Richard Garriott To Sue Former Employer NCSoft 107
Om writes "Richard Garriott, lead designer of the now-defunct NCSoft game Tabula Rasa, is suing former employer NCSoft to the tune of $24,000,000. GamePolitics has details on the legal filings, but contrary to official postings from 'General British' himself, it appears this split wasn't exactly amicable."
The thread about this news got nuked on L2 forum (Score:5, Interesting)
EA Bought Bioware (Score:5, Interesting)
EA owns the Ultima license. Bioware needs to hire Richard Garriot tomorrow and remake Ultima. The first three Ultima games had plots going all over the place. Most of the games don't run on modern computers, and many gamers today never played a single-player Ultima. But thanks to Ultima Online, they recognize the name.
Use the Dragon Age engine that Bioware made, and remake the original Ultima trilogy. I know he doesn't want to work for EA, but working for EA under Bioware probably wouldn't be that bad. Please, make this happen.
Re:The Letter Was Written by NCsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be a bad assumption. Google "Richard Gariott space" and you'll get a long list of news articles on his visit to the ISS, topped by an official web site for the event. He launched on Oct. 12 and returned to Earth Oct. 23.
Google Owen K and you get his dad - making them teh first father / son pair to fly into space and both did it to space stations. (Skylab and ISS)
Re:EA Bought Bioware (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the interesting things about the Ultima V: Lazarus project, which was a remake of U5 based on the Dungeon Siege engine, was that several spells and features from the original 8-bit release couldn't be implemented safely. (You can't teleport around in dungeons, among other things.)
The old-school 2D worlds had some real advantages when it came to game-design freedom. If you wanted to implement an airplane, you changed the player icon into a 14x16-pixel airplane, made the speaker play a repetitive clicking sound, and turned off collision detection. Need a teleport spell? Just generate pairs of random numbers from 0-63 and accept the first pair that lands on an empty tile. It took about 10 minutes to add a new monster via the 2D tile editor; no need to submit a request to the art director, coordinate with the animators, and hope you're not setting the schedule back another week or blowing the texture-memory budget.
Bottom line, the first three Ultimas were chock full of stuff that would be a nightmare to implement in a modern game engine. Lighting, animation, physics, sound, and so forth don't just complicate the code base, they complicate all aspects of production. It'd be comparable to the difference between writing a chapter in a novel about dragons attacking a city, and shooting the scene in a $200M movie. Not to say it can't be done, or that it shouldn't be done, but what you end up with will not be a very faithful heir to the originals.
Re:EA Bought Bioware (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it is largely forgotten how much RG pushed the technical boundaries. Ultima 1 had some weird elements like space flight. Would it be removed for technical reasons in a newer title, or would it be removed because it was wacky and took away from the original title?
From a story perspective, I'd like to see him revisit the original trilogy of kill-the-big-baddie and try to put a spin on it. He put that concept on its head, in Ultima IV-VI, but those games feature abstract concepts that are best handled in sequels to established properties when the fans have already bought in.
And the nice aspect of working with Bioware (and EA financing the affair) is that technical limitations should be minor.
I think the world of Ultima 1 has a lot left on the table. Those of us who know and love Ultima, basically only really know 1 of the 4 original continents. I'm really curious to examine a story that looks how magic affects a fantasy society. What kind of world is it when some people can afford resurrections? At what point is magic feared and outlawed? And what are the repercussions of a man like Mondain acquiring near infinite power?
Check out the Wikipedia page and tell me there isn't ripe potential for a good remake here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_1 [wikipedia.org]
As for limitations with DS/Lazarus, the Lazarus team was working within a toolset. They couldn't rewrite the engine for what they needed. RG working at Bioware would have programmers who could lift technical barriers.