Stratics Interviews Jeff Skalski
Mr. Skalski, as some may recall, was recently appointed to the role of “Ultima Franchise Producer” within BioWare; he is based out of the BioWare Mythic offices in Fairfax, Virginia. Stratics’ Sosaria Reels recently sat down with him for an interview:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BHqWz6m8c0&w=560&h=315]
And hey...it was a Leap Day interview!
At least for the first few minutes, the conversation focuses on Ultima more than on Ultima Online specifically. It’s a pretty wide-ranging discussion that covers a lot of ground, including planned updates to Ultima Online, the hassles and pitfalls of developing for two UO game clients, area revamps within the game, the challenges of player retention…and even a few things related to what else might be in the works concerning Ultima.
(hat tip: UO Journal)
Interesting. I haven’t played Ultima Online in years, but it sounds like good things are happening there.
“And uh ya know we have a couple of other Ultima stuff going on um with the rereleases of the classics that we’ve done through Good Old Games and will soon be doing through Origin.”
“My father’s Intellivision”
Good memories of UO if he’s not lying. No mention of his single-player Ultima experience.
Even though he wasn’t there, he seems apologetic about the decision to make a second client. He also says it’s very hard developing for the two. Too bad he’s a company man.
There are some interesting things happening. Thought it was interesting that he said subscriptions were up.
As for clients, the problem with dual clients goes back to the Third Dawn days. They rolled out a couple of previous clients, Third Dawn and later Kingdom Reborn, and then retracted them. All that work wasted for various reasons. Although technically the current Enhanced Client is using the same engine as KR, which happens to be the same engine under Dark Age of Camelot and Warhamer Age of Reckoning, the artwork is different.
Jeff has acknowledged that UO needs high resolution artwork, and they were working on it, and then backed up a step because he wasn’t satisfied with just high resolution versions of existing artwork, but apparently he wanted it to be better. Not surprising – he did come out of the graphics side of the game industry.
Hopefully they’ll have more of the high resolution artwork finished in time for the 15th Anniversary in September.
But they are running a barebones operation from what it sounds like.
I do hope they do more interviews like this – for once it didn’t sound like it was heavily scripted with all of the answers being run through EA public relations or legal.