Richard Garriott Questioned About MMOs (November 20, 2005)

[ChrisReid]

Armchair Empire has a new interview with Origin founder Richard Garriott. A lot of the focus is on his upcoming title, Tabula Rasa, but the interview also backs up and asks about Origin and Garriott's involvement in the first breakthrough massively multiplayer game, Ultima Online.

Richard Garriott: With UO, we were in a fight to exist at all. No one believed in MMOs, so we had no funding. No one knew what features would be popular so we built lots of things not knowing how or if players might like it. We were writing code that had never been tried before, so it was hard to get it working well.
Interviewer: Since Tabula Rasa is taking place in outer space, there’s the implication that the game world will be quite large. Initially, just how big will this game be in terms of exploration?

Richard Garriott: The game will launch with 2 or 3 planets to explore, but we will provide new planets as fast as we can make them!

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Outer space sure looks weird.

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Original update published on November 20, 2005

 

[Quarto]

Outer space sure looks weird.

Hehe, yeah.

I read another interview with Garriott the other day - apparently, the reason why they changed the style completely is because everybody on the team was playing female characters .

 

[Bandit LOAF]

"Despite the marked shift in style from fantastic high fantasy to gritty alien vs. human doomsday..."

Hoo-boy.

I'd like to see Richard Garriott succeed as much as anyone... in fact, probably more than most people... but I just don't see how Destination Games Presents Weird Pink Sci Fi Planets is going to compete with games like Worlds of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies.