Richard Garriott: Few Regrets
Joshua Winter posed a question to Richard Garriott via Twitter, which the good Lord British kindly responded to:
@MadMab_of_ARMOR Few regrets: Bad spelling in U3 quests, shipped U8 way early, let an EA A$$ (JH) drive me out of Origin. Mostly Great!
— Richard Garriott (@RichardGarriott) July 23, 2013
Once again, Garriott calls out Ultima 8 as a regret; it’s the one game you can safely predict he will mention when asked about this topic. The Ultima 3 issue is news to me; maybe I have just never noticed the typos in the game before, but it would appear that Garriott feels strongly about it.
His closing statement — this “JH” at EA that drove him out of Origin — is a curiosity. Can anyone think whom he might be referencing?
(hat tip: Kevin Fishburne)
Pretty sure JH refers to Jack Heistand. He was OSI’s general manager from 1999 to 2001, assigned by EA obviously, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who pushed toward turning Origin into a online only company.
Good call, Sergorn. From http://demiurg.net/games/lb/
Why did you leave Origin?
After years of doing Ultima Next, I was eager to do something not called Ultima. I had been designing a new non-Ultima title for years and even assembled the team to build it, when the unexpected massive success of UO sucked up all the company resources. Eventually, it became clear that no non-Ultima Online product was going to be developed. As obviously interested as I am in Ultima, I needed to be doing something new.
Was it your decision alone?
No. The EA-placed General Manager, Jack Heistand, and I did not see eye to eye, about how to pursue Origin’s future. We agreed that a common future was unlikely.
What changes took place at Origin to finalize your decision to leave the company?
After it was clear that I could not build a non-Ultima game, I briefly pitched doing some mid-sized games for EA.com. EA only wanted java ap style mini games-another strategy I do not support. Finally, they suggested I return to UO2. In my mind the UO2 team had worked for years to prove themselves and take UO2 in a new non-Richard Garriott direction. If I had returned to UO2, it would have meant that I would likely want to remake it into a “Richard Garriott game,” which would have been a disservice to the team and the ship date.
Yeah, I remember that interview.
After Ultima IX, Richard was aiming to create a new kind of MMO he codenamed “X” (as in the roman numeral “Ten”) because he saw it as kind of a spiritual sequel to the Ultima series and aimed to do it after Ultima IX with the same core dev team.
It was to follow some kind of futuristic fantasy kind of game, and was basically a instanced game – the idea was that it had this core massively multiplayer hub area, from where you’d go into deep story driven adventures (going from small dungeon to multi hours multilayared adventures) but either solo or with a small groupe of friends, the idea being that in massively mutiplayers games you couldn’t really be the “hero”, but you could with such a system (you’ll note this is something RG is still hoping to “crak” in SotA).
The important thing here is that it was an instanced game… before instanced exist. Garriott very much was amongst the first to bring this idea.
The concept of X essentially evolved into Tabula Rasa at Destination Games (I remember RG mentionned how Tabula Rasa was essentially his idea with X merged with Starr Long’s idea for UO2 in a way), and indeed Tabula Rasa was originally very much the kind of futuristic fantays he described X to be. But it Evolved into something else entirely (indeed I always wondered if Guild War wasn’t partially the cause : it essentially playd in the same instanced way X/TR was supposed to)
Bottom line: the MMO/RPG world might have gone a very different way had EA greenlighted X – this was one of the obvious reasons RG left Origin in the end.
I remember I read an interview or something (I can’t find my bookmark of it) years ago before Tabula Rasa was released that “instance” was actually Richard Garriott’s idea. Since he merged his company, Destination Games with NC Korea to form NCsoft America, he shared the idea with the whole company.
ArenaNet liked the idea and believed in it so they created Guild Wars. It was called by RG as “Phase 1” of instance technology.
Then Auto-Assault came, it was called “Phase 2” of instance technology.
Phase 3 of instance technology is or was the one implemented in Tabula Rasa, and fair enough, instance in TR was different from the instance tech of AA and GW before it.
That was then. What I can not reconcile was the fact that most of the ex-Blizzard employees in ArenaNet left Blizzy because they can not agree on how to create World of Warcraft. The soon-to-be ANet team want it instance, the other WoW group wants it non-instance. And so the division.
If I remember correctly, the other ex-Blizzy employees that started their own always toyed with instance technology. So someway or another, the game development community of that era already knew of RG’s instance technology idea and they were all racing to implement it.
Well, only RG implemented it correctly, in my view, in Tabula Rasa (even though I’m a big fan of Guild Wars and Auto-Assault).
Again, that’s what I can remember. I may have mixed it already since it was years and years ago before TR was released. IIRC, it was a few months after AA was released when that article showed up in cyberspace.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Yeah I’m pretty sure Richard Garriott was the first one to come up with the basic idea for instance, though he didn’t coin the term “instance” as I recall. He publically talked about it a lot when mentionning X, and that was as early as early ’99 and maybe even late ’98.
The irony though, is that by the time Tabula Rasa came out, instances were already in use everywhere so it wasn’t anymore the unique innovation it was when Richard Garriott thought of the idea. (And Tabula Rasa in the end was far from the “fully instanced” experience X and TR1.0 were supposed to be at the time.)
Here’s hoping he doesn’t get beaten to the punch yet again with his selective multiplayer thing 😛
Couldn’t resist: http://eightvirtues.com/misc/Regret.png I chose new runic so it wouldn’t start WWIII (I believe Mr. Heistand is retired and thus probably has too much time on his hands). I’ll Tweet it to Garriott. Hopefully he’ll find it amusing. 😉