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T A B L E__T A L K Is getting your parents online more difficult than root canal surgery? Discuss how and why you got your parents wired in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Master of allusion New life for old buzzwords The 21st Challenge No. 12: HTTP say what? Is it sex, or is it art? Will the Asian crisis end Silicon Valley's boom? - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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BY JANELLE BROWN | Ultima Online is, by most accounts, full of bugs. This ambitious role-playing game broke new ground in creating a vast online virtual world that thousands of players could inhabit in real time. It also boasted a host of technical problems: network delays and server crashes, mysterious holes and glitches that let evil characters become overly powerful. Hard-earned objects sometimes disappeared, and the murderous rampages of "player killers" sometimes got an assist from programming lapses. These are, perhaps, the same glitches you might find in many other online games, but with one difference: A group of gamers thinks the Ultima bugs are so egregious that they're suing its publisher, Electronic Arts, for falsely advertising the game's features and releasing a defective product. In the first decision in the case earlier this month, a San Diego judge ruled that most of the plaintiffs' complaints could move forward to trial. Some see the Ultima Online lawsuit as a frivolous misuse of litigation: If you don't like the game, why don't you just return it? But for other gamers and developers, the lawsuit is indicative of a growing issue in the hotly competitive industry -- whether buggy games are being released due to publisher pressure. Regardless, the lawsuit is churning up an industry that has always cherished the open, if sometimes belligerent, communication between developers and gamers. "I don't think that the legal arena is the best place to resolve most disputes, especially in a community that has historically been as relatively small and friendly as the gaming community," says Sid Meier, creative director of Firaxis games and an 18-year industry veteran. "This industry has been one where most designers are also gamers, and most gamers feel they could be designers. It's not an 'us and them' kind of industry, so I'm sorry to see that it has come to this." Gamers had been eagerly awaiting Ultima Online -- the first online game in the hugely successful Ultima series from Origin Systems, which is now owned by Electronic Arts -- when it finally arrived in September 1997. Tens of thousands of players could simultaneously traverse the mythical world of Britannia, conversing in Arthurian dialects, slaying dragons and rescuing princesses. It was -- and still is -- an impressive experiment in community-building. Today, 90,000 people have anted up $59.95 for the CD-ROM and $10 a month to play online. But the game's problems were also infamous. Reviews said Ultima was a "major disappointment" full of "nasty bugs." The game's beta-testers often popped up in online newsgroups, complaining that Ultima had been released before the bugs they had pointed out were fixed. Fixes, in the form of game patches, came fast and furious -- nearly 40 to date -- along with incessant promises that everything would work properly soon. "I think that Electronic Arts slipped and thought they could go ahead and start charging money for what thousands of people were playing for free in the open beta test," says Chris Bailey, the editor of the gaming news site Scorched. "I have been playing games for more than 15 years and can say without doubt that when Ultima Online was released, it had more game-play issues and bugs than any other piece of entertainment software I have ever played." - - - - - - - - - - - -
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