PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon caught up with Richard Garriott and Starr Long at E3 last week and was able to conduct an on-the-spot interview with him. Garriott had some…less than flattering things to say about working under publishers, to begin with:

…frankly our default assumption would have been to do it the old way. But we’ve done that already twice before. We built Origin, sold it to EA, and frankly had to leave. Then we built Destination Games, sold it to NC Soft, eventually had to leave. I thought, “Do we really want to do that again?” because we kind of knew what that cycle’s endgame was going tgo be like. It starts nice, but becomes harder and harder.

And so we thought, “Maybe we’ll try this new way.” However, if you decide to go down the crowdfunding way and it doesn’t work, it really means you’re game over, in the sense that, if we said we wanted to do the spiritual successor to Ultima and the crowdfunding failed, we would never be able to go do the spiritual successor to Ultima with a bigger company. Because they’d look at that and go, “Well it didn’t work there. Why would we pick it up?” So it was a huge faith bet for us. Frankly, it was a scary faith bet for us to try this other way, because we didn’t know how it would play out. Because it’s actually pretty hard to go and be a multi-million dollar crowdfunded campaign.

He also praised the crowdsourced content that Shroud of the Avatar has received from its burgeoning fan community:

so the community was quick to go, “Well, I’m a composer, I’ll make you some music!” But you listen to the stuff they put up on SoundCloud and go, “Yeah, well, you’re no Ken Arnold. Thank you very much for your interest, but here’s what’s not right about it in composition or orchestration, or instrumentation.” And finally as the community began to self-organize around these various disciplines, they came up and said, “Richard, give us clear communication as to what you’re looking for.” And that’s fair.

So we had a Google Hangout and wrote up a handful of docs, and I said, “Here are these pieces that I really liked and here’s why, and here’s some pieces even in Ultima that I’m less happy with, and here are some pieces we could buy on the Internet from royalty free sources, but that’s really not the right way to go—and why. So if you can beat these goals, then more power to you.”

And…they went from batting zero to batting 1000 — just by clearer communication between us and the community.

And, of course, the discussion invariably turned toward the Ultima series:

Ultima 7 was the last Ultima that I designed the story and every character and pretty much every word they said. But I did that in concert with Warren Spector, who was kind of my partner in the writing of that game. Now with Tracy Hickman in this case, equally well qualified writer, I’ve re-drafted the story three full times, written out every NPC and every line of dialogue, up until it goes to the real writer, who will wordsmith it. But I know the story intimately, and I’m very happy with the story personally, because I wrote the damn story. Which in those bigger teams was just not possible.

So for people who liked Ultima 4 – 7, in particular, or Ultima Online, we’re doing that work again ourselves. It will very much be like what people hopefully remember fondly. Because it’s being done the way it was done in those days.

There was some issue raised with Garriott’s statements regarding his design of Ultima 7, as one might expect. But even if there’s some error in the particulars and details, the takeaway here is that Richard Garriott is much more heavily involved in the story of Shroud of the Avatar than he has been in any game — Ultima 9 excepted, I wonder? — since The Black Gate. And that’s probably a good thing, even if to date we’ve had very little indication as to just what sort of story Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues will be telling us.

Wes Fenlon also had a chance to jump into a Shroud of the Avatar gameplay session, and came away noting that the cult of personality surrounding Lord British is still very much alive.