f13.net

Mythic/EA/UO Story Comes to a Thundering Close

So, here's the story. There isn't much of one. As said by the producer, people at EA on the UO team were laid off. The ones who took offers in Virginia will be going. This wasn't a Sigil or Perpetual - UO is still in development and the Kingdom Reborn client is going to continue to get work. As for Stygian Abyss? There are assets and they will be examined. As you know it kept getting delayed and as you know, there isn't an answer Right Now. As for WAR and Mythic, there's no story there. It moves on with development and the numbers hinted at in the post which led to me writing this were overly dramatic. If there is anything else, I will report it soon. Unfortunately (or Fortunately, depending on your side of the fence), this is simply a non-story. As part of standard f13.net protocol, from here on out, I am no longer allowed to lie to you. There will be no cake.

It's also what happens when PR doesn't do its fucking job.

Honestly, if the game avoids zombiehood long enough for me to get a reasonably polished KR client and the SA expansion, I'll be content.  They'll have done enough.  I don't expect them to develop the old whore forever.

Following this news and the article on Destructoid (http://www.destructoid.com/restructuring-layoffs-forthcoming-at-ea-mythic-studios-50896.phtml) I'd expect whatever has been created for UO to be squeezed together into a bug-filled ball of content that won't break the servers, but won't be complete either. And that will be the last update of note UO ever receives.

So EA Mythic is EA's MMO studio du jour? I look forward to EA Mythic's KotoRO announcement to be broken on f13 first.

Oh, and I'll be the first to make the "EA can find ONE BILLION DOLLARS to buy Bioware and Pandemic, but can't scrounge up enough loose change to keep UO content being created?", even though such statements are perhaps missing the point of the Bioware / Pandemic purchase.

One could speculate that the purchase of Bioware was because EA knew that EA-Mythic would be their only MMOG studio after the last remnants of Origin were dragged out back and shot, and they didn't want to trust the entirety of this market to a development team who came off second-best to Verant previously - especially after the "No beta for you! Come back, two months!" event.

If one were so inclined.

To quote the late lamented GBob, Simond, I disagree with what you said.

I know I should stay away from EA/Mythic/UO threads since it's a perfect storm of  :awesome_for_real: but uh, if you're implying DAOC was a poor stepsister to EQ, uh, fail. It was a different game, and had fewer customers, but was still a raging success that put Mythic on the map. In fact DAOC took its biggest hit when it came out with a misguided expansion to turn it into more like EQ (they've been apologizing for it ever since).

Not every gamer wants to spend 6 hours clicking little bars moving from right to left to get a 3% chance to earn the Burning Pants of Selfesteem. It's true!

So then there was this one time that I agreed with Lum.

It's also too bad that whoever the hell was in charge of UO at the time never had the intelligence or the cojones to offer alternatives to misguided expansions like Mythic did.

Edit: Well, some of them gave it a shot. Sorry about that, Pete.

Remember that I was commenting on EA's motivation re: Bioware. I very much doubt that EA's upper management will be happy with a moral victory this time around, you know?

Good job that I played on a Zek, then.  :thumbs_up:

DAoC was more than a moral victory.  It made money.  That does count for something.

I have some fond memories of Ultima underworld:Stygian Abyss. Fantastic game.

Another Big Business "The More You Know": Acquiring Bioware/Pandemic was to get the upcoming games, to get into this MOG business the easy way.  The MOG business is a gravy train (if you do it right, which I submit Mythic knows how to do -- HAY MARK) and such an acquisition would mean a boost in investor confidence due to the ROI one could reasonably expect from a Bioware MOG.  Investor confidence is how you boost your stock price, which is how your existing investors/board of directors make money and therefore is pretty much the main reason behind any business move.  Example: why did my company pay $4.1 beeellion for Glaceau?  It got Coca-Cola into the vitamin water market immediately, which not only let us not bother setting up a new business unit but removed our main competition at the same time.  Same thing with EA.

As for cutting UO costs, EA of all companies knows how to do shit on a budget.  I'm sure Riticello saw a printout or PowerPoint slide with a UO screenshot in it and said "Why do we have an entire studio working on this?  Let's get some analysis going here."  End result, they decided they could get the DAoC people to work on it on the weekends and still make a profit.  Nothing to do with Bioware; I'd wager it's all part of the regular enema that big businesses give themselves.

Pretty sure that's as valid a metric as any for judging 'not as good as'.  I'm pretty sure I can do a pie graph or bar chart or something to elucidate.

Only if it dips into, and subsequently recovers from, negative numbers please.

I'm still waiting for them to re-skin and re-rule DAOC into UO. I'd buy that before I bought Warhammer.

Spending $800 million to buy a new studio with 800 employees and then trying to cut expenses by $5 million (or whatever the number saved by firing people from an already skeletal UO staff) doesn't really make a lot of sense. What revenue is Bioware/Pandemic expected to contribute in the next 12 months? Mass Effect. EA management claims there are 10 other games in the pipeline. I have no idea what they are or how far along they are. The CEO tells all divisions that they have to lower costs after spending $800 million to acquire a large, new cost center - probably $16 million annually (800 people X $200k per person all in).

The bottom line is that an $800 million acquisition does not hit the income statement, but ramping up a studio does. EA could build and support an incredible MMO studio for $100 million a year, but that would be a $0.30 per share hit to earnings until that studio produced revenue, which is significant on a $1.20 per share base. One could argue that no serious talent would join EA if they decided to build their own studio no matter how much EA insisted they would be hands off this time. But that argument holds tru for Bioware. Did EA make that promise to them? There are 800 million reasons why the owners of Bioware would believe it, but what about everyone else that works there?

I just don't see this ending well for anyone involved other than John Riccitello's investment firm which just got cashed out.

I can't stress enough how well deserved and long past due firing of these asshats on UO team is. Usually Development team works on improving product, looking back quite a few years I can't say they did anything but damage. It boggles my mind how reliable they got at fucking up. Even if I excuse some of these development errors to listening to mouth breathing cesspool of stupidity community on Stratics and shiteating posters like Peaches, it still leaves A LOT of fuck ups to account for.

So finally, all after all these years, some good things might happen to UO. One might hope that a whole lot 'what were they thinking' changes will get undone and game might even get back on track of being Ultima.

I also agree with Lum. While I have no hidden love for DAOC (never liked it) I must give props to Mythic for putting quality product out. I think Mythic had industry-first release that wasn't a cluster-fuck and allowed DAOC (mostly) to stick to its guns of RvR PvP/PvE hybrid gameplay. If nothing else we should thank Mythic for demonstrating to industry that stable release and sticking to your core gameplay, instead of trying to emulate flavor of the months leader, is a way to go.

It's ok, show us all on the ninja elf doll where the UO team touched you.

How can someone learn English well enough to use "clusterfuck", but not get simple pronouns, adjectives, and indefinite articles right?

"a" and "the" --- learn them, love them

It looks like this involved more than just the UO team?
"Getting rising costs in line with the revenue" also means no investments. That for a MMO simply means a certain downward path. The more customers you lose, the less development, so less customers and so on.

(http://www.buffettworld.com/forum/forumimages/GRAMMAR_nazi.jpg)

Adjectives are hard. 

That's actually a good way to spot people who have Russian as their first language, since the rules for those are different.

Feel free to bust non-native speakers for that when, you know, you can start putting out flames of UO dev teams in Russian.

All they really have to do with the KR client is polish the chat system and fix a couple of minor graphical bugs, and it'll basically be done.  Stuff that a Mythic employee probably COULD do on the weekend.  So I'll hold out a little hope for that.

Why isn't it done already?  What were the KR developers working on instead?  An optional way of reskinning the new client with all the old graphics.  Yes, I'm fucking serious.  That's what they thought they needed to do to bring the conversion rate up.  That's the sort of thing the mutant fucking low-life troglodyes on Stratics were always asking for.  Meanwhile I'm pulling my hair out because I want to use KR, but the chat system is intolerable and there are some minor but highly visible bugs pissing me off.

I know you EA guys read this site.  Sorry you're losing your jobs.  I love your game and all.  Unlike some other commentators around here, I've actually played it lately, and I thought you did a fine job with the daunting task of breathing life into an ancient heap of spaghetti code over the last couple of years.  In-game events over the last couple years have been excellent in particular.

But whoever set the priorities for the KR team made some bad calls.  A ridiculous plan to let people port the shitty old graphics into the new client (which was meant to do away with those graphics) should NOT come before things like a reasonably useful chat system and certain weapons not floating above the characters hand.

There are plenty of ESL speakers/writers who didn't make the jump to "clusterfuck" before they got their "a's" and "the's" right. Coming from languages where the rules are just as different at that.

And there are plenty who do, especially young people who play online games. I know - it's a stretch, work with me here - some people learn how to say "[whatever] your mother" before they learn how to say "Where's the spoon drawer?"

People who bust ESL speakers on imperfect language skills irks me. Especially if they're American, since most Americans only speak two languages, English and l33t.

You have a whole drawer for spoons?  Just how much are they paying you?

Edit: It's about time my avatar made an appearance in this thread.

It makes more sense if you realize I own no forks nor knives.

yes keep the devs away from the sharp objects please.

Really, I still can't get over the priorities of the KR team.  Horseshit reskins a better way to increase conversion than basic interface and graphical fixes?  What the fuck?  From where it is now, they could have that client in a reasonably polished state, one they could call complete with a straight face, with a month's work if they actually focused on the right things.

Re-work chat, correct a few graphic bugs, and bam.  Done.

Am I the only one who reads Mark's stuff and wonders, "Does he really believe his company's immune to the EA-Borging process, or is he just putting on a good face in exchange for another pair of diamond loafers?"

Or perhaps there really IS a new face to EA...  One that doesn't suck the life from it's talent, and then discards the deccicated husks of studios aside while reaching for the next juicy morsel, shaking its wad of currency to dazzle the minds of those who should know better..

 :awesome_for_real:

There's a big effort underway on the chat system, it's one of the larger projects.

You still give EA your money?

Now you know why your name is pink, you have no credibility.

Ah, horrible scat porn. Thankfully not in-line. Well played sir! Perhaps you shall match wits with your nemesis on another site!

Bruce?

Holy mother of fuck, it's AW!

IT'S THE GUY WITH THE CHART!

Thanks for making it redundant, Angel.  :-D

EA is still in the business of forcefully selling franchise boxes, when MMOs do worse Madden sales go up.  Aside from that, when you're bought out or taken over the passion is lost, it becomes just a job.  After Riccitiello's Sims disaster, I'm sure he'll be interested in keeping in line with the tried and tested model, while only keeping an MMO buzz for investors.

I should set you up on a date with Grunk.

I see Warhammer being another EA flop, don't you?

(http://zulfiqar.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/neo_whoa_1.jpg)

Whoa, are people surprised this happened?

And I do not mean the recent changes at EA...

I don't even know why you're here.

Bottom line? You should keep your personal belongings in a box, and have a button that fires off your goodbye emails with one click. If you get a check from EA that is.

Well, that's your problem.  Ask youself what will happen to the Bioware MMO also...

That should be enough of a clue; EA knows it missed the boat with WoW.

Such naivity is charming. Seriously, if this were any other game but UO, if a big publisher came in, fired 95% of the staff and gave it to someone else to develop for at this stage of the game, both of you would be calling out for the last rites to be read (but with more cursing).

I mean "fix a few bugs and it's ready to go" is something I'd expect to read on a TR fansite. A better UI and chart interface isn't necessarily something that would be just whipped up in a weekend, either.

And I can actually see the point of allowing people to choose the old graphics if they want - not as an expansion strategy, but as a retention one. One lesson hard learned in MMOs is that players hate the devs tinkering in their established domain, even if the end result is meant to be beneficial. Sure, they shouldn't make it their only focus, but it makes a MMO genre-kind of sense.

Better for us all if they'd also stay away from blunt instruments, including keyboards.
:rimshot:

From Gamespot: (http://au.gamespot.com/news/6181740.html?tag=latestnews;title;0)


Nice try, but you can't make comments about keeping costs down / meeting rising costs internally and then try to spin it as just the normal phase of firing the codemonkeys before Xmas. It's not a staff cut if the contractors were just finishing their contracts.

EDIT: And I'd suggest that cutting headcount just before the proposed release of a MMO isn't a good sign *cough*Gods and Heroes*cough* and probably doesn't bode well. Isn't that right Mark?

They need to:

1)  Quit routing party/guild/alliance chat to the overhead text display.
2)  Let players choose the color their speech text displays in.
3)  Increase font size all around.

And that's it.  Chat fixed.  I wasn't joking when I said you could do it in a weekend.  Shit, the guy who gets the coffee could handle it.  The graphical bug affecting a few weapons in KR is probably a little more difficult to address, but still no big deal if "KR will continue to get work" isn't an outright fabrication.  They knock those two things out, and they have a product I'll use.

So quite frankly, Unsub, cram your uninformed opinion up your ass.  I'm quite aware of how old the game is, and what these moves mean.  I'm the one who brought the god damned news here in the first place.  All I'm pointing out are the one or two things they ought to fix instead of the dumb shit they've been wasting time on.

It's because you denned the SWG threads and forbade us ever to speak of them in public again. Constant rehashes of the NGE are anathema to his kind.

We did it to protect the innocents from such as him. You have interrupted our ritual, and now the gates have opened and the chart-bearing bastards are flooding in.

It's been six months since he banned Trammel threads, and now he's quashed SWG discussion too.  I know he means well, but someday the impulses he's repressing are going to explode forth in a torrent of LOLs.

I know its been rough 6 month,l we had to sustain ourself with SWG thread and he took even that away... This could have been such a beautiful thread now that we have chart guy back. Bastards! We need to start flaming each other over WoW warlocks or something yet-to-be-forbidden.

He hasn't quashed SWG threads. He's just moved them to their own private cell villa in the corpsegrinder section of the board. You have your own subforum!

It will be Star Wars and it will fucking rule!  ALL OTHER OPINIONS ARE HERESY.

It would be fine for me if they didn't expected people to play a monthly fee for it.

Who are you?  You didn't wander over here from Stratics did you?

Because if you did...

(http://www.lardlad.com/images/homer/homer107.gif)

The fact that the Emulated UO servers are a hell of a lot more fun than the real UO servers should have made you leave that game years ago. I still play UO occasionally, but it's always on an emulated server. They are just more fun. Hell, if you know a little scripting you could start your own server.

man what

DAOC was EQ with an easier xp curve and relic zerging instead of raiding as it's endgame. Maybe it's changed since then, but I wouldn't know. I got bored of camping purple crabs...to make my xp bar move from right to left, ya know...

That was my experience with it during its first month of life anyhow.  Bought it because of the Lum connection, never resubbed because EQ's gameplay is butt, even with increased XP gains on fanservers.

The freeshard scene is a pile of ass, sustained only by the low cost of entry and a small cadre of people whose interest in the game vanished when everyone else went to Trammel.  They play these shards trying to recapture something that's gone forever, and quit after a month, two weeks of which was spent unattended macroing.  The overwhelming majority of them have peak concurrencies in the single digits, and everytime one comes along that manages to draw a crowd, it almost always manages to go down in a flaming wreck of drama.

What possible benefit is there for any SWG or UO discussion anymore though? KR was worth discussing for a bit, but like anything SWG, it always devolves into a histrionic nostalgia trip down what-it-coulda-shoulda-woulda-been lane.

Before the thread gets locked and banned, I was pretty excited about the KR thing until I found out they were going to keep the 2d client. Thats the crutch. It keeps them their minimum accounts who will play UO 2d until they drop dead of old age. But it stifles progress. If they don't have enough faith in a new client to go with it, then it's not worth doing.

The whole thing is like a 30 year old kid living in your basement. At some point, he has to get his own place. Kicking him out may make him homeless, but it's the only way he's ever going to have even a small chance to move forward.

who let the crack out??

where's the red name to say we're all like, jaded, and stuff?

Well, one keeps AW away and the other draws him, like a moth to flame.

What? Stop flaming my religion!

Merry Christmas and no bonus for all your hard work!

How about adverbs?

Ymay Igpay Atinlay isway erfectpay!

The sheer pointless insanity of a good Trammel thread is precisely what makes one so entertaining.  That one a couple years ago with AW and all the charts and whatnot was the most fun I've ever had on these forums.  Sinij was making up slurs about my mother, Slayerik was telling carebears to STFU and L2P, everyone was making charts, Lum went into old-school fighting form to mock the shit out of AW, Raph and Calandryll were talking actual worthwhile design stuff, and Schild was bouncing around telling us what fucking psychos we all were.

God it was great.

I was, am, and will continue to be right. :oh_i_see:

I know a guy who refuses to leave Shadowbane because he will not upgrade his computer. At all. It's from 1999 or thereabouts. And I wonder why the FUCK people won't upgrade even a little bit. It's depressing on a macro, humanity come on dubya tee eff scale.

There's plenty of people like that out there.  But every time I point it out I'm told I'm nuts and it's only a minority.

Then things like the Steam hardware setup reports get released, and I have a little bit of a giggle.

Please see "SWG: NGE" on the merits of putting all your eggs in one basket. Not exactly the same, sure, but large changes can upset those otherwise willing to continue paying until the heat death of the universe.

... I believe that comment there is the perfect storm of UO and SWG associations. Until Mark Jacobs pops up to announce KotorO: Imperator Worlds is Mythic's next MMO, that's all she wrote.

This very year I finally upgraded from windows 98 to XP. This on my gaming computer.

Dammit. I could run Burning Crusade, Eve and Guild Wars on that noble, heroic but vastly underpowered computer.

But BC was giving me the "OS not supported" warning when I logged in, and Eve finally just crapped out with a recent patch, and wouldn't play at all.

I think it goes from frugal to a point of principle to some people, no not be "bullied" into buying the latest shinies to run the newest games that are going to wind up in the bottom of your closet in a few months...

Except for Sony and Nintendo related matters which constantly and amusingly prove you wrong on a daily basis.

Wii and DS up, PS3 and PSP DOWWWWNNN!  :-D

That is my stance, more or less. I try to buy the good stuff when I do get around to replacing my worn out machines, but I won't purposefully upgrade to support any new game.

If a game doesn't support my current hardware, it obviously doesn't want my business. There is more then enough data floating around to know that most people run PoS machines, not top of the line hardware.

If you pardon the shitty analogy, they build games like Tires for Ferrari's but expect them to sell like Civic Tires.

Your Pig Latin wis perfect?   :headscratch:

isHay igpay atinlay eallyray isway erfectpay!

Hehe.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/op-ed/2569-BioWare-Pandemic-The-Fatted-Calves

Yeah, don't get me wrong here. I'm not an upgrade whore; I only now upgraded my 2GHz, 768 RAM, ATI x1600 machine to my sleek Quadcore, 8800 a couple weeks ago and the new machine isn't top of the line by any means. I want for stuff to come out in clusters of 'Man, I wish I could play that'. But it's a far cry being slow on the upgrade like I am (four years between machines) and refusing to upgrade after ten years. And then it gets into the realm of the weird when you don't upgrade and then insist on holding back a game you purport to love and want to do well because you won't upgrade from Machine From 1999 Machine From 2003. We're not talking thousands of bucks to run the new UO client here.

I don't understand.  Do you have any visual aids?

How do you go from decent article to tin-foil hattery in one paragraph?

The red emphasis on those "we have"s (How the fuck do you pluralize a quote?) was so jarring I couldn't even figure out what was being said there until I looked at the article.

So the telling phrase is the last sentence, "In the end, the breaking away and eventual reeling back in of Pandemic and BioWare may be as much about reconsolidating the authority of big name publishers as any franchise.".

Amazing concept.  A big business buys their competitors because it helps them consolidate their position in the industry.  Uh, I kind of thought it was generally understood that was exactly the reason why you bought your competition?

And then, in the video game industry, the employees are fired or quit, and go on to found more little startups. Out of those devs that put out a decently fun game then get eaten up by EA!

(http://www.rmhctampabay.com/Images/SBB07/LionKing.jpg)

I'm all for a good conspiracy theory, but I can't see one here. What happened with Bioware, Pandemic and VG Holdings happened at the time because it seemed like a good deal, and Riccitello jumping from company to company was more than likely a way just normal career advancement for someone like him. There wasn't some master plan to get Bioware and Pandemic that started years ago in the darkened boardrooms of EA - the games industy isn't that reliable to plan that far ahead.

The lesson here is that Bioware and Pandemic found out the hard way is that when you hand over control of your companies to a third-party, you really can't help what happens to that third party. Hope the $155 million set aside "to retain key talent" helps dry their tears though.

I know this wasn't the point, but I don't think he won't leave Shadowbane because of the performance.
Shadowbane is a uniqe MMORPG, the only one with certain PvP characteristics in a fantasy environment.
And despite its tragic history, it is now an incredibly fun game.

So yeah, you had a point there because I know guys who still claim to play WoW for that reason, but in my opinion it doesn't apply to Shadowbane. Because, simply put, if you quit playing Shadobane there's nothing even remotely similar you can upgrade to. So if you like world-affecting PvP (and don't want to play EVE)  you are stuck with SB.

The same could be said for UO for a long time. I'd say up to Trammel the poor Diablesque-itemization.

No, that analogy is right on the money.
The problem is people always want new shinies.  I even see it in the tabletop games market where one would think a good RPG still is good even if there aren't endless upgrades and expansions for it.  (According to RPGnet there should be a new edition every 2-3 years because its good for the industry or something.  RPGnet is full of clueless fucking morons.)

It doesnt matter that there were fantastic games on the C64 from 83-94.  By 89 in the US all the devs wanted to make their titles on the 2000 dollar PC compatibles even though the 100 dollar C64 and the 600 dollar Amiga 500 could almost match if not surpass in some categories as far as hardware specs went.  Games developers get hardware focused regardless of if its economically reasonable. 

Heck, just look at Valve and Mac gaming.  Macs are THE fastest growing computing segment and in the audience that plays games the most.  College kids.  Valve wanted a million bucks to let Half Life 2 get ported to the Mac.  (Though Gabe Newell said differently in between eating small children.)  So instead of making a fair money on an evergrowing segment of the marketplace, they get none.

Was it really greed, was it really Newell's insistence Apple didn't give a shit, or was it hardware focused asshattery?  Its mostly obvious its the latter with a tad of the cash lust.  But mostly a hardware and OS snobbery.

Is $1 million dollars a lot of money to ask from a company in order to get a title ported? That seems like kind of a low-ball offer from Valve.

It's a nothing amount of money. I've been calling bullshit on this story for a while. It's too ridiculous and too stupid.

If growing from 3% of the market to 4% of the market is all we are talking about (which were the figures last I heard) it still doesn't make Apple some sort of gaming mecca.

On the other hand, if $1m was all Valve wanted, someone should have ponied up.

As for another part of your statement: Amiga 500 w/ 512kb memory expansion > PC x286 - x486 for games. Oh yeah. Pity that software piracy and management ineptitude killed Commodore.

Fun and good times? You can't pay money to somebody to get that kid of entertainment.

I laugh at the idea of it being worth Valve's time to port HL2 to it. Man, those thousands of man hours porting a complex game engine was worth those 10,000 sales. Wait, I doubt it'd even sell that much. HL2 doesn't have a wide enough appeal. WoW does, Blizzard had a history of porting to Mac, they made an OpenGL engine to start with, so it got ported.

What the hell are you talking about?  That no one would pony up a million dollars to buy the license to port Halflife 2 to the Mac is Valve's evil baby eating machination?  A million bucks is trivial for a license for the game of the year, that no one would cough it up meant that no one thought they could make back a million dollars in sales on the Mac.

You think the C64 was competitive in 1994?  Or the Amiga?  Do you realize that it was the open PC architecture that even allowed for the boom in gaming that existed in the 90's?  Developers like id loved the NeXT and the Amiga but everyone had PC's and so that's what they developed for.  Why would developers cough up thousands of dollars for a license to develop on Commodores products when PC's were most of the market AND practically free to develop on?  The whole 3D graphics card phenomena couldn't even have existed if not for the PC's open architecture.

Hardware focused asshattery?  Dude, shed your persecution complex and take a look around.

Its not worth Valve's time.  But reports are that companies have talked with Valve and that's the price they gave them.   At the current level of sales Mac games get a million bucks is insane.  (Havok physics engine games have had trouble for the same reason, and its apparently only around 250-750K) 

Of course most Mac games are Popcap styled derivative puzzle crap that could be made in a week, 2 if the basement coders ran out of Monster Energy and Red Bull. 

That's the thing.  The amount of money it would make didn't come close to the amount Valve was asking for a liscense. 

On to other things: I don't think anyone needed a liscense to make games on the Commodore machines.  Commodore was known for incredibly stupid decisions, but I don't believe that was one of them.  I certainly don't remember any such shenanigans mentioned in the history of Commodore book I have.  Liscenses to develop on a system didn't start till Nintendo anyhow. 

The sad thing is people did have Commodore machines.  The C64 is still the best selling home computer of all time.  (Admitted, it was 1 machine for over a decade and these days people get antsy if there isn't a new set of hardware every 3-4 years.)  The Amiga was HUGE in Europe. (And it was a Sega Genesis for all intents and purposes.. ok its more the Genesis was an Amiga really..)

It would be a good thing if game companies got the fuck away from DirectX. That's all I know.

This was because a C64 game could be developed by the aforementioned basement coders, who didn't even have Red Bull to fall back on.

... we're a long way from Mythic / EA / UO at this point.

The problem is that OpenGL (especially in its standard form, without all the extensions) doesn't provide nearly as much shiny as DirectX does.  And there aren't any other alternatives.

I think it will Ancient Wyrm . Reason I think so is because EA Mythic has yet to launch or manage an MMO in which they didn't ultimately run into the ground yet. Lets take a look at EA's track record :

MMO games still running but not performing well :

The Sims Online (might as well be dead)
Ultima Online
Dark Ages of Camelot

MMO titles ran into the ground by EAl :

Earth and Beyond
Motor City Online

Can you think of any others? If so please post them here. Thanks!

I smell Stratics all over you.  Die.

Meridian 65 doesn't exist.

Meridian 59 was never owned or operated by EA. It was published by 3DO, which went out of business. One of the developers bought the rights and is running it independently.

Fuck that. I'm playing Meridian 360!

Both Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online are performing well enough to not be in the same sentence with Sims Online.

Motor City Online is the other sunset.

EA has had no measurable effect on DAoC or UO, because they've only controlled them for 5 minutes. The sky is not falling. DAoC has been on the run down for a while, and UO still has WUA posting screenshots, so it doesn't look like anything has got worse.

EA might suck - but you need to try harder.

EA owned Origin all through the development of UO but it happened before they'd been completely borgified. I'm sure that if EA had been in full control they'd have cancelled it before it was ever released.

I thought UO2 was the great white hope of all the MMOs that EA cancelled.

However, it's several years since then and I think that EA may have had time to look around and think, "Hey, there might be something to these MMOs after all."

They also fucked over Multiplayer Battletech 3025.  I played the beta.  It REALLY had potential.

I thought we agreed never to speak of that game.  Those motherfuckers...

EA became evil after they stopped developing Deluxe Paint for the Amiga.

There, re-railed.

Also: Guybrush Threepwood got his first name from DPaint, so EA is indirectly responsible for two of the best Lucasarts games ever (plus one OK one and one mediocre one).

Yeah sorry about that, I am thinking Motor City Online, sorry about that, beginning to get my MMO's mixed up here.

The final straw in EA evil was the NFL exclusivity deal.   It was the crowning achievement in douchebaggery.  And given how shitty the sports game field has been since, it merely proves the naysayers right.

In American Politics, you can do almost whatever you want, so long as you still have enough support left over to get away with it.
In American Business, you can do almost whatever you want, so long as you still have enough money left over to get away with it.
I wonder which envies the other?

My point is that, when it comes to EA's dealings, you don't need conspiracy theories.  They're quite overt about what they do.  "It was sound business practice" is all the excuse you need.

EA became evil when they soiled the name of Dan Silva's great software by creating Deluxe Paint IV, which was a lousy bug ridden abomination.

howdy all, im new to forums but have been reading f13 for about 6 months. on the EA issue, i own several of their games and one thing I can definately say, EA doesnt really help games actually alot of them end up like shit.  Their best game imo was Battlefield 2, and now theyve acquired yet another company? what they think they have to act like sony? ahem F**k EA  :evil:

Again, since I read these in reverse order, minus points for censoring Fuck.

UO team puts out a little video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKqb2CwiFdA) of their last meeting at the California office.  Warning, singing.  Having read a few different announcements, more of the "name" developers are relocating than I expected.

I could see Raph fitting right in (http://www.raphkoster.com/music/index.shtml) there.