EA Mythic Interview

WarCry has published a two-part interview with EA Mythic’s Mark Jacobs, talking to the general manager about Warhammer Online in part one and then moving on to Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot in part two. An excerpt about UO’s Kingdom Reborn and Stygian Abyss add-ons:

Jacobs admitted that they were not expecting this update to revolutionize the game. It’s about to turn 10 years old (Origin originally launched it on September 25th, 1997) and they had to be careful not to undermine the playerbase they have. As such, Kingdom Reborn is a completely optional update. Will they eventually force people to move over? Maybe some day, but Jacobs compared it to the various engine upgrades in Dark Age of Camelot. Eventually, their metrics tell them that only a very tiny percentage of users are on an old client, at which point they retire it. That means that if players really do prefer the old client, they can vote by their choice and EA Mythic will do what is in the best interests of the users.

Jacobs didn’t hide the fact that the Beta had some issues and knows that it will take a long time for such a fundamental change to sink in. Their goal is to improve the game without fundamental change and adoption rates will dictate the pace at which they move forward.

An example of this is the Stygian Abyss expansion pack, announced at the same time as Kingdom Reborn. Originally, they were two parts of the same initiative, but it doesn’t take much to realize that EA Mythic has downplayed that update a bit. This is no coincidence. The plan remains to work on and launch that expansion, but first they want KR to sink in. If no one adopts it, well, they may need to rethink their plans for an expansion specifically tailored to the features KR opened up.