Origin Sells Out

Re:Origin Sells Out by gameswithgo on Friday September 06, 2019 @11:52AM (#20896741)

I worked at Origin in Austin as a summer intern shortly after EA took over. They were hard at work on Ultima Online 2, which they cancelled a about a year later. It was a bummer, as I had just interviewed to work on the Star Wars MMO, and when UO2 got shut down, suddenly a ton of experienced MMO devs were on the market and in town, and they passed on me, a college grad :(

On the bright side I probably make more money now than I would have had I gotten my foot into AAA gamedev!

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Re:Origin Sells Out by jadbox on Friday September 06, 2019 @12:26PM (#20897025)

I really really wanted Ultima Online 2 to happen, and looking back, it could have changed how future MMOs like Everquest or WoW had been developed. The failure of UO2 made a lot of studios wary of sandbox open world games, and they decided to go the more moderate route of theme-park design (limited, predictable design) for both world design and character abilities.

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Re:Origin Sells Out by SeanBoocock on Friday September 06, 2019 @01:21PM (#20897607)

Eh Star Wars Galaxies was still developed in the “sandbox” mold and released to tepid reception. There have been successful sandbox MMOs - EVE Online and Second Life - but the audience for that experience is a lot smaller than for games like WoW (or the MMO-lites that are de jure now like Destiny, The Division, Anthem).

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Re:Origin Sells Out by jghn on Friday September 06, 2019 @03:06PM (#20898772)

The writing was already on the wall the moment EQ came out. I loved the sandbox style but it was clear that the majority did not, and the majority of the untapped market definitely would not

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