Why would anyone give that failure and multimillionaire Richard Garrot any money? If he can afford Texas mansions and going to a space station, then he can afford to fund it himself.
Plus he haven't made anything worthwhile since Ultimas. That decades of flops. His last major title killed NCsoft US. Literally, Tabula Rasa was such fundamental failure that it didn't lasted a year online AND killed off parent studio.
Agreed. I've been putting a lot of money into various game kickstarters lately, and his was the one I had no problem passing on even though I loved my time in UO with Crimson Sky and our alliance with KGB spanking PK's all over the map.
Even if I gave the benefit of the doubt to the game engine, even if he was going to make that an mmo and not some sort of multiplayer game, what through me off was the transition from 3rd person world to the stupid 2d map you use to travel from cities across the map like it was some old school RPG. That was just totally immersion breaking and made no sense to me.
I dunno, I think people give him way too much credit for UO, he had great people working for him like Raph Koster that really pushed for and fostered the open sandbox world play, and other than the Ultima story and virtues I'm not sure what Lord British ever really contributed to that project.
The projects where he was truly lead on later like Tabula Rasa which I picked up were promising but tanked and was a massive failure with more than the usual amount of industry drama. Even that one could've been great, some of it was before its time, the rest was flawed like the silly small instanced zones/maps.