For Those Of You Who Enjoy Such Speculations…
Responding to an angry reader who would just rather that all of us siterunners “stop sucking up to a corporation that doesn’t care” and “tell us what’s going on with Origin and GOG,” BanditLOAF has posted a lengthy article which does an admirable job re-capping all we’ve heard about Ultima, BioWare Mythic, secret projects, and other such things over the last few months.
And yes, he sends some linkage our way (thanks, by the way!), since I have reported on a few such details myself.
But I want to draw attention to his conclusion more than anything, because it’s ultimately what’s important here. What do we know? Well, we know that GOG has a countdown on their front page. Ooooooh! Aaaaaah! And the rumour mill is abuzz with the apparent “known fact” that the publisher to be announced tomorrow will either be LucasArts or Electronic Arts.
Quoth LOAF:
heir announcement tomorrow is said to cover 25 games from a major publisher which at this point is known to be either Electronic Arts or Lucasarts. The smart money had been on LA– they have been willing to digitally distribute classic games in the past (through Steam) while EA hasn’t (with limited exceptions, such as their disasterous brief deal with the GameTap service). But the indications are that this may be EA, and Origin’s back-catalog specifically. Interestingly, Mythic’s own Origin page lists Origin’s games as 25 titles (it’s an odd list, which counts Cybermage as the same number of games as Wing Commander… but it’s an interesting match to what GOG has promised).
To be honest, I don’t know where that “fact” comes from,, I entirely missed the little visual gimmick GOG were using in this article, slowly removing publishers from a map until just EA and LucasArts were left. Although, to be fair there was a reasonable certainty that one of these publishers would arrive on GOG by the summertime; the CDProjekt folks made it abundantly clear that there was a high chance of that some months ago during a livecast conference.
Which will it be? Check back at GOG in a little less than 24 hours from now.
By the way: It’s off topic from the rest of the article, but I want to cite it here anyway because LOAF makes what I think is an admirable point that some (maybe most) of us (myself included) might have missed:
…last year’s Lord of Ultima release is important. Decried by fans as an Ultima in Name Only and a cash grab, Lord of Ultima still proves something very important–just by not being Lord of Dragon Age.
This is something which I think is made all the more relevant now that it’s been revealed that EA was shopping the idea of a new AAA Ultima game to Obsidian back in 2006. That idea fell by the wayside when negotiations fell apart, and shortly afterward EA acquired BioWare, which brought Dragon Age to the fore as EA’s shiny new AAA fantasy title.
In other words, they could easily have opted to farm the Dragon Age franchise out to EA Phenomic. They didn’t. They farmed out the Ultima franchise. Yeah, that pissed us all off…but LOAF is correct, I think, in pointing out that it’s still a significant thing.