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Gamespy has conducted an interview with Richard Garriott about the Ultimas, Lineage and other things. Certainly a must-read for RPG fans. Here's an exc erpt:
Richard Gariott by day. GameSpy: Was it a bittersweet departure leaving Origin?
Richard Garriott: Oh, totally. I'd never had it in my mind to do so, though I'd already made the decision many, many years before to leave the Ultima series. If you look at the franchise, I started it when I was 19 years old and it had gone on for 20+ years. So a lot of aspects of the world (the names of characters, the system of virtues, etc.) and a great deal of the design momentum was put in place decades before I thought I was a competent game designer. Hence, I've always been very eager to start from scratch and create a new reality to flex my design skills. Which, if you're familiar with Tabula Rasa, may be of interest, since those words mean "blank slate." It's the exciting part of starting on that game.
But even today, I wish that things had worked out better with Electronic Arts. It's ironic that the top selling online product at EA, even today, is Ultima Online. We constantly tried to tell them that we understood the online game business and give advice, but the company had a very different agenda. Even the four or five other massively multiplayer games they've launched have flopped compared to Ultima Online.
On the one hand, I feel vindicated that we were giving good advice, but unfortunately there was a substantial disagreement as to the future of online gaming there, and it just wasn't possible to sustain the relationship. |
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Richard Garriott Interview at Gamespy
