Sergorn Dragon posted a link to this interview in a comment, but it’s a good interview and so is worthy of direct mention on the main page of the site. 

John Loch, the Middle-Aged Gamer, had the opportunity to interview executive producer Rick Hall, lead designer Jonathan Hanna, senior programmer Kevin Saffel, and writer/community coordinator Amy Sage from the Ultima X: Odyssey development team back in 2008, and the interview he posted to his blog is simply a must-read for anyone curious about this unpublished Origin game, its aim, its beginnings, and its untimely end.

Ultimately, the game failed and died because the team didn’t want to move away from Austin, during a period when EA was attempting to consolidate its development and studios in its California office. It’s difficult to place all the blame on EA for this; they had done the same with Maxis and Westwood before doing so with Origin, and in both cases had seen a majority of each studio’s personnel opt to move to California to continue working on games from there. There wasn’t any particular reason for them to think, I suppose, that it would be any different with Origin.

But there must be something about Austin. Actually, I’m almost certain there is; the city is almost a legend in its own right, and it seems to inspire a very fierce loyalty in the people that move there (especially those who work in various entertainment-related industries, including game development).

Indeed, Rick Hall confirms as much in the interview:

EA had no desire to drop the project. Remember, they made offers to most of the dev team to try to relocate them to California. They absolutely wanted to finish the game. The whole issue was driven by investor relations. Wall Street demands efficiency. At the time, EA had studios all over the world and each studio requires money to operate. It was making EA less efficient than it could have been. Investor pressure caused EA to attempt to consolidate their satellite studios into “hubs”. 

That’s one of the reasons why Westwood was shut down, and many of those developers moved to EA’s San Francisco office. Shortly thereafter, EA attempted further consolidation with both Maxis and the Origin studio. I think the EA execs truly expected a higher percentage of people to accept their offers to relocate the Austin guys to San Francisco. After all, they had success in Las Vegas with Westwood (around 85% accepted the relocation offers), and EA expected to repeat that success with Origin. 

Unfortunately, Las Vegas is very different than Austin. There aren’t many game developers in Las Vegas, so the Westwood guys were going to have to move anyway. They had no other viable options, so they just took up EA’s relocation offers out of convenience. In Austin, there were 20 other game developers right there in town, and practically everyone in Austin knows everyone else. It wasn’t hard for a lot of people to find jobs right there. The end result was definitely not what EA expected. The UXO project died simply because of logistics, not because EA wanted to shut it down.

Again, it’s hard to place all the blame on EA here. Consolidating studios does make sense from a business standpoint, or at least it did back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It would have been much more efficient for a developer to have different groups sharing resources across floors in an office building, as opposed to sharing resources across the span of a continent or an ocean. Even in this day and age, that’s generally true, although the maturation of technologies like CVS and broadband have lessened ineffeciency that geographical separation of studios can cause.

But a decade ago, these things weren’t as pervasive as they are now, and were more costly. And had a goodly number of people from Origin opted to move to San Francisco, UXO would almost certainly have been released. But Austin is…well…Austin, I guess. People from Origin stayed there, found work with other developers in the area (and there are a lot of developers in the area), and Odyssey simply couldn’t continue as a result.

Of course, EA has of course pretty much stepped away from the idea of consolidation now; their biggest and best studios are spread all over the world. DICE is in Sweden. BioWare is in Edmonton (and Austin, and Fairfax, and Montreal). EA has a dedicated Montreal studio and another in Vancouver…and a QA group in Romania. It’s pretty to think that they got off their consolidation bent in no small part due to the downfall of Origin, that they learned that particular lesson and actually took it to heart. It might even be true.