Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Garriott's P.R. blitz comes after the end of a one-year noncompete clause in his contract with Electronic Arts, the company to whom he sold Origin, the Austin game studio he founded to develop his Ultima games, in 1992. Now he works out of the Austin offices of NCSoft, just 300 yards or so from his old headquarters.
"The way the hills are structured," says Garriott by phone a week before his visit to San Francisco, "we can't quite see each other, though we can probably shoot water balloons on longer rubber bands back and forth."
Garriott's return to the gaming industry after parting ways with EA in late 2000 was supposed to be at a start-up called Destination Games, a company he planned to run with his brother Robert. But soon after registering the domain, he was offered the opportunity to merge with the Korean-based NCSoft, developers of Lineage: The Blood Pledge, the most popular subscriber-based online game in the world. (As of this writing, Lineage boasts a staggering 3 million-plus players, mostly in Korea, Taiwan and other Asian economic hubs. By contrast, Everquest, the most popular American subscription-based online game, has a mere 400,000 or so subscribers worldwide.)
This reversal of fortune must seem like a vindication for Garriott, who departed Electronic Arts, as he tells it, in protest at the company's intent to shape its online services in a way that wouldn't readily accommodate his world-building talents.
"They thought Ultima Online was just kind of a niche or a fad," Garriott says. Instead, he says EA was trying to steer its content toward casual, nonsubscribing gamers. "Instead of making more epic games like Ultima, they were asking me and our team to participate in the creation of Java applet Web games ... which didn't fit with my vision of either what I liked to do creatively, personally, nor my vision from a business standpoint of what would really be the place to target for revenue generation in this segment."
Since then, the idea of converting casual Web gamers into useful revenue streams has become one more discarded business model. "Electronic Arts is writing off about $250 million of failed strategy last year, and I suspect they have a fair bit more to write off," says Garriott. Among those gone in the shakeout are many of his own former employees at Origin. "Which is perfect for us -- those are all the people who worked with us for the last 20 years. So as they slowly let them go, we slowly hire them."
Electronic Arts disputes Garriott's interpretation of the events leading to his departure.
"EA did not ask Richard to make gamelets," said Jeff Brown, V.P. for corporate communications at Electronic Arts, via e-mail. "We simply wanted him to finish Ultima Online 2, which had languished in development without progress for a considerable time. In the end, we found his product was not commercially viable. Reasons surrounding his separation from EA are confidential." Regarding Garriott's claim that EA's online business strategy has cost the company about $250 million in losses, Brown says: "We have no idea how Richard would come up with something like that -- but it's just not true. Richard's history suggests he's a lot better at creating medieval fantasy than he is at math."
That said, Brown offers his regards for Garriott's new venture with EA's Korean competitor: "We wish him success in his next project and we hope his new partners show patience in directing his creative energies."
In any case, while the competition to capture (and hold) the lucrative fees of subscription-based MMRPG games has grown ever more frenetic, Garriott believes it's still underexploited. "As my noncompete ran out," he says, "I was very pleasantly surprised to find out, no, in fact, EA never did turn that corner in that whole time, Microsoft [Asheron's Call] has yet to focus on this space sufficiently and Sony [Everquest and the upcoming Star Wars Galaxies], which I think is doing the best job of our competitors, frankly has overextended itself."
This opens up a potential berth for Garriott and NCSoft, starting with Lineage, which became available in U.S. stores, game magazines and as a free download at the end of November. It's a Diablo-style, top-down, hack-and-slash game with a mouse-driven interface -- easy to learn, simple to start. But at first glance, Garriott still has his work cut out for him. In terms of visuals and sound, the game seems just slightly more polished than the original 1997 game from Blizzard Entertainment.
And while Garriott says the game is aimed at a more casual, younger demographic (15-25, by his estimate, as opposed to the 20-35 that's the more typical segment among MMRPG players), its shortcomings are still conspicuous.
In a genre where the fashion-plate aspect of role playing is such a draw, Lineage characters and their adventure kit are disappointingly inconsistent. (Make your character wield a small dagger, for example, and it suddenly looks like he's dragging a six-foot sword behind him.) Garriott says more appropriate equipment visuals will be patched into the game, in later downloads. What likely won't be changed, however, is the androgynous, Japanese anime quality of the character classes the player has to choose from.
Experimenting with gender roles has always been a powerful appeal of MMRPGs; female gamers often enjoy the casual subversion of embodying a male character, and vice versa. But offered the choice between a knock-kneed blond Elf and a male Warrior who looks about as butch as Michael Jackson during his Captain Eo period, it's hard to imagine that kind of gender hacking will happen here.
"That probably won't be changed," Garriott acknowledges during my house demo. "I think the anime style is a choice that [the Lineage designers] have made and they'll probably stick with it."
But the real area where Lineage shines involves the meta game, a sort of role-playing capture the flag, set against a backdrop that makes the kingdom seem like a mythical Afghanistan. In Lineage, the realm's king has been lost, with many roaming the land claiming to be his true successor. A player can choose to play a prince or a princess, and gather other players to his Blood Pledge, leading them to conquer castles, depose competing princes and gain wide swaths of territory. Succeeding at that, you get to tax the local shopkeepers, generating more revenue to finance even more conquest. The fights over castles are savage, Garriott promises, involving thousands of players at one time, in the same geographic space.
"That will set the stage not for Lord British to enter the game, not to try to claim rulership," Garriott says, "but rather to become a sort of arbitrator -- a very Merlin-like figure -- in the process to determine who the one true king is."
Enthralled by the legend of Lord British, NCSoft sought out Richard Garriott as the man with enough status within the American gaming community to bring Lineage to the States and re-create its success in Asia.
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