Richard Garriott – Page 3

Lord British Talks Social Gaming, Fishing in UO

June 10, 2011 by Deckard

Gamasutra has posted an in-depth interview with Richard Garriott, aka Lord British. The majority of the interview covers his views on MMOs today, on mobile gaming, or more precisely, cross-platform gaming, why he thinks certain social games do better than others, and in general a wide range of topics related to gaming.

There is a very brief discussion of what Garriott considers to be a spiritual successor to UO, Lord British’s New Britannia, that his company, Portalarium, is currently working on. He does reference Ultima Online in discussing it:

Now that being said, one of my personal goals is to create a more what I call an Ultima Online-like experience with the game that I’m hoping to do — the big game coming up. And that will again go back to making linear narrative somewhat of a challenge, just like it was a challenge in Ultima Online.

Towards the end of the article, in a discussion of metrics, Garriott explains the usage of metrics and how it related to fishing in Ultima Online, both originally and then how the developers adjusted it to match peoples’ expectations.

RG: Yeah, well, I can tell you in Ultima Online we constantly used those metrics to redesign the game. For example, one of my favorite stories is, in Ultima Online, when the game shipped, you could use a fishing pole on the water and there was a 50/50 chance you’d get a fish. Beginning and end of simulation — literately use a pole, on water, 50/50, fish. Lots of people did it, tons of people did it.
And people began to believe apocryphal information about fishing; they began to believe that if you fished in a river versus in the ocean they were better chances of getting fish, which of course was not true. I told you the simulation use fishing pole, on water, 50/50, fish. That’s it!
But so many people were doing it, and so many people had these fictitious beliefs that we thought, “Wow, we should spend some time to make fishing better!” And we did. Over time we actually made the fishing simulation more improved, gave you different kinds of fish, and there really was a point to using different places, and then it became even more popular.
And there were things that we thought were really cool that we put in the game, that nobody noticed or cared about — very sad and tragic. But we either fixed and adressed those, or often, we just removed them from the game.

Full Article: Gamasutra

Richard Garriott Gives LOGIN 2011 Keynote

May 17, 2011 by Deckard

Richard Garriott gave the keynote speech at the LOGIN 2011 Conference that’s being held this week.

He discussed what he perceives as three eras of gaming, with the third era currently happening, while the second era was kicked off by MMORPGs such as Ultima Online:

Later, online games started to take the market. Massively Multiplayer games are gaming’s second era. Ultima Online–originally called Multima– paved the way for these games, but Garriott notes that it was a project no one initially believed it. “This is the hardest game I’ve ever had tried to get going,” he noted as he described the trouble. He later had to go over-budget on Ultima IX, and used that extra money to start creating the game. This gamble eventually paid off because Ultima Online sold more copies than Ultima 1-9 combined, according to him.
Garriott notes that his is an era because it was pioneered by multiplayer games. In the keynote, he shows examples of how Ultima Online (made in 1999) looked most like Ultima 6 (from 1990). However, press allegedly still praised about the game because of the online component. In the next decade, online games and virtual worlds would become a major force in the industry.

Read: Full article at LOGIN News

Why do You Love Ultima and What Makes an Ultima?

May 13, 2011 by Deckard

WtF Dragon over at Ultima Aiera has expanded on a comment made by an Ultima fan, and is asking for stories about what Ultima means to fans, and what constitutes an Ultima game. It was based on this comment:

I think a thread should be started where we can all tell stories about why we love Ultima. Testimonials, basically, so we can gain greater insight into each other’s understanding and perception of the series, and perhaps in some way begin to understand what we as a collective define Ultima to be.
Good idea or nay? It’s been touched on here and there, myself included, but I’d love to see everyone’s experiences in one place. It’d be hella inspirational and maybe bring us together a bit more. This is a very fractured community at times.

and he went on ask Ultima Aiera visitors this:

So, here’s the deal. If you’re already registered at Aiera and would like to contribute, let me know and I will enable your user account with post-drafting rights. (I’ll still have to approve all the articles, thanks to the WordPress security model, but don’t worry…I’ll publish almost anything!)
If you’re not registered (how come?) and would like to contribute, send me your thoughts via the contact form and I will figure out how to post them under your name.

While Ultima Online has diverged from the original Ultima series a great deal, there have been efforts to bring the original Ultima stories and lore back into UO, and some of those efforts continue up through today, as we look towards the expansion of the Ter Mur storyline from the Stygian Abyss expansion. If you have some thoughts and time, head over there and post them. Even though it’s been many years since we’ve had a true stand-alone Ultima game, if you look through the Ultima Aiera site, you’ll find that people are just as passionate about it today as they were two decades ago, with fan remakes and updates still coming out.

Read the article and comments: Ultima Aiera

UO History in Maps and Trinkets

April 13, 2011 by Deckard

I spend a lot of time talking about the future of UO, but it’s always fascinating to look at how far UO has come and where it started. WTF Dragon at Ultima Aiera has posted a couple of articles showing Ultima Online’s past.

The first covers an image of the original Ultima Online map, much of which didn’t make it into UO, which he notes probably due to server or other technical issues, or at least it didn’t make it into UO as shown. If you follow some of the links in the comments, they’ll take you to Raz’s Ultima Online History page which talks about some of the maps of UO as well.

The second article covers over 100 photos of rare items that the Origin Museum has collected, and several of these are related to UO. Some of these, you all may even own:

Click on the images for much larger versions.

One of these days I will get around to posting my UO collection.

Ultima Online – Death Penalties, Shards, and Originality

March 30, 2011March 29, 2011 by Deckard

Who says Ultima Online doesn’t get attention on the various MMO websites. Okay, usually it’s being discussed in the past tense, but nonetheless, plenty of people are still reading about it.

First off, Massively has put together the perfect death penalties as part of their ‘Perfect Ten’ series. Ultima Online clocks in at number four:

Nothing like putting in a hard day’s work and seeing the physical rewards of that work in the form of loot — and then having all of that stripped away from you after you are killed and humiliated by a roving band of player-killers! What joy! What fun!
While the odd recent game like Darkfall is trying to bring back full-body looting as a consequence of death, this feature by and large remains a relic of the cold, cutthroat days of Ultima Online pre-Trammel.

And we get a bonus mention on another Massively article, this time when talking about the MMO industry and how it rolls out servers, err shards and how they are structured in terms of single shard vs multiple shards:

Sometimes it feels as if almost every MMO development studio just defers to the choices made by the creators of other successful games without doing its own research. This is particularly visible when comparing server models, as most MMO coming out on the market are still using Ultima Online-style shards. I think we’ll see more games released using a single-shard server structure in the coming years to create a cohesive community.

Meanwhile, over at Life on Aggramar, a World of Warcraft-oriented website, Delin Quent has put together an interesting article that is worth reading, MMO Originality: Ultima Online (via Ultima Aiera), that discusses the sandbox that is/was Ultima Online, and it’s influence on other MMOs. This is actually part one of a multi-part series.

Delin takes a look at resource gathering, which is still a lot different than most other MMOs:

The mining, lumber and cloth gathering in UO is vastly different to any game I have played. First mining, there were several ore types you could mine depending on your skill level and mining is as simple as having a pick or shovel and finding any rocks in the game and start mining. No looking for a mining node on screen somewhere, but find a pile of rocks, which mountains were prevalent, and start mining till you mine out that spot and move on. Lumbering was the same, look for a forest and take your axe and start chopping trees to fill your pack with logs. In later expansions they added more wood types, again determined by your skill level. Cloth making had to be the most unique, yes, you could go to a tailor and buy bolts of cloth, but those truly immersed in the game would go out in the world and gather cotton or wool from sheep’s to spin into yarn and then into cloth.