UO postmortem from GDC2018

I have posted up a page with the slides from the UO postmortem panel that Richard Garriott, Starr Long, Rich Vogel, and I gave at GDC 2018. We ended up doing the hour long talk, followed by an additional hour and a half (!) of Q&A afterwards. No video is available yet, but I’ll post here once it is — likely not for a few weeks.

One thing that the static images of the slides don’t capture is that the opening had “Stones” playing (the version from the opening screen of UO) and the chest actually animated opening when the crowd shouted that yes, we should log in.

There was a fairly large amount of coverage of the panel, much of it from outlets in Asia. I’ve provided links to the articles I’ve found so far. The most detailed, including some description of the Q&A afterwards, is the one from Massively.

VentureBeat: EA Hated Ultima Online Until It Didn’t
Rolling Stone Glixel: Ultima Online Creators Look Back on Revolutionary Game
MassivelyOP: GDC 2018: Ultima Online post-mortem with Richard Garriott, Starr Long, Raph Koster, and Rich Vogel
4Gamer (translated)
Inven (translated)
Ars Technica
Famitsu (translated)
Mein MMO (translated)

Most of the articles don’t get what we were saying about Kristen quite right — she was basically the other key designer on the team, early on; I was saying she doesn’t get enough credit for that, not that she was uncredited in the manual/game. I’ve written up the story of our job application before here on this blog, so if you want to know more, check out the article I wrote on the occasion of UO’s fifteenth anniversary. The articles also fail to mention Rick Delashmit, whom we mentioned numerous times as the key engineer on the project and who also the key programmer on LegendMUD.

The Q&A was lengthy… one bit not captured by any of the articles was the brief debate between Richard and myself about the feasibility of the virtual ecology that was intended to be in UO. He still warns people away from attempting something similar. I think it’s absolutely doable these days. I told him he had to go check out the AI Summit, and told the crowd, “Tell you what, I’ll do it in my next MMO.”