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he also has a wall in his house made entirely of candy https://www.businessinsider.com/minecraft-creators-new-mansion-has-a-massive-candy-wall-2014-12
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Jul 11, 2019 16:43
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extra stout posted:Also while I enjoy this thread it is weird to me that it's easier to get you guys to hate a bad MMO for years than it is for you to try The Lord of The Rings Online, the #1 MMO still standing to be fair i've done both yoloer420 posted:I really need to get around to opening the box of trinkets from this poo poo. It's been sitting in the cupboard for a year or more now. Did all the promised physical rewards end up getting included in these packages? the book from Tracy Hickman did not in final form - I don't know all the details but it is significant drama and most of what everyone who already got everything else and burned it ceremoniously in a youtube video are complaining about. (mind you, he already wrote the book, it's apparently out there and on Amazon you can buy it and can download the ebook version, but people are very angry and want the autographed special edition they were promised. spoiler: good luck with that) Lum_ fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 00:29
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Why robots? Because Lord British wanted all NPCs on schedules that would have them go home and go to sleep every "night". Obviously having a tutorial NPC say "bite me I'm off duty, wait for me to come back" to progress is... less than ideal. Thus we got him to agree to robot NPCs.
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Aug 26, 2019 16:12
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(This "why"/"because" logic loop explains most things in this game, btw)
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Aug 26, 2019 16:13
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The Todd McFarlane stuff was actually repurposed for a UO1 expansion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online:_Lord_Blackthorn%27s_Revenge
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Aug 29, 2019 13:47
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Dr. Kyle Farnsworth posted:Now all we need is Lum slinking back into the thread for the inevitable “never liked those assholes I worked for anyway” like all “it’s a new MMO and this random staffer is a goon!!!!” Posters. nah, that'd be dumb
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Oct 10, 2019 22:00
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quote:What exactly was Lum's part in the management process I was below Richard Garriott in the org chart, assuming one existed. (Yes, he was actually involved with the project - I interacted with him daily). The last year of the project I had a small team of world designers but was never considered management (and would have turned it down were it offered - I suck at it) The conversation system (which is awful and I wanted to rip out for years) was implemented by me based on his design for something between Ultima 6 and a fully-functioning Alexa/Siri clone (surprisingly, you can't really do that in Unity, also we were committed to have the game work in multiple languages which further crippled the system). The result was a kludgey mess which required a ton of writing to make each NPC work at all, much less convincingly. It worked the best in the first few releases when we had time to spend a week or more writing each individual NPC - once we had to implement upwards of 80+ NPCs for multiple zones each month, the results became really threadbare. Eventually near the end of the project we had 4 other designers implementing NPCs; the quality improved significantly (this can be seen in the "outskirts" scenes that new users were funneled into) but not nearly enough. The quest system... well, for the first few years of the project Richard insisted that there were no quests in the game at all, NPCs would just spontaneously ask players to do things as part of conversations. This was, to use the technical term, "stupid" (a long running joke was that I had spent the past release working on not-quests). Eventually this was mercifully forgotten, but it crippled the game since there was never (and to this day I imagine still isn't) a simple way to just add a quest. This is why most of the quests work fitfully and break easily - players would go looking for WoW-style discrete "quest" actions which just didn't exist. This is also why the quest journal and onscreen quest indicators (which were added VERY late in the project) seldom worked correctly, because they had to work with a chaotic mass of character flags, NPC states, and god knows what else. As for the rest of it - I signed a NDA with a company that no longer exists, but on the other hand the game industry is small and I'm both old and like being employed. I'll just say that by the time I was laid off, it came as a relief. Anything else I'll refrain from comment on because in case you didn't notice, there's some seriously deranged "fans" of this project and I'd prefer they forget I exist. Freakazoid_ posted:The difference between a no name code monkey looking to make rent and a former mmo critic is the latter is going to have the skills and insight to tell if the developer they're working for is committing a scam. In a world where there was a news item a week ago that the cash shop for CS:GO had to be taken down because it was being used 100% for money laundering, I think holding me responsible for the state of the industry due to my blog articles written 20 years ago is almost charmingly quaint. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Nov 5, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 16:48
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*shrug* Learning devops which is quite familiar to someone who's had live MMOs fall on them and is about as transferable a skillset as you can get these days. If I go temporarily insane and decide to work on actual game design I'll just finish up one of my perpetually unfinished home projects. At any event if you just look at my posts in this thread I was always pretty open about my opinion! Lum_ fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 01:38
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TheAgent posted:We are old as gently caress "The end! No moral." Rotten Red Rod posted:Also, to Lum, it must be loving weird to hear us talking about you like this, but I have to assume you're used to it by now. Hi, I really liked your site when I was in high school. Thanks! It's only weird in that it happens in a very small microcosm of grognard MMO players from 20 years ago. (Many of which turned out to be game developers themselves, weirdly enough.) The weirdest thing is that the stuff I'm proudest of in retrospect (my work on DAOC live, some of the writing on SotA, designs on a few games that never made it out the door) hardly ever get noticed, but you get drunk and go on IRC while trying to fly a plane online ONE TIME... Lum_ fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Nov 7, 2019 |
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Nov 7, 2019 03:14
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Licarn posted:one of these things will happen Doubt it. The server could easily run on a $20/mo. Linode server or someone's Google Fiber account. The vast majority of the network traffic is peer-to-peer (the first client that enters a scene gets designated master and acts as a server host, the "game server" primarily does account authentication, player character persistence and basic fraud/dupe checking off monster drops/quest rewards) so even more than any other MMO it could run indefinitely in a corner somewhere. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Nov 7, 2019 |
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Nov 7, 2019 20:05
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yoloer420 posted:Can you give any insight into how NAT busting is performed and what is done if those techniques fail? Does the master stay as a solo instance or are they eventually merged in with another? Don't remember the details of implementation, sorry. (it's been almost 2 years since I worked there and I wasn't working on that bit).
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Nov 8, 2019 06:19
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that's been his company's name forever, his twitter and reddit accounts always had that ID https://www.reddit.com/user/catnipgames/
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Nov 14, 2019 21:21
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That cryptocurrency page can't be right, because it claims that all the NEVERDIE COINS in the world are worth over $22,000. (There was never any serious discussion of any of that Neverdie stuff when I was there, I think Richard had plans for it if the ICO took off, but it didn't and then Portalarium didn't and well then!)
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Mar 10, 2020 16:50
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This started 2 years ago. Stormtrooper helms and light sabers were added in during a May the 4th livestream. It wasn't marketed as ...obviously as it is now, so I guess they have really good lawyers on standby. http://sotawiki.net/sota/Blue_Electric_Sword http://sotawiki.net/sota/Red_Electric_Sword http://sotawiki.net/sota/White_Sky_Navy_Helmet The Totally-Not-Darth-Vader armor set was slated as the top end reward for the livestream, but didn't get unlocked. https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=89581 Lum_ fucked around with this message at 03:23 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 03:11
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I just checked steamcharts and it's still hovering at around 150 players. Development apparently consists of mainly just one guy and some people working on contract. (I don't have any idea what's been done since we all got laid off several years ago; pretty sure most content development came to a screeching halt at that point)
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May 2, 2021 00:25
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Freakazoid_ posted:Also I hope Lum is doing well. Yeah, I'm fine. And woah nelly, glad I haven't been involved in any of this stuff the past 4 years. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Mar 3, 2022 09:52
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Arms_Akimbo posted:The time to do that was a year ago when Reddit was drunk on GameStop money There is still a *ton* of profoundly stupid money flooding into the hands of anyone who says the words "blockchain", "NFT" and "play to earn" in a sentence. Case in point, uh, this.
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Apr 13, 2022 15:23
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Dementropy posted:I'm honestly not sure what the target audience is. The audience for pretty much every entry on this website. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ As I said, there is a *lot* of money right now going to anyone who can stream the words "blockchain", "NFT" and "play to earn" in a sentence convincingly. SXSW Interactive this year was full of blockchain play-to-earn project announcements and they were all lavishly funded. The target audience is not PC/MMO gamers, at all. It's the same audience this is pitched at (a blockchain/NFT launch that also picked up a couple of game designers, this time from the tabletop RPG community, as window dressing) https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-nft-gripnr-blockchain-dnd-ttrpg-1848686984 I personally get so many job offers from fly-by-night NFT/P2E projects doing cold calls from LinkedIn desperate for anyone with game development experience that I edited my profile to say "not interested in cryptocurrency/NFT/P2E projects, ever." It's helped reduce the barrage a bit! Lum_ fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Apr 15, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 02:06
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HardKase posted:This is f2p now? I am installing it. I hate you guys. Why the gently caress would you do that? Source: me, who helped make the drat thing
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Apr 22, 2022 01:39
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The current state of SOTA in 2022: Given that the one full-time non-volunteer developer now is working on "Effigy" (yes, that's the name of the next Lord British Production) the few SOTA users left seem to have figured out that the game may see fewer updates. Some have mentioned trying to buy the game, which I guess would be poetic and arguably the ones remaining already *have*. https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/could-catnip-sell-sota-to-the-players-and-or-open-source-the-code.171777/
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Apr 22, 2022 02:06
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I'll have you know my awful and nigh-unfixable code for full text conversations is only made obsolete by at least 10 Asset Store packages!
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Apr 22, 2022 02:11
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30.5 Days posted:I hadn't actually looked at this thing in awhile and holy poo poo, they really do release new unity-purchased assets for purchase every single month like clockwork. That's slowed down because even purchasing an asset off the store requires some development work to have placed in the game.
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Apr 22, 2022 20:14
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Most of those are reissues from earlier releases. (Which irritates the faithful because they were originally told they would be exclusive one time only etc.) AFAIK (and bear in mind I talk to no one involved on this, and until Garriott decided to become Lord CryptoBritish of NFTLand I had mostly purged this from my consciousness) in addition to Spears there's 1 designer, 1 artist, and 1 to 2 programmers who work on a contract basis from when I was there, and another programmer who was brought on from the community. Then there's other community people who are the equivalent of community volunteers/guides in other games whom I assume are paid in COTOs and glory. So it's enough to get out new content every once in a while but there is no logical way to keep 5-6 people paid even on a part time basis when you have a customer base measured in two digits. FrostyPox posted:I don't get why those people love this game so much. Just play Ultima Online or Skyrim or some poo poo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect
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Apr 23, 2022 00:43
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Reciprocator posted:I am playing this Congrats on being a bit more than 2% of the player base.
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May 31, 2022 19:04
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I said come in! posted:He hasn't, I am not sure he has ever played his own game even once. nah, he played it often when it was in active development, I think there’s a steam achievement if you get on his friends list. mind you, his version of “playing” was puttering around lowbie areas, filing hundreds of JIRAs on what he wanted the game to do (I would usually get these) and putting people on friends lists. I doubt he’s been on in the past few years other than the rare twitch stream.
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Jun 12, 2022 00:47
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30.5 Days posted:Did they ever fix any of the aggro-manipulation abilities? Like their version of the wow spell "fade" (a personal aggro-dumping ability) would be undone if the mob took any damage at all from anyone (including the tank). There was a million things like that, none of it worked at a basic level, so it was impossible to do any real grouping, the whole game was everyone just training up every skill to become a one-man army. This was almost certainly due to the networking peer to peer model which caused innumerable weird bugs in anything group related. No idea if that ever got fixed. However that also meant that the game can essentially live forever as all it needs is one or two AWS instances to handle authentication and persistence. If it required real game servers it would have shut down years ago. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Jun 12, 2022 |
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Jun 12, 2022 07:59
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FreeWifi!! posted:How are they even paying for their server costs for this game..? SOTA's server costs are super low. A medium-size AWS instance costs about $75 a month. They're not clearing that much, but they're probably clearing that.
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Jun 14, 2022 01:34
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This appears to still exist for some reason https://www.ironandmagic.com/ it would be very on brand for this to come out a year after web3 collapses into a hype-driven scamheap
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Aug 15, 2022 15:45
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30.5 Days posted:Why are the land parcels "coming soon". They know you can just sell air to these crypto dunces, right? I assume they don't have the web3 crypto-to-air pipeline developed yet, this takes time
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Aug 15, 2022 21:26
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Good news! https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/integration/quarterssdk-226386
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Aug 16, 2022 04:01
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no idea, I just did a search for "blockchain" on the unity asset store. if you actually install anything blockchain-related into a unity project you are even dumber than I am.
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Aug 16, 2022 16:50
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anyway, the incredibly informative web site for the new NFT game disappeared, was briefly replaced with a "you haven't paid your bill" notice, and now redirects to a Facebook page, in case you were wondering as to the technical competency of the new team.
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Aug 18, 2022 16:03
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So, um, the game's been offline for over a week because the last update was world-eatingly bad. They just announced they'd be coming back up some point in the future... after rolling back to last August. It looks like almost the entire dev team (of 4 or 5 or so) is now new hires from the community, Chris has posted some but not that much. Anyway, yeah, that happened. (the SOTA-RAW reddit has most of the gory details as they happened: https://reddit.com/r/shroudoftheavatar_raw/ )
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Oct 6, 2022 20:18
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yoloer420 posted:Whoa! So is my boxed copy still playable in offline single player as per the Kickstarter promises? Ironically enough, yes, it should be. The "offline single player mode" is basically "you have your own server, with one person". The auth server stuff should still work, it's the game database that's fubar. So if you have a pressing need to grind 40 wolves or something it's there. ...of course it's a good bet that whatever corruption of the game data happened to cause all this in a previous update affected the single player DB as well. So if you placed a house and decorated it so you could look at it and say to yourself "yes, this is a place for all my stuff", it may not be there any more? I don't know. I just wrote bad quests. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 00:21
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Rhymenoserous posted:Lum let us know when your NDA drops so you can really fill us in on this boondoggle. Eh, it's hard to quantify when NDAs expire for companies that no longer exist, but it all mostly amounts to wild scope creep - trying to make a $50+ million MMO with a $5 million budget results in things like one person implementing the entire NPC dialogue and quests for 3/4 of the game. Plus a lot of frankly stupid decisions were nailed in stone early by a stakeholder (ie Richard or Chris) insisting on it (such as the dialogue system - Richard was absolutely married to the text parser years after it was obvious it wasn't going to work, was convinced it would be as good as Siri or something and then would spend days dictating how one NPC should respond to random questions about food). I wanted to rip the whole thing out and put in a dialogue tree system like literally every other RPG on the planet and was a few days from doing that when we all got told to get out. I mean, all of this was obvious to any outside observer, and add to that the (frankly justified, given the levels of funding changing hands) entitlement of some of the player base meant it was always going to launch headlong into a brick wall. Then when it was obvious it was never going to make any money back most of the dev team was let go and from that point on it became Chris' hobby project (almost no designers or artists were kept after the layoffs, so very little new content was ever going to appear). I haven't had any direct contact with anyone involved since the layoffs in 2018 so for the past few years have been just watching from the sidelines like everyone else. Wish I could say I was surprised about the NFT game but well, there's a lot of stupid money in that space (or was).
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Oct 9, 2022 17:51
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Hi SOTA thread! I love this thread. It's a time capsule of my hopes and dreams working for my 1990s-era heroes being crushed into a fine paste, sprinkled over noodles, and served to someone who paid $7000 for an ugly airship. Anyway, guess what! https://getpangaea.com/ Huh, looks like any other web3 "game" being announced, wonder who's working on it... https://getpangaea.com/About-us/ oh god, what https://getpangaea.com/About-Project-Rise/What-Project-Rise-is-and-isnt/#wbb1 surely no one is putting money into this https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/540043-03#funding whyyyyyyyyyyy
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Feb 12, 2024 20:04
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Joe Scott is from DeMeta which was the web3 crypto gaming company doing "Iron and Magic" for the approximately 3 weeks it was in active development.jabro posted:Chris Spears is the guy who took over SotA after Garriott wrung all the money from it. I think he was the community manager or something like that before. lol. No, he was the CTO and also the lead gameplay designer by default (Garriott was concerned more with story and random tangents he'd go off on; my job was 90% enabling those random tangents and story ideas). He came up with the deck system, did all the game balancing, and for good measure did a couple of dungeons (The Rise, Castle Atos). If you got mad about something in game not involving real money, it's a good chance it was his fault. He also was absolutely a true believer in the game (why not, it was literally his game in terms of gameplay) and that's why he ended up owning it. No clue why he handed it off to someone else later as I don't talk to him any more. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 00:31
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Not wanting to be publicly associated with Spears is also a consideration. There are some members of the "fan base" for SoTA that are seriously insane. I don't mean goon-style posting on boards weird crap insane, I mean restraining order levels of insanity.
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Feb 13, 2024 16:23
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if only i spent those years doing nothing. it takes a lot of work to write all the dialogue for a bad game!
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Feb 26, 2024 22:56
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I said come in! posted:What are you doing nowadays? I'm so sorry that you had to work with Richard Garriot at one point. He sounds like a completely insufferable rear end in a top hat to be around. I'd rather not talk about what I'm doing now and I'm pretty much done with trying to work in design unless it's my own project. Garriott is only insufferable from a distance. He's extremely charismatic in person; like Steve Jobs he has a Reality Distortion Field(tm) where he can lie right to your face and you just smile and nod because he's just so goshdarn likeable.
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Feb 27, 2024 16:16
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