UO gets a mention


High-level gear was another area where compromises were necessary.

"It was really cool in Ultima Online to make your own character or guild with your own colors and your own look," Pardo said. "But there's only so much art time that you have, and only so many artists. We chose instead to concentrate that coolness on making really cool prestige armor sets that came from specific places. We allowed raiders and more hardcore players to get that prestige and reward, so that you can recognize where someone has been. With customizable gear, everyone can look different. But you can't have both."


Read the full report at gamasutra.com

Interesting.

UPDATE

World of Warcraft hits 7 million subscribers

Elizabeth Harper is covering the MMO-heavy Austin Game Conference for Joystiq and our WoW-obsessed
friends at WoW Insider.




Wednesday morning at the Austin Game Conference it was announced that World of Warcraft has hit 7 million active subscribers world-wide. While the number doesn't surprise us -- as we've yet to see an MMO present a serious challenge to WoW's dominance of the genre -- such large figures are rather staggering. Despite all of the technical issues and player complaints, the game's popularity has continued to grow on a large scale (the game only announced it hit 6 million active subscribers at the beginning of March, this year). So congratulations, Blizzard, on another million players!

Mark Jacobs, CEO of Mythic Entertainment

source from a reporters take on Jacobs speech


I wanted to make it in time to catch the keynote speech by Mark Jacobs, CEO of Mythic Entertainment, scheduled to start at 9 a.m.

[Part of Jacobs speech below.]

But then in the late 1990s came the “holy trinity” of widely-accepted games in the “massively multiplayer” or “persistent world” genre: Ultima Online, EverQuest and Asheron’s Call. Their marks of success became recognizable — subscriber bases in the hundreds of thousands and even higher retail sales, high conversion rates of purchasers to subscribers and long-term retention of subscribers. The main awkwardness was the critics trying to second-guess how many more subscribers the new genre could take before the market became saturated, Jacobs said. Each MMO made after UO has faced the same question, he said.


[the full speech at source above.]

I can't speak for everyone else, but I had a blast!

Quite a few of the new and old dev team members turned up at various times throughout the conference. I ran into Hanse, AviStetto, MrTact, Deathwish, Oaks (not to mention a smattering of QA and GMs) plus a few before-my-time dev team members (but I have no idea what their pseudonyms were). It was also great to meet and chat with Draconi and Mostly Harmless about all things UO.

As much as I would've liked to have gotten together with the old Austin UO Meetup crowd, the schedule was VERY packed.

It was good to visit my old home in Austin though! I even drove past the old Origin building which has another game company in it now.



Draconi UO Designer

Ah man, it was a blast! And it's nice to see you around the boards speedman

Is it just me or is like every mmorpg getting some sort of upgrade/makeover? Big money changing hands on these merger deals too; I hope our rates don't take a hike...

Anyone who would like to read more about 'Hanse' read on.