GDC Online is officially under way, which makes it the perfect time to share the second part of our interview with BioWare's Gordon Walton and ZeniMax Online's Matt Firor.

ZAM: Ultima Online will be receiving the Hall of Fame Award. Gordon, you were at one time the VP/Executive Producer in charge of managing the game. What are your thoughts on Ultima Online receiving this award?

Gordon: I was only in that position for a couple years. Ultima Online was the first breakout, the first game that got into the public mind. That's what really makes UO stand out. Suddenly people realized this was a viable, commercial medium. It showed you can have a retail hit to go with an online game. It was huge at the time. It basically generated a ton of investment money into the medium, which is what its real importance is in my mind besides the design. The design stuff behind it was very important, but so is the fact that it actually generated a business. Both Matt and I were doing online games for years before that, and getting investment money to build games when we knew that they could be awesome if we could just build them was very difficult.

Matt: Yeah, I think in the years between late 1995 and 2001 we released 12 to 13 games just to make ends meet. We tried a whole bunch of things before we finally got funding for Dark Age of Camelot. It was Ultima's success and EverQuest's success which led to the floodgates of funding being opened finally and other projects finally being able to be created.

ZAM: Since you both just talked about your past projects, I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about your current projects. Matt, can you tell us anything about your projects with your studio?

Matt: I'm working on some projects and they will launch sometime this century.

ZAM: Fair enough! Gordon, BioWare has so much coming out, but the major game on most players' radars is Star Wars: The Old Republic. Can you give us any updates?

Gordon: We are getting toward the end of it, which is the good news. BioWare is known for extended periods of polish to really make the game all it can be. What you'll see us doing between now and next year is really working on making sure that we have not just a game, but hopefully the right game that really delivers not only on the BioWare brand values but on the Star Wars brand values. The shipping window is in the spring of next year. It' been quite a challenging project. I've never done one this big, and I don't think very many people have, either. If you think about the Mass Effect trilogy of games, we're basically building eight of those in one game. We're having fun with it, but it's also extremely challenging.

ZAM: Well I know we're looking forward to it! To wrap things up, what is the one panel or trend at GDC Online that really draws your attention when you look at this massive schedule?

Matt: I'm a huge Brian Reynolds fan, so I'm definitely looking forward to his keynote. There's also a panel that talks about how your major work starts once you actually launch a game in the online space. I'm looking forward to that as well. Tim Cain, who is one of the guys who worked on the original Fallout games back in the day, is also speaking. He's at Carbine Studios right now and will be doing a lecture on storytelling in MMOs.

Gordon: I love the Live track that we put together. The heart and soul of an online game business is being able to do live well. You can build the best game in the world, but if you can't run it well then you're cruisin' for a bruisin'. All online games are an ongoing thing. Audiences want to be entertained on an ongoing basis. Just throwing it out there and letting them have it won't work. You have to do a lot more than that. I love the Live track that we have this year.

On a personal level, I'm more interested in seeing not only the design parts of the social gaming experience but also some of the technologies and how they're delivering games on that scale. It's fascinating to think about going to the next level and thinking, “I don't have millions of people to entertain, I have tens of millions.” How's that going to actually work? If you know a lot about the technology behind it, you know it actually is rocket science on some level. It's fun to see how people are approaching those kinds of problems to put this many people in one place at one time. There are going to be more sessions to go to than I'm going to have time to see, I'm sure. There's a ton of great information being compiled in one place on our business.

ZAM: Thank you so much for taking to the time to talk with us about the convention!

Gordon: Not a problem!

Matt: Thanks for having us!

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief