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."

Classic Ultima vs Online

[aridhol]

I've been a fan of Ultima ever since I got Ultima IV on my Commodore; I've since gone back and played the entire central series.

I look at what they're marketing as Ultima these days, and have to wonder what the heck happened. Why did Blackthorne go from being a corrupted nobleman to being a cyborg? When did Britannia get all ultra-high-tech?

I don't play online games. I like to go through at my own pace, on my own schedule, and complete a game. I don't want some 31337 kiddie to come along and screw up the game by being completely out of character or by cheating. And I don't want to pay extra to play a game that I've already bought.

So my Ultima experience is limited to the "real" Ultimas. I'll never know what accident of history changed Britannia to a sci-fi nightmare. And I won't lose any sleep over it.

Re:Tabula Rasa

[$$$$$exyGal]

Here's what Garriott says about the name "Tabula Risa":

There's a number of ways to interpret "clean slate." We originally picked that name less because of subject matter than the need to start over again. Interestingly, if you go into the way the game is designed, we didn't actively choose to have the fiction behind the game support that title, but the background tale we selected actually wound up fitting the name quite well.

Interesting that the name didn't necessarily have anything to do with the actual product.

--sex [slashdot.org]

Re:Cool.

[Reedo]

I honestly can't tell if that's sarcasm of not.

If not, then you must not have heard about Ultima 9? Made by a guy with a solid reputation (Ultima!) and was heralded by Origin/EA for it's cutting-edge graphics technology. It released and was one of the biggest disasters in recent memory. It was so buggy that Origin remastered the game [ultima-ascension.com] with all the patches and sent them out to registered users who bought Ultima 9. They also shut down the message boards [ultima-ascension.com] shortly after release because of the massive amount of complaints.

Two kinds of Internet, two kinds of online games

[redbeard_ak]

Some folks think that MMOGs are the next generation of MUDs, but I think not.

MMOGs are the AOL of the internet - a prepackaged, lowest-common-denominator experience. That's the economics of paying for the bandwidth and paying for the servers - you need so many customers. Because of that, MMOGs are simply not going to be as challenging as the single-player games in difficulty, but are still not going to allow everyone to complete the game. What will be challenging for the 10 hour a day player will be impossible for the 10 hour a week or month player.

The MUDs were so great because of the connection between community and the creators of the content - often there was overlap.

There are some open-source mmog projects (mmog open-server) [sourceforge.net] and Nel [nongnu.org]. There is some hope of community-driven content in mmog gaming. Of course, there is also, NeverWinterNights [bioware.com], which although proprietary, still is really taking off in terms of its community [neverwinte...ctions.com] and its player-created content [neverwinte...ctions.com].

Akalabeth!

[feed_those_kitties]

Wow, does that bring back memories.

Spending hours on my old Apple ][, trying to avoid the 'a thief stole some food' message...

*sigh*...

I found one spot in one dungeon where using a magic attack would double all your stats. Do that several times, and you'd become a killing machine. I remember attacking with the bow, and killing things off the screen...

*sigh*...

Garriott's Halloween Haunted House

[mr.henry]

Richard Garriott used to open his Austin house to the public for a pretty spectacular Haunted House. As I recall, people camped out front for days to make sure they got one of the limited spots.

I always thought that was cool of the guy. I think he's moved out of that house and into a "castle" on some serious acreage, not too far from his old place.

It's been awhile...

[vsavatar]

I haven't heard from Warren Spector in a long time. I used to have phone conversations occassionally when he was at Origin and Looking Glass. Back then me and a few others were trying to put together a gaming project of our own, and Mr. Spector was kind enough to give us some thoughts on how to go about doing it, what was required, what some dos and don'ts of the industry were, and the like. He was always pretty cool and I really admired most of the games he produced in addition to the fact that he was never too high and mighty to take some time out and chat with the little guy about the business and how to succeed. Richard Garriot is a lot like Warren in some ways. He was always very down to earth, I loved the games he produced (especially the Ultima series), and I was supposed to meet him at Dragon*Con in '97, but with all the work being done on UO he wasn't able to show up. It's unfortunate that he had to resign from Origin, but I can fully understand it with the way EA raped the company and changed it into something that RG had never intended. It's nice to hear that both these guys are still around and kicking. Maybe there's yet some hope for more good games to come out.

Re:Classic Ultima vs Online

[DrCode]

I agree, and also have another reason for playing single-person games: I like being the hero. In single-person games, you get to save the world, solve the mystery, or defeat the evil pirate LeChuck.

One game designer (forgot who) suggested that the ideal multi-player game would have far more NPC's than real players. That way, each human player could still be the center of attention, and get involved in complex plots, only occasionally running into other humans.

Re:Two kinds of Internet, two kinds of online game

[mao che minh]

That's true for the modern day MMORPGs (to a certain extent), but if you played Ultima Online in it's hayday (I.E. before EA took the reigns), then you would remember the unity between developer and customer. Once the corporation mind-set wriggled it's way into development the entire experience changed drastically.

For one, numbers don't lie. Ultima Online's subscription totals dropped drastically in the year that EA started imposing it's will. I played that game, Ultima Online, before the EA integration, and it really was surreal how much weight the consumer's voice carried. After EA came on the scene the corporate influence was so evident that each and every little change carried it's stench. It was amazing, really, now that I actually take the time to reflect. UO had started to become a EverQuest (Sony's baby) clone with an outdated engine. Subscriptions went from 500,000 strong to 220,000 in a very brief time - the most reported cause for quitting wasn't because of the competition (in fact, many EverQuest players were actually first time MMORPG customers). The leading cause of quitting wasn't a bad product. Most people that quit UO in the now infamous exodus was because of the disloyalty that EA showed it's long term customers in the form of terrible support, a change to a time-sink-centric experience, and the elimination of intense community interaction in game development. Hell, they even cut their customer support staff in half at a time when more people then ever were trying their game out!

However, I don't know how right I am. My info comes from first hand experience as a player and the occassional chat with my pal that worked in customer support for Origin (the company that runs UO under the EA umbrella). He was laid off right after I quit playing a year and half or so ago.

Well, in any event, I hear that Ultima Online subscriptions have gained by about 15,000 over the past year since they started listening to their consumer again. The new expansion [uo.com] has caused a little buzz amongst the MMORPG crowd as well.

Still getting no respect....

[Holdstrong]

after all of these years, he stil never mentions them.... I mean am I the only one who really enjoyed that stepchild Ultima - Martian Dreams ???

It's entirely possible that I am being nostalgic here, but where else could you play a killer game and in some small way enlighten your knowledge of classics, and science and politics? The NPC's were outstanding! I remember Freud, Tesla, Twain, Lenin, Roosevelt - heck I even recall reading parts of their intellectual works within the game!!

I enjoy a good scifi/fanatsy trip as much as the next guy, but in my book, on content alone, Martian Dreams was the standout of Garriots crop. Ambitious and smart.

But then again, I really enjoyed Savage Empire too.

Timely Review of Garriot /UO

[beacher]

EA/OSI is staging their latest publish to the servers right now, and there's some bit of a scandal there.
EA was offering a new landmass to the playerbase, only if they ordered through Gamestop, EBGames, Amazon, or EA's own store. The new client was to ship on the 11th. What EA sisn't say was that they were going to dump all of their packages at UPS's Louisvilla Air hub at 2AM, ensuring that the packages got delivered that day. A lot of people are crying foul, but it really doesn't seem to matter..... The servers haven't come back up yet (they said it would take 4-5 hours.. it's been about 12 now..) One of the servers has come up and I've seen turtles **** faster.
They have changed a bunch of merchant and housing rules in order to generate more subscriptions and it just keeps getting worse and worse. They don't fix the nastier bugs and they ban people that accidentally stumble on bugs (There's a tile that you can step on and send a broadcast message - Fixed? Not that I know of. Bannable? You betcha - Can they lock something over it so nobody steps on it? Sure! Why don't they? No idea)

Garriot said it - "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."

They have no interest in fixing what is wrong, they keep introducing new "features", and their customer service has been offshored by people who don't play the game and english is their second language.

Real frustrating knowing that your pixel crack is been cut with noise...

Re:Classic Ultima vs Online

[Your Login Here]

What I find interesting is that so many players want to have no NPCs. Look at all the player run shards, they all seem to take pride in the fact that everything is run without NPCs.

Of course, the economy on them makes no sense since gold doesn't have any intrinsic value anymore. It isn't worth the time of the people who work on their smith skills to bother asking for money for basic weapons and armour. In fact the entire system degrades into bartering/begging since no one accepts gold (and naturally because of that no one wants gold).

I'm sure you could write an economics paper on the subject.