I've always felt that one of EA's greatest challenges has been recognizing disruptive technology and capitalizing on it.

This played out numerous times with the PS3 vs. Wii, PSP vs. DS, and especially regarding micro-transactions. There is a producer at EA who, since at least 2005, was not only aware of how important MTX was in Asia, but that we couldn't keep believing that cultural barriers wouldn't keep games on the pay-per-month subscription model forever here in the U.S. I remember going to his brown-bag lunches and saying "Wow, here's a guy who gets it!" But no one took social gaming or micro-transactions seriously back then: it was Sims, Warhammer, Madden, and Pogo. Speaking of, imagine if EA had immediately recognized how powerful a platform Facebook was, and flooded the early app/games scene with MTX versions of Pogo games?

Now we're seeing the advent of Social Gaming 1.0 mixed with these micro-transactions, and already it's been so disruptive that a completely new company with low budget games has surpassed an industry giant that spends tens of millions per title. Why? Because the market has been broadened yet again, far beyond the bounds of the comfort zones most larger companies have established for themselves. EA hasn't ignored this, of course, but they reacted late and with the time-honored response of buying a company that specializes in the area, hoping to get into the market immediately.

Admittedly, the current state of games on Facebook is... I don't know, someone said it was like the Atari days before the big crash. Yet imagine what Social Gaming 2.0 will look like as more high-quality games and free-to-play 3D MMOs start hitting the browsers.

Full disclosure: I was one of the UO design leads during Warhammer's later development years, and everything I'm about to say is tinted by a) not working directly on the product, b) my professional opinion having played it, c) and that I have a contract similar to Sanya Weathers' (who is quoted in the EA Louse comments several times) and will not engage in disparagement.

EA Louse completely ignores actual game design reasons that the product failed, instead focusing on company culture and his/her managers' failings. I won't comment on that, but I will point out the following things that went rather horribly wrong with Warhammer:
* Incomplete content: past level 20 most zones were barely there, let alone fully populated with content.
* Broken systems: the economy, craftinig, Tier 4, and the actual zoning and load balancing code couldn't keep up
* Unbalanced classes: they tried to make equivalents for each faction, and over-powered the Bright Wizards, Warriors Priests, and Witch Hunters. Excellent write up about that here, especially about Crowd Control: http://www.brighthub.com/video-games/mmo/articles/44427.aspx?p=3
* Not moving fast enough on PvP imbalance complaints: The common response would be "We ran the numbers! On average, 50% are Order, 50% are Chaos! It's perfectly even!" and in the real world of course it was usually a massive mis-match between sides in individual fights
* The mandate to produce new content instead of fix old broken content. I'll never understand that one, and I tread on dangerous ground going too much into it, but it was a horribly bad idea.
* Public quests: I have always, truly believed that public quests were a good idea gone horribly wrong. This is probably just me being naive from my days on UO, where if we had a fun system idea we could implement it directly ourselves and things like "automatically adjusting difficulty, loot, time constraints and quest goals" were well within reach for the designer. Public quests in WAR stopped being fun the moment population surges in a zone dropped -- soon becoming impossible to complete. How awesome would it have been to at least have them dynamically adjust to lower/higher levels of difficulty based on how many people were in the zone and their relative strengths? How much better if the same *kind* of PQs weren't spread like filler throughout all the zones and they were a little more creative?

Hopefully other games will learn from this: you have to finish and polish the game until it shines! Only in the emerging F2P market can you get away without doing so, and even that will change over the coming years.

This should be a wake up call to every 1st tier MMORPG developer:

Money and a strong IP do not equal success!

How many of us felt intuitively that Square Enix has been losing its way with the FF franchise for years? How could FFXIV be anything other than what we're seeing right now?

Just like the offline industry that spends hundreds of millions now to develop offline AAA titles, the MMORPG market is suffering the same, eventual fate: to be usurped by quickly built, fun, disruptive games discovering new monetization models ala Minecraft. Yet, we're seeing the big boys approach development with the same WOW-killer attitude again and again, instead of innovating.

Some might say: well look at FFXIV's switch up from the auction system to player markets! Sorry, that's as old as Ultima Online and finding items you want is just as frustrating.

It's so very disappointing to see Final Fantasy XIV hit the shelves like this, I can't even believe it.

Wile E. Coyote? Road Runner? A high speed pest?

Giant building sized anvil dropped from excessive heights courtesy an ACME Skylifter?

The joke - it is now explained

Because I know a very well educated coyote that would be really interested in this sort of innovative technology with his work in high speed pest control.

I swear this is the standard response of any designer confronted, suddenly, with gaps in their thinking. "It can't be a serious problem, there is a workaround!"

I just wanted to mention that the U6 remake should generally be safe from legal action from EA, not because of any inherent "rightness" about what they've done, but because of the generally benevolent attitude EA has taken in the past concerning the core Ultima game remakes.

When I was on the Ultima Online team the U5: Lazarus mod for Dungeon Siege came out, and I actually chose a copy of Dungeon Siege II (if I remember correctly) for the weekly developer prize just so I could download the mod and play it. Our producer at the time was asked by the corporate legal department about it, and since it didn't harm UO, and possibly helped boost marketing recognition for Ultima in general, EA decided not to do anything as long as the remake didn't turn a profit.

In general, EA barely remembers the Ultima IP exists - except to co-opt it for brand recognition (such as the new web-game RTS). UO remains an excellent source of revenue for the company, but even with its millions and millions a year is considered extremely minor compared to the core franchises.

As long as the U6 remake team doesn't turn a profit from this, I couldn't imagine EA taking action, especially since the current UO team would still have a minor bit of input at Mythic. For the curious, no, server emulation for UO is not looked kindly upon by the legal department, yet no significant action was taken in all the years I worked there.

Meanwhile, for U6: I pray that the conversation system and scheduling systems have been converted. People remember Ultima 7 as the most "advanced NPC AI" yet U6 had almost all those features before they were perfected in U7, *and* the conversation system was a model for keyword/response recognition for any interactive games to follow. Ultima Online's own NPC speech system was based on U6's, boasting 13,000 unique lines of text before they were scrapped in 1999-2000 during a localization of the game where the translations were projected to cost something like $250k.

As with the Lazarus project, I just want to give my hearty thanks and appreciation to the team who created this. We dreamed of doing updated Ultima remakes at EA, but never gained any traction. Thank you for doing what we couldn't!

Know that Britannia has entered into a new age of enlightenment!
Know that the time has finally come for the one true Lord of Britannia to take His place at the head of His people!
Under my guidance, Britannia will flourish. And all the people shall rejoice and pay homage to their new... Guardian!
Know that you, too, shall kneel before me, Avatar. You, too, shall soon acknowledge my authority - for I shall be your companion... your provider... and your master!

And Gargoyles too now :P

What a day! We just launched the open beta, and now I get to come home and see UO up on the front page of Slashdot!

This totally made my registration all those years ago worth it :P

Seriously! A lot of people don't even realize UO is even around, when it still has a playerbase that outshines (in size *and* passion) many of the newest entrants, who're so quick to fade away while Britannia lives on.

It's amazing, and humbling, when I think about how different UO is from the grindfests so prevalent these days, when all we do is try to let players live in the Ultima universe with some fun, tile-based physics and a penchant for interactivity (and in Felucca, a bit of brutality!)

The Stygian Abyss expansion may not be 3D (awww, sorry Ultima Underworld), but there's plenty homage paid to our rich past :)

Just don't try to eat the complementary M&Ms at +1.8gees, guys. A lesson learned the hard way!

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