I'm not sure how much of that was wishful thinking on the part of gamers that were looking for a silver lining in the steaming pile that was Ultima IX (me included) and how much of that was founding in fact, or at least the plans of Origin/EA. Well, I distinctly remember there being a lot of hype a while after Ultima IX came out that Ultima X would be a reimagining of UO in 3D. (And I'd highlight the undercutting aspect over the nihilistic aspect while I'll cop to being less impressed with nihilism than probably the average HN reader, nihilistic RPGs aren't intrinsically a bad thing, but in this particular case it undercuts the foundations.) Even a fully-realized Ultima 8 was never going to fit the series very well, and IMHO could even have ended up with a worse story in some aspects than we got. And perhaps a bit more controversially, the series just wasn't headed in a good direction after the impressive founding of the series' reputation on the virtue system in 4 and 5, the series was headed ever faster into a nihilistic undercutting of its own foundations. The exponential increase in the difficulty of technology was not playing well with Origin's high level of aggressiveness on that front. IMHO, there would still have been a lot of winds against the series anyhow. Rational business logic said to pour the effort into the moneymaker UO and the single-player Ultimas couldn't compete for resources. If you zoom up a bit from the level this article is in, as I understand it, while Ultima was on the rocks anyhow, it was Ultima Online that comprehensively killed the franchise by being too successful. Hacki's page is still THE internet resource for the pissed off former Ultima fan. Of course, EA is to blame for all of this, but Garriott shares this blame for allowing them to take too much control away from his organization and okaying the releases before they were ready. This was later admitted by an Origin team member who released the real plot, and later on people attempted to fan-patch the game to make it more like it had been planned originally. And this wasn't the worst thing - it became clear after not too long that the game wasn't done at all. The lore had been changed, sometimes substantially. Finally after about two months, it was playable but as one progressed in the game, incongruities almost immediately popped out. Also released in an unplayable state, the patches rolled in. What REALLY killed Ultima was the absolute state of Ultima IX. Later they released a patch which fixed the most glaring issues and I completed the game, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. Pagan was unplayable on release, it was actually impossible to across the stones leading across an underground river without falling in. I spent late nights tweaking my autoexec.bat and config.sys to get Ultima VII to run properly. I was one of the first people to beat Ultima VI and still have my award certificate from Lord British which I got in the mail. I was one of the superfans at the time, I had played every Ultima on my Apple II and then my PC. Knowing very little, I'd love work for this guy, based on that apology alone. But don't criticize him for failing to throw his team under the bus. If anything, this was probably _too_ self-blaming (we all know EA would just replace him if he didn't bow down, accomplishing nothing). The apology was _incredibly_ well-written: it highlights all of garriott's mistakes, in detail, and places the blame squarely on his own shoulders: he could say "EA is evil because they enforce business discipline," but instead said "they did their job as a business, and I didn't so mine as a creator." But saying so is an attack on the people Garriott screwed when he screwed up the omissions are of other people's contributions to his faults, not his faults themselves. The reality (which we all see) is that the dev team f*cking hated the game, probably gave up on quality, and everyone knows it. Ugh - those omissions are not self-serving. This classic passive-aggressive apology - “I felt awful that I had let down so many people in my effort to be loyal and learn from EA” doesn’t exactly ring out with contrition - isn’t even internally consistent if the development team loved their game so much, why was Origin’s management forced to devise stratagems to keep them from going home out of the fear that they wouldn’t come back? Nevertheless, it does contain a fair amount of truth alongside its self-serving omissions
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