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Author Topic: Mythic/EA/UO Story Comes to a Thundering Close  (Read 75779 times)
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on: October 25, 2007, 01:00:08 AM

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.
WindupAtheist
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Reply #1 on: October 25, 2007, 01:51:33 AM

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.

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Reply #2 on: October 25, 2007, 02:36:30 AM

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 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.

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Reply #3 on: October 25, 2007, 02:39:34 AM

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.

Simond
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Reply #4 on: October 25, 2007, 03:28:33 AM

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.

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Reply #5 on: October 25, 2007, 04:55:18 AM

a development team who came off second-best to Verant previously

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!
Azaroth
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Reply #6 on: October 25, 2007, 05:40:40 AM

a development team who came off second-best to Verant previously

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.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2007, 05:54:23 AM by Azaroth »

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Reply #7 on: October 25, 2007, 05:49:05 AM

a development team who came off second-best to Verant previously

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.
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?

Quote
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!
Good job that I played on a Zek, then.  Thumbs up!

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Reply #8 on: October 25, 2007, 06:29:37 AM

DAoC was more than a moral victory.  It made money.  That does count for something.
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Reply #9 on: October 25, 2007, 06:51:56 AM

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

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Reply #10 on: October 25, 2007, 06:57:44 AM

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.

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Reply #11 on: October 25, 2007, 07:07:37 AM

uh, if you're implying DAOC was a poor stepsister to EQ, uh, fail. It was a different game, and had fewer customers...

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.

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Reply #12 on: October 25, 2007, 07:47:30 AM

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

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Krakrok
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Reply #13 on: October 25, 2007, 08:19:39 AM


I'm still waiting for them to re-skin and re-rule DAOC into UO. I'd buy that before I bought Warhammer.
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Reply #14 on: October 25, 2007, 08:51:13 AM

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 have never played WoW.
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Reply #15 on: October 25, 2007, 09:08:44 AM

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.

Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.
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Reply #16 on: October 25, 2007, 09:15:07 AM

a development team who came off second-best to Verant previously

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!

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.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2007, 09:23:12 AM by sinij »

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Reply #17 on: October 25, 2007, 09:49:25 AM

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.

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

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Reply #18 on: October 25, 2007, 10:16:24 AM

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
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Reply #19 on: October 25, 2007, 11:22:42 AM

It looks like this involved more than just the UO team?
Quote
John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, has tasked every studio and company within the monolithic publisher with getting their rising costs in line with revenue, which in plain English means layoffs.

The email from Mythic VP Rob Denton was sent to all employees of Mythic and details some of the plans to reduce costs by cutting jobs as well as some actions already taken. Headcount will be managed through "attrition, performance management, stricter hiring guidelines and layoffs". Over the next two months, the Ultima Online team will be moving from EA Redwood Shores to Mythic's Fairfax, VA studio to streamline operations. Meanwhile, a number of employees at both studios have already been let go as of earlier today including many UO staffers, with more to follow as EA tightens its belt in the coming months.
"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.

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Reply #20 on: October 25, 2007, 11:33:13 AM

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


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Reply #21 on: October 25, 2007, 11:55:23 AM

Adjectives are hard. 

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Reply #22 on: October 25, 2007, 12:50:22 PM

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

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.
WindupAtheist
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Badicalthon


Reply #23 on: October 25, 2007, 01:59:40 PM

Following this news and the article on Destructoid 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.

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.

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Reply #24 on: October 25, 2007, 02:04:22 PM

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

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.

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.
Lum
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Reply #25 on: October 25, 2007, 02:08:12 PM

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.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2007, 02:11:02 PM by Lum »
Rasix
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Reply #26 on: October 25, 2007, 02:09:43 PM

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.

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Reply #27 on: October 25, 2007, 02:12:28 PM

It makes more sense if you realize I own no forks nor knives.
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Reply #28 on: October 25, 2007, 02:15:36 PM

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

yes keep the devs away from the sharp objects please.
WindupAtheist
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Reply #29 on: October 25, 2007, 02:24:45 PM

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.

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Reply #30 on: October 25, 2007, 02:42:41 PM

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

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Reply #31 on: October 25, 2007, 03:15:45 PM

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

oh god how did this get here I am not good with computer
AW
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Reply #32 on: October 25, 2007, 04:16:03 PM

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.

You still give EA your money?

Now you know why your name is pink, you have no credibility.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2007, 04:30:28 PM by AW »

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Modern Angel
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Reply #33 on: October 25, 2007, 04:24:26 PM

Ah, horrible scat porn. Thankfully not in-line. Well played sir! Perhaps you shall match wits with your nemesis on another site!
SnakeCharmer
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Reply #34 on: October 25, 2007, 04:52:04 PM

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.

You still give EA your money?

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

Bruce?
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