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Anyone buying this?

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The relocation packages were actually quite generous and most of the team got offers. The problem is the cost of living in CA compared to Austin is literally more than double...so even with the salary increases, it wasn't even close. Add to that the fact that there are many game companies in Austin that were hiring at the time as well. The majory of the UXO team got jobs in the Austin area within a month. Unfortunately, EA figured they could get about 75-90% of the UXO team to move, but only got 4 people (about 12%).

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Originally posted by Dhruin

HomeLAN - Ultimately, what was the main reason for the decision to cancel the game?

Aaron Cohen - We decided to focus our resources in Ultima Online. The enthusiastic response to the Ultima Online 7th Anniversary Edition and the upcoming expansion pack convinced us to devote all our energy and resources to that game and that community.

Anyone buying this?

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Wisdom in Cancellation

According to the tenured cut-and-paste monkeys over at UO Stratics, Ultima X: Odyssey is officially yesterday's news. To quote EA's own PR:

Today, the decision was made to discontinue the production of Ultima X: Odyssey. This was done in order focus resources and talent on Ultima Online, the upcoming expansion, and an unannounced Ultima Online project.

“With Ultima Online thriving, and with plans for its future taking shape, we made the decision to focus all our resources on that game world,” said Anthony Castoro, producer of Ultima Online. “We look forward to making more exciting announcements about Ultima Online very soon.”

Emphasis mine for reasons that really shouldn't need explaining at this point.

Where do we begin, then? With the risible assertion that UO - the only thing besides Great Escapes Solitaire and Zuma Deluxe that's still giving EA's online division a reason to exist - is "thriving" after posting no appreciable increase in subscriber population for over a year? With the idea that people are still looking forward to Sunsword's "exciting announcements" regarding the future of a title that's effectively dead in the water at this point in time? That merging the surviving team of an fast-paced, Unreal-engine powered slash-'em-up with a ponderous, delicate community-based game based on decade-old technology is going to be anything but trouble for all parties involved?

In order to appreciate the magnitude of this event, let's break it down into the steps EA took to get there.

1. Origin launches Ultima Online under the protective umbrella of Electronic Arts. After a shaky start, the game soon reaches a subscriber base of several hundred thousand subscribers. The gaming industry sits up and takes notice in turn.

2. EverQuest launches, featuring amenities like actual polygons, blatant Elven cleavage and Milo Cooper's performance-enhanced Porsche. EQ's success promptly kick-starts an entire industry dedicated to charging US$49.95 for the two minutes it takes to change xXxXanderCagexXx's online handle to RichardBRiddick.

EA retaliates by announcing that Ultima Online 2 is under development, featuring state-of-the-art technology. And Meerlings. And cyborgs.

3. In spite of the fact that EQ's subscription base is now 100,000 higher than UO's, in spite of the fact that the game is close to beta, and Ultima Online 2 is cancelled in favor of Ultima Online, a game entering its fourth year of operation and now limping behind every conceivable competitor save DikuMUD in terms of technological sophistication.

The UO2 team retaliates by defecting en masse to other companies.

4. Dark Age of Camelot is released, offering players a faction-based alternative to EverQuest with improved graphics. The game becomes the fastest-growing MMOG of its day, eventually amassing a subscription base of 250,000 and establishing Mythic as one of the major players in the industry.

EA retaliates by pumping cash into a game centered around pestering its players with instant messages cribbed wholesale from Z-grade X-Files fan fiction.

5. Final Fantasy XI releases, becoming the first MMOG to beat EverQuest at its own game with state-of-the-art graphics and an expansive gameworld.

EA retaliates by patching in colored nets.

And seeds.

Especially seeds.

6. World of Warcraft, Blizzard's shiny EverQuest clone, is announced, promising to be bigger than Jesus after previous bigger-than-Jesus contenders fail to comprehensively eclipse the King of the Jews.

EA retaliates by announcing the long-awaited Ultima Online 2 II, cleverly disguised under the working title of Ultima X: Odyssey. Nobody cares.

7. Ultima X is cancelled in favor of Ultima Online - a game entering its seventh year of operation and nearly ten years behind the technology curve in spite of one half-assed graphical upgrade and what's coming to feel like ninety expansion packs' worth of questionable content - after quietly leaking team members for months prior.

Bucky retaliates by making a spurious update while ranters everywhere are left giddy at the prospect of the eminent revelation of Ultima Onlina 2 III. Everybody wins.

One could argue long and hard on the wisdom of this decision; in all likelihood, longer than UOX itself deserves. So let's boil this down to just two easy-to-remember observations. One: given that at the time of writing Ultima Online has managed to absorb about five or six titles' worth of development staff, it's faintly embarrassing to realise how little the game has actually advanced since Koster wandered off to give gamers the most realistic Wookiee hair ever seen in an online title. While UXO ex-producer Davis Yee's assertion that "development on UO will be greatly enhanced as we consolidate our resources behind that franchise" sounds good on paper, the most we've got to look forward to in all likelihood is UXO's graphical assets being bundled up and shoved out the door as Ultima Online: Age of Adventure. Certainly, the revolving-door policy of UO's design team means that half of each lead designer's tenure nowadays seems to be dedicated solely to remedying the miscellaneous fuckups of his predecessors; the game's much-abused code, on the other hand, isn't going to get any better anytime soon. Anybody expecting miracles out of this particular set of events is only setting themselves up for crushing disappointment.

Two: This isn't a surprise. No, really. More fundamentally, all this points to the fact that somebody in EA's headcheese department is scared stiff of potentially sapping subscribers from the only truly successful title to come out of the company's development sweatshops. At this point, the smart money is on "unannounced Ultima Online project" being yet another graphical update of the aging warhorse; with Motor City Online and Earth & Beyond Online both buried in a shallow grave while The Sims Online continues to struggle to establish anything close to the kind of market share its moneygivers had envisioned, "taking risks" doesn't quite have the same appeal it did a few years back. Furthermore, all this comes at a time when the amount of "surefire bets" in the industry seems to be dropping exponentially. Miniscule subscription bases for former hot-ticket games like Horizons and Shadowbane, coupled with disappointing numbers for Star Wars Galaxies - at last count, the game widely predicted to crack the MMO industry open and bring in a new rush of players after TSO didn't so much stumble out of the starting gate as drop dead after the first fifty meters - make it easier than ever for suits to pull the plug on projects which require millions of dollars to even hit the shallow waters of beta. Nothing signposts that more clearly than the flurry of high-profile cancellations in the last few weeks; when a widely-recognised license like Warhammer Online gets the rug pulled out from under it and Microsoft cuts itself loose from the MMOG marketplace entirely, it doesn't take a space-age genius to see that the fallout from the fourth-gen flops has yet to settle.

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I think its time EA accepted the fact that its design policy is not compatible with the design policy of creating an Ultima. If I was EA, I would simply design an engine that offers all elements from Ultima 1-9, spells, landscapes, conversation system, riding system and so on, call it The ultima Construction kit, put a sticker saying "MAKE YOUR OWN ULTIMA" on it and sell it. There are enough Ultima enthusiasts who will jump to such an opporunity. After all if they can't make an Ultima, might as well let others and still make money off the venture.

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