Half Life 2 delayed....or is it? (1 Viewer)

[JamesHl]

Feh, Ultima IX wasn't rushed. They had years to make it. It's just that everything went frighteningly downhill after EA bought Origin.

 

[John_Berger]

No, it was rushed. Richard Garriott and others involved with the project said that they were under a lot of pressure to get it out for the Christmas 1999 season. That game needed at least one more year in development and should have been released for the Christmas 2000 season instead.

 

[Krystian C]

No, it was not rushed. Developement began on Ultima IX very shortly after VIII. If they could have made up their minds on the engine they wanted to use (They had the game half done then scrapped it all and started fresh again) then they would have had a solid product. Ultima 8 came out in 1994, they had 5 fricken years of developement, there was no rush. If they had put out a quality product in a timely manner, then they may not be in the position they are today as EA's bitch.

 

[John_Berger]

they may not be in the position they are today as EA's bitch.

For some reason, the way you phrased that was just too funny.

It still doesn't forgive the fact that it was out on the market before it should have been. So, yes, that is rushed, regardless of how much preparation time they had. And I'll take Richard Garriott's word over anyone else's in this thread, thank you. :p)

Regardless, this is a Half-Life 2 thread, so let's reel it back in before the admins tell us to do so.

 

[JamesHl]

If they had put out a quality product in a timely manner, then they may not be in the position they are today as EA's bitch.

Actually, EA bought them in 92. I wouldn't blame these problems so much on the team at Origin (they seem like nice guys, I met a few of them through a friend of mine who worked in the same building, which is also how I knew when they canned the last of the people who weren't working on UO. Twas a sad parade of people crossing the parking lot with drawers in hand... but I digress). I would tend to blame what went down with XIII and IX more on EA than Origin, but in the case of IX I would have to cite some degree of development incompetence. When you get pretty far and realize you have to start over because your game is horrible, that is the dev team's fault. However, I will also agree with John that they shouldn't have been pressured to put out an obviously beta quality release. So it was sort of an orgy of incompetence, really.

The problem with EA as a company is they want everything to be online, because they realize what a cash cow it is to have a game that people pay $40 or whatever to buy and then $10 a month to play. I don't see why people go for that: I can understand the monthly fee, but why not give away the software? Oh well. At least it doesn't seem to be working out as well as they'd hoped, last I heard the sims online wasn't meeting their revenue expectations, and they had to cancel NFS: Motor City because it wasn't what they said it would be at all. I guess Ultima Online is more or less successful, though.