tinkering skill could only create trapped chests. Except no NPC ever opened a chest. So in effect the only use was to kill newbies.
The gameplay and game design itself was a poorly thought out catastrophe. Most of the issues were already known and tested for decades on MUDs, but UO just had to repeat every single mistake in the book.
E.g., it was dead predictable that someone will deadlock their original economy. The problem of people actually working hard to take non-renewable resources out of the game -- e.g., by stashing them in vaults or in the inventory of 100 non-played avatars -- was known on MUDs for ages. And blimey, who would have guessed? The exact same issue deadlocked UO's economy.
And how about listening to the customers? It took _years_ of screaming in anguish for a non-PK option, which Origin mostly just ignored. UO lost players hand-over-fist over that issue. Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft basically made "we're the place where you won't get repeadedly PK'ed like on UO" their _main_ claim to glory.
It was already known on MUDs that purely player-enforced justice does not work. Ever. RL justice works only because you do care about what happens to your RL self. But on virtual world you can _count_ on having a hefty share of players who just don't care about their virtual avatars. There is _nothing_ you can do in-character to keep them inline, because they aren't in-character to start with.
Etc.
Basically I'm saying that UO and U9 were both equally half-arsed efforts. Which one came first and which was delayed... does it even make that much of a difference? I believe that even if they came out the other way around, they'd still have been half-arsed. And still, basically, just a sympthom of the fact that something was already rotten at Origin.
Re:This will NOT kill Ultima Online. (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday October 04 2002, @09:21AM)
Read some of the articles.
This is not the end for Ultima
ultima Online will still continue. I'm sure it will change, especially if people take the sevrense package instead of relocating. But it will still be there.
Re:This will NOT kill Ultima Online. (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @10:49PM)
1: The next publish (what UO calls updates) is mostly (90%) about the ability to move characters between shards (seperate UO worlds)
2: The event moderaters have been removed and will
3: It is almost impossible to BUY THE GAME in stores anymore. Next to no brick and morter stores carry it and EA does next to no advertizing for it. So how does it attract new customers?
Re:This will NOT kill Ultima Online. (Score:4, Informative)
Here's some linkage: (Score:5, Informative)
Source 2 [ign.com]
Here ya'll go! Free Ultima Online to mourn the loss of OSI with.
Oh my (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.alexkrupp.com/)
Re:Oh my (Score:5, Informative)
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although it still sucks that some people will be losing there job. The PC gaming biz is grim these days.
I hear they've been outsourced. . . (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.sco.com/)
Ah well... (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday January 18 2006, @06:02PM)
I have to say though, Origin had about the best tagline of any gaming company...
Origin - We Create Worlds.
Not anymore, I guess.
Re:Ah well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultima 7 & SI are still two of the greatest and most fun games ever invented in my book, though. Too bad U8 was downhill and U9 wasn't even done. I hope Mr. Garriot can afford to keep his house with the secret room and the 5000 watt stereo - it would be a shame for him to have to get creative and make a good game again.
Re:OK. And... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people don't feel too bad about killing chickens for meat since chickens don't appear to be persons. Unfortunately, many also see nothing wrong with ignoring the effects of relocations and whatnot on the people at the company.
Re:OK. And... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ssinow.com/ | Last Journal: Monday October 01, @02:25PM)
I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but while corporate management may be heartless, it usually isn't malicious. You make it sound like they're moving people just to have something to do.
Where is #1 and #2? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday February 23 2004, @04:55PM)
Where is the #1 and #2 location for game development?
Re:Where is #1 and #2? (Score:4, Interesting)
About 4 blocks from my house is the huge EA Canadian headquarters (950 employees) where they do all the sports games, and then downtown we have Radical Entertainment, Relic, Threewave, Rockstar Vancouver, Barking Dog, etc...
Not a surprise. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not a surprise. (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Saturday December 07 2002, @12:34AM)
I, too, have been to Origin's site, and yes, it is very impressive indeed.
Re:Not a surprise. (Score:5, Informative)
Why relocate to California? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.smo.uhi.a...clora/riomhaire.html)
Re:Why relocate to California? (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday April 27 2005, @11:26AM)
#2 Activision [activision.com], THQ [corporate-ir.net], Vivendi [vugames.com], and a host of studios both publisher owned and independent are located there.
LA is the place to be in you are a video game maker who likes to buy all the talent, suck it dry as fast as possible and then fire that talent and start again. Whoa, did I just hear someone describe EA?
Re:Why relocate to California? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday December 07 2005, @10:41PM)
That's EA to a freakin' T, and it practically brings tears to my eyes the projects and franchises they've run into the ground. Okay, namely it's just Ultima Online 2 that will never see the light of day, and it boils my blood that EA dropped the ball on that one! They're riding UO 1 like tobacco companies ride cigarette sales, and
Im suprised it took so long... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://alliance.sf.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 08 2007, @11:57AM)
After EA bought up Origion Wing Commander went into it's declining stages ending up with the catasrophe that was Privateer 2 on Erin's part and the nuclear holocaust that was the movie (On Chris' part). Thus died one of the finest and most groundbreaking gaming series in history.
I never paid much attention to Ultima but I knew it was a matter of time till EA did the same thing to it, I just read an article about after the success of EverQuest EA starting forcing Origin to make Ultima more Everquest-ish and less Ultima-like and thus removing and in forcing those changes it involved making Ultima un-Ultima-like thereby alienating Ultimas fans.
WAY TO GO ELECTRONIC ARTS - You have sucessfully killed two of the longest run and best gaming series there ever were. May you continue to spoon feed people things like Madden ever year with miminal changes and another $50 price tag.
---------------------
To the Origin Guys: Look to the community, we are with you, many would help you start anew to become what you once were. Weh ave confident in you guys.
Re:Im suprised it took so long... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.blacklance.org | Last Journal: Tuesday June 10 2003, @02:50AM)
I hope you'll also realize that the Wing Commander movie really had nothing to do with EA. When Chris Roberts left the company after Wing Commander 4 he negotiated for the movie rights to Wing Commander for a certain number of years. After that, there wasn't any EA involvement to speak of.
Re:Im suprised it took so long... (Score:4, Informative)
play Ultima Online like its 1999! (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.lordsofdeath.com/)
There are a whole lot of UO emulated player run shards alive and kicking today. Many are attempting to recreate that era for UO which changed, like I said when EA gutted the OSI team. I have found www.preuor.com [preuor.com] the best shard for that purpose. They have meticulously made efforts to recreate the small things that made UO great. Try it, you'll be surprised how fun a 2d game mmorpg can actually be and best of all its free (no monthly fee or game purchase required).
www.preuor.com [preuor.com]
Goodbye to the pedigree (Score:5, Insightful)
Killing Origin is just another sad episode in the tale of "EA Lames". We'll see more game console stupidity with John Madden screaming about football, but truly original game concepts are dying, as are the companies who made them.
I will lift a Guiness to my youth, and the hours of fun I had with Origin tonight.
Just what Austin needs (Score:4, Informative)
(http://traumstadt.org/)
It is true (Score:5, Informative)
1. They are not done with UOX. It is in Beta. Origin Beta or real Beta, who knows. They think they can move development to california for the Earth and Beyond people to finish?!?!?!
2. There were 230 people working there.
3. The studio management may have known, but I know they were still hiring and relocating people to Austin several weeks ago.
4. This was the worst kept secret in Austin. Everyone knew last week. Except the employees.
5. UO support moving to california.
6. Origin owned that building.
I have been gone from there for almost 6 years, but I spent 10 there. It is a little sad, but not unexpected. EA tried to shut it down back in '99, but pulled back from the brink for some reason. Feel sorry for their new employees, especially the new GM.
-Donut, Origin Alumni 1990-1999
Ultima VI, Ultima VII, Strike Commander, Serpent Isle, Pacific Strike, Longbow, Longbow2, A-10.
Here we go again... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 02 2005, @10:07PM)
EA has bought its way to the top. Bullfrog, Westwood, Maxis, Origin have all fallen before the giant. Eliminating whole divisions--even highly successful ones--is nothing new. Just ask the people [garagegames.com] from Dynamix who got chopped shortly after Tribes 2 became a hit.
Infogrames, er, Atari, is no better. They went a from a small publishing house to one of the titans of the games industry by buying everything they could. Adopting the name "Atari," plastering it over their corporate monolith as a relatively cheap facade (the company was only a few million dollars) is, to me, the most cynical thing I've seen from a gaming company in a long time. Yet, there is no media outrage, not even a notice that they're a completely different company that adopted the same name.
Creativity is dead. There are no more juicy steaks of games, no more Command and Conquers or Homeworlds, the games that bring gaming into a whole new dimension, at least from the major houses. Instead, we get reheated leftovers or ground chuck, tossed on a bun and served up McDonalds style. Yet another game in the same series, yet another Sims expansion back--Is this the future of gaming that you want? This is the future of gaming as in the hands of EA and "Atari." EA did not produce a new, original game in 2003 [slashdot.org]--only rehashes and expansions.
Support an independent developer with fresh ideas, or support an open-source game. Look to the endless parade of closed studios and stifled creativity, sequels following the same pattern, only with few shiny new features. Is this the way you want your games? Or do you want something fresh and new?
"Creativity is dead" (Score:4, Interesting)
Even things regarding a game's difficulty is being gutted. Whens the last time anyone here played the singleplayer mode of any game and actually had trouble with it?
Ahh Ultima (Score:5, Funny)
Though there are some great ultima projects being worked on such as the lazarus project [u5lazarus.com]
Re:Ahh Ultima (Score:5, Informative)
U4: word of passage that allows entry into the abyss
U5: allows entry into dungeon Doom in the center of the underworld
Origin's games (Score:5, Informative)
publisher
3DO, CyberMage, Super Wing Commander
Amiga
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness,Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny,Ultima VI: The False Prophet,Wing Commander
Apple IIe/c/c+
Ogre,Omega,Ultima,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
Atari 400/800/XL/XE
Autoduel,Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
Atari ST
Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny,Ultima VI: The False Prophet
Commodore 64
Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny,Ultima VI: The False Prophet,Ultima: The First Age of Darkness
MSX
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (Pony Canyon),Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
Macintosh
Super Wing Commander,Ultima III: Exodus,Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
PC
Abuse,CyberMage: Darklight Awakening,Privateer 2: The Darkening,Shadowcaster,Ulitma IX: Ascension,Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness,Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (Pony Canyon),Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima IX: Ascension,Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds,Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny,Ultima VI: The False Prophet,Ultima VII Part II: Serpent Isle,Ultima VII: The Black Gate,Ultima VII: The Forge of Virtue,Ultima VIII: Pagan,Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams,Wing Commander,Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi,Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger,Wing Commander: Privateer,Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams,Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire
PlayStation
Crusader: No Remorse,Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger,Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom
Saturn
Crusader: No Remorse
Sega CD
Wing Commander
Super NES
Wing Commander: Secret Missions
developer
3DO
CyberMage,Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Amiga
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness,Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny,Ultima VI: The False Prophet
Wing Commander,Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Apple IIe/c/c+
Ogre,Omega,Ultima,Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
Atari 400/800/XL/XE
Autoduel,Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness,Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima: The First Age of Darkness
Atari ST
Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny,Ultima VI: The False Prophet
Commodore 64
Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny,Ultima VI: The False Prophet,Ultima: The First Age of Darkness
Game Boy
Ultima: Runes of Virtue,Ultima: Runes of Virtue II
MSX
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (Pony Canyon),Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
Macintosh
Super Wing Commander,System Shock,Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
NES
Ultima: Exodus,Ultima: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima: Warriors of Destiny
PC
Crusader: No Regret,Crusader: No Remorse,CyberMage: Darklight Awakening,Strike Commander,Ultima Collection,Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness,Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (Pony Canyon),Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress,Ultima III: Exodus,Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar,Ultima IX: Ascension,Ultima Online,Ultima Online: Age of Shadows,Ultima Online: Lord Bl