Richard Garriott Interviews @ Eurogamer

Sergorn said:

Quite the contrary - while Garriott has always had a major involvement in Ultima IX once the original U8-like version was discarded (he co-wrote the so called "Bob White") his involvement became stronger with the final iteration since he took back the director's seat in Summer '98 after the whole Del Castillo debacle.

As he put it himself, U9 was the Ultima he was the most involved in since the Black Gate. This definitly was his project through and through.

-Sergorn

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I think one of the main problems with U9 was that he seemed far more interested in the technical side of the development than in the content side. On the Ultima Collection CD there was an interview with him about the upcoming U9 and 95% of what he talked about were the technical achievements (like being able to see the sky for the first time, how each rain drop was individually created and rendered, etc.). In a way, it's kind of like what's happened with Lucas on Star Wars.

blatantninja said:

I think one of the main problems with U9 was that he seemed far more interested in the technical side of the development than in the content side. .

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Nah, it's just that they didn't have the time to implement all the content they wanted. Eck even on the technical side they didn't exactly had the time to put everything they wanted, nevemind optimize them properly.

The thing is that while Ultima IX was in development for over five years, the final iteration we got was in development for less than two years. It began development in late '97, with a pretty big shakedown/redesign in mid-98. That's not a lot of time to create a big 3D RPG, and with the deadline they had they ended cutting up a lot of content simply because they never had time to do everything they wanted.

For instance the game files includes an alternate map for the village of Cove, which is presented as a pretty big village in the middle of the mountains. In the final game, Cove ended as a "village" of two buildings - one being burned down. It's rather representative of what the team intended between what the team maanged to implement. That's the the issue of U9's development at this point it was basically "rush and cut" because they know they'd have no time to implement everything, make cities as big as they wanted, make as many NPCs as they wanted, implement proper NPC schedules and so on... Even dialogues suffered from this, because they had a set deadline for voice recording so they didn't exactly had time to give 'em the proper polish they needed.

The truth of the matter is that Ultima IX would probably have required an extra year of development to do everything they intended to with the level of polish you'd expect from a quality Origin game, and at that point EA didn't care anymore.

To be fair it probably was a mistake to begin with to restart the game from scratch after UO shipped, and they'd likely should have just completed the Bob White version (with say, added 3Dfx support) - but then they couldn't know either at this point that EA was about to turn Origin into a MMO company and sacrifice every single players game in the process. Ultima IX might not have ended up cancelled like the Wing Commander games of the time and such, but the "rush and cut" was also a direct consequence of this new policy, because EA couldn't wait to get done with U9 so that they could send everyone on new MMOs.

That being said the technical side had its importance in term of crafting the whole virtual world aspect, especially since this was also a major criticism of Ultima VIII: how it basically dropped the ball on the whole "living breathing world". (Though I feel for a 1999 game it was actually very impressive in that aspect actually... U9 still have better interactivity than some RPGs being released a decade later).

-Sergorn

That makes sense. The towns really did feel empty, not just Cove. I always thought the interface had potential, and, especially for the time, it was pretty gorgeous.