Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve and we are joined once again by lord british or richard garriott and today we're talking about some of your legacy yeah so you and your team brought a lot of a lot of innovation to the games industry especially when it comes to RPGs and mmos so what was sort of the start of all of that yeah well the you know of course these these gray hairs can tell you that a war if you if you if you wikipedia it you'll see that I've been around for about as long as anybody has been around in this industry you know my very first games for example like Calabasas ero in my mind introduced things like tile graphics the scrolling taya graphic maps are first in Ultima 3d perspective line drawn dungeons first showed up in a calla bath if you go by a little bit further forward the word avatar which is now obviously quite common in our games industry that really shroud of the avatar and I'm shroud of the avatar with fact I I wanted to use the word avatar in shroud of the avatar specifically to help you know reinforce that data point that you know prior to Ultima 4 which was called quest of the avatar your character in a game was called your character and and you might be playing the character of conan the barbarian with Ultima 4 since it was a game about virtue I wanted it to be you in the virtual world since i use the sanskrit word avatar then you as you mentioned the term mmorpgs is really credited to the team and I for Ultima Online i think i actually get credit on the internet but i'm not sure it was actually me but it was somewhere within the you know myself or star or some of the other team members that first used that term was that under origin systems these rights yeah all everything we mentioned has been under origin my brother and i started to form origin in 82 although I think I incorporation formerly was 83 1983 and of course some other big names in from origin what food Warren Spector chris Roberts yep and there's part of the two but other biggest names Tony's Rebecca also did the Crusader series another particularly popular one but but yeah origin when we we settled in austin texas we were the only entertainment software company within probably a thousand miles and so if you wanted to be in the games industry you know that some of the other early california companies might be too far away there were a couple people on the couple companies on the east coast but if you're in the middle of the united states or especially if you're in the southern part of the nited states everyone came to origin you know which is how we how we got hold of chris chris had originally been developing in England missionaries from and and he tried to hire our wisp it was contracting with an artist named Dennis Liu Bei who did familiar name who did all of the covers of all Altimas plus a lot of chris's stuff and and we hired dennis nube and we said we basically stole stole dennis from chris who when he was free lance and so fair for Chris came over I was going like hey what are you doing taking my artist and who the heck are you guys anyway down here in Austin because his parents were living in Austin still doing okay and and so we said look if you want if you want to work with Dennis just let's all work together in terms of items you created or contributed to with the creation there's a went over avatar previously at CES talked about the word shard as a pro games two servers yeah and in fact start is an interesting one too because you know I if you go to a database convention and they talk about keeping databases duplicated on like the east coast to the west coast they'll call them shards but they'll have no idea that that term comes from Ultima Online and and the reason why that term exists that now especially all mmos use that if they have a copy of the server set you know I'm on the East Coast are to the west coast shard when we designed Ultima Online ea's sales projections for the lifetime of the product was 30,000 units and we thought oh that's just way too low they're wrong it'll be maybe a hundred thousand and and we said will you know in case we're wildly successful we'll build world that if we had a we sold a million copies in lifetime will build Britannia to hold that many people which means you know concurrently maybe a hundred thousand people playing or 1010 200,000 people and and then when we had people sign up for the beta we had way more people sign up for the beta you know went 50 within a within a few days mandame in a week we had like 50,000 people pay us five dollars a piece for the privilege of being in the beta and EA an estimate oh my gosh is gonna be much bigger than we thought we're not gonna be able fit every in one world and I actually thought to me that was disappointing because I was going I want people to be together and so I didn't want this fiction where these two worlds were unrelated to each other and so I invented the term shards because at the end of Ultima one mundane the evil wizard is immortal due to this the existence of his gym of immortality as the way you killed him as you first destroy the gym and break it into shards and the theory was that upon that breaking of this super powerful magical artifact a copy of the world was kept in each shard you would join one shard I would join another but maybe someday we'll reunite the shards and so therefore really part of the same world it's very clever in fiction so that's just an arbitrary word shard but now it's literally used by all of online gaming so we've got a charge which have affected industries outside of gaming fairly impressive in its alright at least in terms of terminology avatars we've got movies in addition to game all games use avatars now movies now obviously use the term directly and and even things like you know tile graphics up until 3d now has become so easy or with hardware related you know tile graphics obviously was also had a 20 year run as a fairly good standard for role-playing games and so you know and so first shroud of the avatar I hope we're going to do it again you know the camera we have ever talked about this where we we have a very unique server model for shroud of the avatar you know because they didn't want shards I really do want everybody to be in one world together and so we have instead of having a client-server model which is the way almost all mmos are marketed are architected we actually distribute the server into everyone's machine and so that lets you first of all play solo player if you wish but it also means that if the three of us are in and an instance that is private we can we're all running the server and so it means that we only need to check in with a home office for validation of gold transactions or deaths or other things cheating but since we're all three simultaneously keeping the heartbeat of the server going if one of us drops out or their machine blue screens the other people in the communities keep going so it's not a like traditional peer-to-peer where the if the host drops then you're screwed correct it's more sophisticated it's more sophisticated in fact you know as we had been talking about previously despite this is a completely new type of architecture we've been launching it every month for 15 months and it's been running 24 hours a day seven days a week for four months and it has never failed and part of the reason is because it has to be so fault tolerant you know you know someone's going to try to hack it you know someone's machine is just going to crash and so with the foundation of the logic of how the servers operate just has to be able to deal with something goes wrong and so it's extremely fault tolerant it's not to say no individual persons machine has failed because that has happened but the service broadly has never had even one moment of unscheduled downtime impressive and it for shroud of the avatar I guess we'll throw a quick plug in there for that is there a target release date is their price can they buy into it now you can't bite it now it's already on Steam early access or directly through our website at route of the avatar calm and any of our backers can come in and play 24 hours a day seven days a week will be in alpha by summer beta by fall and I'm going up to the the final wipe which is the closest thing we have to commercial release hopefully right at the end of the year we're struggling to try to make sure we get it into this calendar year but it'll be close so for more information as always links in the description below we shot another video just prior to this and talking out shadow the avatar updates so if you're interested in what you hear here check that out and we will see you all next time you