Sure, why not.

So you had a peek in LB's bank account at the time when Origin was sold to EA?

I seem to remember that the buyout was unavoidable because the cost of floppy disks were too high for a small studio with games requiring dozens of them to get any profit. I also recall something about NCSoft giving stocks for Garriot that later became rather valuable and while he was in space or in the quarantine afterwards they tried to exploit some loopholes to force him to sell them at a lower rate.

In retrospect it may have been possible for Garriot to somehow keep the studio floating long enough for the CD-ROM players to became more commonplace, but then again, who can blame him for not taking the risk when everyone still remembered how the whole American video game industry had crashed once already just nine years earlier?

Somehow I can't get rid of thinking any 3D FPRPG as a full on WYSIWYG experience, that will kill any immersion just by not having the characters actually rummaging their backpacks instead of summoning items out of thin air or having some kind of magnets in their clothes instead of holsters to keep their weapons from falling to the ground.

On the other hand while even the later 2D Ultimas were prone to this, all FPRPGs are developed with this line of thought:

"See that cabin over there? We can't leave it empty, yet we can't fill it with anything useful either, so lets place some random junk in there that the players are compelled to pick up just in case there is some easter egg for a trash collector to unlock..."

That would be excellent. I loved the MM series and it deserves better...

Just take the moongate away from the island?

I did but than it took me to another Island with no way of knowing how to get out either and I thought the gates were random and they take me anywhere, but no I go back and forth between the 2 islands so how the fuck do I get out of the islands, without dying, if I want to play this game as a Fighter?

It's been a long time, but if memory serves the different phases of the moons (and more importantly combinations of the two) lead you to different places.

In fact, I just googled it and found a neat little guide.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/562660-ultima-iv-quest-of-the-avatar/faqs/6063

ignore him, he just put the EA buyout (1992) next to Garriot going to space (2008) like there wasn't 16 years between the two (13 of which saw the G man working for NCsoft): either he is trolling or one of the most incompetent anti-fans ever.

yeah, NCsoft has always held contempt for the NA market (ruthlessly killing off western titles while continuing to pump wasted funds into titles from their korean offices that had shriveled and died on America's shores) and after the initial feather in cap victory of hiring on Garriot (in Korea Garriot is to MMOs what Carmac is to FPS) they just viewed him as a burden and regretted giving him a major management position with power .... they threw out his initial concept for Tabula Rasa because it wasn't something they felt the Korean market would like, made him start over from scratch with a western war shooter in space concept (I can't think of anything farther removed from what Garriot is proficient at), blamed him for the extra expenses that caused, rammed Tabula Rasa out the door when it was barely out of internal Alpha, then fired him while he was in quarantine / recovery from his space trip and cashed out his NCsoft stock options for something like less than a tenth of their value while announcing it like it was a voluntary retirement.

The moongates are tied to the phases of the moons; you can see the phases for each gate on the cloth map. Those things were not just little extras, they were required to play the game, partially due to technical limitations, partially to immerse you deeper into the game and partially for copy protection. Spoony complained in Ultima Underworld II about how you never get your bag of runes unless you find the hidden door in your starting room and how there is no hint; you only know it is there if you look at the included map. Ultima 5 used runic fonts all over the place, it was impossible to read the hints without the manual to translate (there is a patch that replaces the runic font with a normal latin alphabet though).

Anyway, how do the gates work? The left moon on the screen at the top is where the moongate will appear and the right moongate is where it will lead to. It takes three (or four) ticks of the right moon until the left moon moves one tick, so for each moongate there are three (or four) possible destinations depending on the phase of the right moon. This means not every moongate will lead everywhere, but it is still faster than walking most of the time (and in the beginning the only possibility).

This means it can take forever until the right combination of phases appears. Here is a little trick I use: install the Ultima IV upgrade patch and set your CPU cycles to Max in DOSBox. This will make the game run crazy fast, but you can press Alt + F to cap the framerate (thanks to the patch) to a reasonable limit. When you need the moons to change just press Alt + F7 again and time just flies by because the moon phases are tied to the framerate, not how many turns you actually pass. Once the combination is there toggle the framerate limiter back on. The same goes for wind as well.

I don't think you can actually proceed anywhere in UW2 without opening that secret door, since it's the only point of access to anything beyond the castle interior (the other doors into the same passage can only be opened from inside the passage itself).

What someone does with their own money is their business.

If you weren't aware Richard's father was an astronaut, and Richard has been wanting to go into space like his dad for a long long time, but he isn't an astronaut himself and thus he found a way to go through making his own money from gaming and what he did with his life, and imo there's not a DAMN thing wrong with that.

Being able to achieve a dream of yours from your own hard work, it's no ones right to say he shoulda spent money on this or that.

I for one would GLADLY pledge to a kickstarter from him if he was making a new pc based rpg or something like that.

If it's a social/facebook game though, I am not interested really.

It's not a matter of him spending his money however he pleases.

The issue is, if he really cared about video games and RPG's, he wouldn't need to beg fans over Kickstarter to pay HIM to make a game, when he has/had the personal resources to make it himself. He should of made it himself and then sold it, otherwise it's just fundamentally dishonest.

Kickstarter is great for indies and mid-sized companies, but to have an ego-obsessed millionaire who lives in a mansion come on it, who hasn't been involved in making a good game in 21 years, and then expect the fans to empty their pockets for him, when he could fund it out of his own pocket change, is just disgusting.

Fools like you will get what you deserve.

So, he's going to run around showing his butt, eh?

I'm not gonna argue, because I mostly agree with you..

Except there's a couple things Kickstarter can give him, that throwing his own money at the project really doesn't.

Hard confirmation of people being interested in buying his new game, showing that it's a sound investment.

If Garriot decided he wanted to return to the 'glory days' of RPGs, he could be fighting with the notion in the video game industry that no one wants that anymore, or that people didn't want to hear his name on games anymore, after the clusterfuck that was Tabula Rasa.

... Also that mansion he lives in?
Yeah, it's up for sale. been on the market since October 2011, presently asking 3.5m for it.
http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/8207-Two-Coves-Dr_Austin_TX_78730_M80342-14958