How Lord British is Returning to RPGs

There are many people with good reason to be excited about Richard Garriott’s return to making RPGs. Ultimate RPG, his free-to-play, socially-connected take on the genre that he has done so much to popularize over the past 30 years, is in development, and targeted to release in the next 18 months.

Take, for example, those of you ancient enough to have played the original Ultima, launched in 1981 and massively influential in the subsequent design and culture of role-playing games, a bona fide Big Moment in the early development of video games, one in which first-person dungeon-exploration was merged with text-based storytelling and top-down combat-adventuring.

Perhaps you owned a shiny PC in the early 1990s, that faraway world of seminal games like Doom, The 7th Guest and Syndicate. Maybe you played the visually appealing, isometric open world of Ultima VII, felt yourself lost inside its convincingly bustling environs, conversing with other characters. As Rock Paper Shotgun’s Adam Smith said, the first game that “made me feel I was part of a world that didn’t revolve around me”.

Or, a mere 15 years ago you bought and played something called Ultima Online, an online RPG in which players fought against one another through a fantasy world, the first MMO to hit 100,000 subscribers and whose influence on subsequent games can hardly be overstated.

Garriott is an interesting man in other ways. He is widely known as ‘Lord British’, also the name of his most famous in-game character, which is pretty unusual even in the world of videogames. (It is not easy to imagine Cliff Bleszinski being commonly referred to as ‘Marcus Fenix’.)

He has travelled to space, paid for out of his own pocket. He has fought merciless battles with corporate entities like former employer NCsoft, and won. He is an accomplished magician.

Of course, he has suffered failures. His mid-2000s RPG Tabula Rasa was a hugely expensive development project that, despite positive reviews, failed to attract enough players and was subsequently closed down.

Now he is running a company called Portalarium. On the face of it, this is a social gaming company like many others, peddling online blackjack and roulette games. The firm is also launching Ultimate Collector Garage Sale, a game about shopping. These are not to sorts of entertainments that stir the loins of IGN readers.

And yet they are a means to an end, a way for Garriott to play with the mechanics of social gaming and to build the basic infrastructure of his real project, Ultimate RPG, a spiritual successor to his series of Ultima games

However, it won't feature that hallowed brand, owned now by Electronic Arts, which itself is launching a free-to-play multiplayer RPG called Ultima Forever.

So here's Garriott talking about his new project. One note, he was pretty clear that there were elements of the game he didn’t want to talk about yet, such as the plot and visual stye, while other decisions are still in the process of being made.

IGN: How do you pull together social gaming and free-to-play with the traditions of RPG gaming in the Ultima series?

Richard: “I would argue that the Ultimas, as role-playing games, and Ultima Online, as an MMO, are still unique amongst role-playing games. Most other role-playing games and MMOs follow the EverQuest or World of Warcraft models. They tend to be games where every player is, first and foremost, a combatant. There are no players who are not somehow involved in combat.

“Now, as a secondary activity, many of them can do things like have crafting abilities or other roles that they can enhance. But primarily, everyone is a combatant.

Ultima Online

"Contrast that with, say, Ultima Online, where two-thirds of the people may have been combatants, but the other third of the people could easily join the game and participate in the game and never be involved in combat. Those people did roles like running a pub, or they were pet-tamers, or they were farmers or fishermen.

“Well, I find this interesting, this diverse sandbox world, with all these ways to live roles within the reality of the game. I would still argue that Ultima and especially Ultima Online pioneered that, but it has largely been untouched by other creators.

“If you look at the games that became popular in social media first, they're games about farming, about running a cafe, about managing your pets. To me they're all a dissection of the things, the non-combat roles, that we proved to be popular with Ultima Online.

“So if there's anyone around who can take this new group of players who like farming and pets and cafes, and introduce them into a deeper reality where they can live in a world where next door to your cafe may be a farmer where you can go buy all your crops, and there might be a combatant who comes from the dungeons or the wilderness outside who comes through to buy some of your goods or services, I think that my team and my Ultima experiences are very well-suited to do that.

“

It is absolutely going to be a full-blown Lord British virtual world where you will be able to get in and play all the wide variety of roles.

“And so the game that we're going to create, it's important to say that it's not a free-to-play MMO. Right now there's already tons of free-to-play MMOs, many of them coming across from Asia, lots of them look beautiful, lots of them are fully-featured in the sense that they have quests and all the shopkeepers to give you all the various parts and pieces. But if you ever sit down to play any of these, the first thing you do is spend an hour or so creating your character, and the next hour or so collecting all the stuff you need to go out on an adventure, and the next couple of hours going out to mine or farm your level-one monsters to get your level-one gear, then farm your level-two creatures to get your level-two gear.

“And then after a few hours of investment, you say, yep, this is the same old thing as every other game out there, and you say, wow, what a waste of four hours of my time. Then you go into the mode where you're not going to bother playing any more of these free-to-play MMOs, because on the whole they're not worth your time.

“On the other hand, it is absolutely going to be a full-blown Lord British virtual world where you will be able to get in and play all the wide variety of roles that people are accustomed to, with the depth that people are accustomed to, with the overlay of virtues and social commentary that people are used to out of my games.

“So it will feel very familiar as a Lord British game in that sense. The challenge that we're taking on right now, and I believe we can do very well, is that unlike a traditional MMO, where people will spend, as I just mentioned, their first hours going through the game, learning if the game is any fun, we're being very careful to craft a game in such a way that as soon as you start, as soon as we have any indication of what kind of participation you would like to have within this world, that we will lead you to that. If, for example, farming is your thing, we'll help you create your living space very quickly and easily, and then slowly introduce you into the broader world of what a complete virtual world role-playing game is.”

IGN: And presumably the player-payment will be microtransactions? It is a free-to-play in terms of that being the model, right?

Richard: Well, on mobile it may very well have an app cost, a modest app cost. But yes, it will be a free-to-play model. Exactly what the gateways to payment are is something we're still debating as a team. Just so you'll know my bias going into it, I am fairly motivated to do it in a method which is not what I'll call the traditional social media product. I'm a big believer in what I'd call the ‘fair handshake’. While on one hand it's very reasonable for me to give something away for free to give people a taste and let them understand that this thing is something they want to spend their time in, once people start spending significant time in it, it's reasonable for me to find a non-fictionally-invasive, non-pestering way to ask that they support the product.

Tabula Rasa

“And so I don't suspect I'm going to be looking to find a way to ask for payment like the usual random objects throughout the game. But rather to do it in a way that is more uniform and cohesive within the experience of the game itself.”

IGN: Can you tell me about how you are building towards the RPG through the release of these other social games?

“Role-playing games are extraordinarily fully-featured. You not only need the graphics engine of a first-person shooter, but then you need to layer on top of that all the RPG components of magic and combat. You need all the trading-game mechanics, all these other things that are built into a full-blown RPG.

“So what we did with Portalarium when we started, we said, let's build a sequence of games that really build the RPG one piece at a time. And so about a year ago, we released our first little test products. We did some casino games that allowed us to do our client-server architecture, our synchronous and asynchronous backend, our friends lists, our ability for people to buy currency within the game, things of that nature.

Ultima VII

“And now we're launching Ultimate Collector. Of course, not only do we think Ultimate Collector is going to be a great game on its own, but if you think of it as a technological evolution, it allows us to have the code we need for avatars and housing and secure trade and buying and selling from shops, inventory management.

“It’s a collection of code-base that's required for the Ultimate RPG. And over the last six months, we've been rolling out or starting to spin up a team specifically focused on Ultimate RPG, getting a lot of the visuals and style guides, all the world-crafting going. And only now are we spinning up what I'll call the features that are specific to the role-playing game. All the things like combat and magic, the quest system that is unique to an RPG.

“We believe that we've approached it in a logical way so that we didn't have to spend too many years and too many millions of dollars in the pursuit of an unknown, and instead we're now launching and monetizing the pieces along the way, getting to know the audience, the new platforms and those skills will help us complete the RPG.”

IGN: When are you hoping to have Ultimate RPG ready?

Richard: It's a least a year out. How much beyond a year, that's hard to say, but it's definitely more than a year away. I would speculate a year and a half, if I had to put a stake in the ground somewhere. But we don't have a precise timeline until we get more of the team spun up and you have people working exclusively on the new product.”

Colin Campbell is a British-born, Santa-Cruz based games journalist, working for IGN. You can contact me via Twitter or IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com