Richard Garriott Talks a Lot About Ultima Online and Crafting

Richard Garriott gave a keynote this week at the GDC Europe conference, where he touched on the Ultima and Ultima Online series as well as what he’s learned.

While I don’t have a transcript of the keynote, He gave a really in-depth interview that was published on the Soulrift blog.

Here are some excerpts. In regards to in-game economies and trying to control how much players have at what levels:

Well, when you generate a massively multiplayer game, the ability to tightly control and constrain things goes out the window. Even if you start with a basis of saying at level 1 you get 1s of gold and level 2 you get 10s and level 3 you get 100s, etc., the problem then becomes that anyone of high level can basically hand that value to a person of low level.

In regards to non-combat roles and real estate and housing in UO:

We had the circumstance where, I think one of the most interesting emergent value assets that came up in Ultima Online was how quickly and how valuable virtual real-estate became. I think that the reason why they became so valuable and the impact on the economy kinda goes like this: Ultima Online, to this day I think, is the only MMO that did such a good job of giving players non-combat roles that were so thoroughly simulated that people had entire lives that they would live out in the virtual world that had little or nothing to do with adventuring. The classical case is the blacksmith. There were people who would literally spend their entire virtual life online buying ore that would be brought by adventurers in dungeons, smelting it down into ingots, taking those ingots and forging weapons, and selling those weapons back to the adventurers who would go back into the dungeon and get more ore. Well, if your joy in this game was to be a blacksmith and make weapons, well your blacksmith shop sorta needed to be somewhere on the beaten path between the dungeon and the city centre where the players usually had their caravans of player groups going for safety. And that real-estate, of course, was almost immediately bought up by players early in the game, so late in the game the only place to build a new blacksmith shop was way out in the woods somewhere, which was, frankly, no amount of advertising would bring people to you. So the real-estate suddenly became the thing of value.

Right after this part, he went on to discuss how officially Origin/EA had no stance on Real Money Transactions (RMTs) and then once they saw what started to happen – scams, third world labor, etc., they began to shift their official stance against RMT

In regards to crafting in other games and UO, Garriott mentioned that it should be as powerful in other MMOs as it was in UO, and that he had no idea early on just how powerful it would be in UO:

but I had no idea of the power of these levels of activity that were not combat within Ultima Online until I was a game master within the game itself and I would do things like… I remember a day that I was running around in the Help Queue and just responding to complaints, people getting stuck somewhere or whatever their problem might be, and I would teleport in as Lord British and help them out and feel very proud of myself.

I remember one time I was invisible and just walking around the coast line and there was this man standing along the shore and he had decorated and adorned his character very carefully, he was wearing cut-off short and a holey shirt and a big straw hat and he was standing on the beach with a fishing pole catching fish and laying the fish out beside him on the dirt. At that time, this was very early in Ultima Online, the simulation for fishing was precisely this: use fishpole on water, 50/50 chance to generate a fish. End of simulation. So there really was no simulation. I did not think of fishing as a profession, I did not think of fishing as something we were simulating, I just thought everything you can see that is a decoration in Ultima Online, it should work. So if you saw a typewriter – not that we ever had one – but if we did, it should work. If there’s a telephone, it should work.

He described how important it, when discussing the fisherman mentioned above, and how it changed his perception and reinforced certain beliefs:

That was a very important lesson for me, when I saw that. It really taught me that people were already playing Ultima Online for reasons that I had never in my wildest imagination have thought that people would desire, much less pull off an entire existing around fishing. But because we were devoted to “everything works” and you really could fish and you really could sell that fish in the market and you really could go into the pub and not only, of course, buy drinks but there was also a board game, you could sit down and play

The whole thing is very much worth a read with a huge emphasis on in-game economies and crafting, and Garriott goes on to talk about Tabula Rasa, some of the other games he’s worked on, and the next Lord British game.

So what are you waiting for, head over to Soulrift to read the full interview.

Richard Garriott Discusses Ultima, Ultima Online at GDC Europe

Richard Garriott gave the final keynote at this week’s Game Developers Conference in Europe, using the Ultima series, Ultima Online, and his upcoming Lord British game as examples for the three phases, aka the “Three Grand Eras of Game Development” as he calls them. They move from single-player to MMORPGs to social gaming.

He discussed a bit of what helped him succeed, while making it clear that he felt it was time to move on.

“One thing that I really lucked into was creating storylines with what I will call ‘social relevance’,” he said, pointing to the moral choices inherent in the Ultima games.

The “save the kingdom” story of the original games in the series is no longer enough, though it still has traction in the industry, he said. “The first Ultimas were very simple stories… And if you look at most games today they still are. Personally, I don’t know about you, after I told that story a few times I was done with it.”

He also discussed the very early days of UO when it wasn’t always a sure thing, and he even discussed that the graphics were outdated in the 1990s:

When he launched the Ultima Online project, EA’s “faith in the team and faith in the project was so low,” he said, that “projected sales were 30k lifetime.”

“Sales and marketing were not in favor of us working with the game,” he said. “It wasn’t until we put up a prototype and put up a web page… 50,000 people signed up to be beta testers in the first couple of weeks. When it finally did ship it was the fastest selling PC game in origin and EA history at the time. Within about two years had outsold all of the other previous Ultimas combined.”

Even so, he said, “Despite the success, lots of people were not convinced that this was a good future for gaming in general.”

This is because the game had dated graphics and a lack of story — putting it behind the current state of the art of single player games. “When a new era starts with graphics that are five or 10 years behind the state of the art, very quickly that changes.”

One thing I found very interesting and agreed with, is Garriott’s take on mobile gaming:

“I am now much more of a gamer than I ever been been in my whole life, but the vast majority of the gaming I have played has been on this machine,” Garriott said, while holding up an iPhone.

“I’m a devout believer that this is the current and near-term future of games.”

I agree with that – I’ve played far more games on my iPhone and have been impressed by how far it’s come in such a short time. I’m playing the Ultima IV beta on the iPad as well and it’s very impressive and makes for a good platform for older games.

This is just a general comment, but I wonder at times if he’s got a case of sour grapes when it comes to certain things. He’s had some really bad experiences that weren’t his fault, especially with MMOs – Ultima Online 2, Tabula Rasa, but also with Ultima 8, which he mentioned:

“There are only two games I look back with some sense of regret… They happened under similar conditions and I made the same mistake twice,” said Garriott.

They were both the first games he worked on after selling his company to a new publisher. Ultima 8 was rushed to hit a holiday release window, and it’s his biggest regret.

“Tabula Rasa — the original vision we had for the game, I wish we had stuck by… The vision was seen as too strange and far out by sales, marketing, and international concerns… It put us further and further behind before we even really got started.”

He had very little to say about Lord British’s New Britannia, other than it wasn’t ready, but he did mention that MMOs are changing to suit the many playstyles out there and used UO as an example:

One important problem with today’s MMOs is that “every player is a combatant”, he said. “In Ultima Online, that was not true.”

It is easy for me to say that you should judge his comments in light of the bad experiences he’s had with some large companies when it came to both his Ultima and Ultima Online games and other properties later on, but some of those experiences ended in court. I think it’s especially telling that more and more MMORPGs are being released all the time – when you visit sites like Massively.joystiq.com or MMORPG.com, the selection of MMOs now versus even just five years ago is staggering. Some of the largest and most anticipated games in the next two years are MMORPGs – Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s Titan, just to name two.

On the other hand, he always had a thing for trying to be cutting edge, whether it was pushing the boundaries of computer hardware with games coming out of Origin, or helping take the MMORPG genre into the mainstream when companies and players weren’t sure what they were or what they were capable of. And let’s face it, some of the social games he talks about have 5-6 times the players that games like World of Warcraft have. Just because those social or Facebook games may appeal to a broader audience than MMORPGs doesn’t make them any less of a game and they are still making their developers 100s of millions, even billions of dollars.

I’ll still take single-player games and MMORPGs over 95% of the social games out there though. And the games I play most on my iPhone – mostly single-player, especially “retro” games that just aren’t being made on the Mac or PC platform. I’m still not sure why EA hasn’t started releasing Origin’s back catalog of Ultima and Wing Commander games on the iPhone. That’s a lot of money just waiting to be made.

It’s a very entertaining read, and while Gamasutra has highlights, I will try to find a transcript or video.

Source: Gamasutra

Lord British’s New Britannia is Announced

Back in February, Richard Garriott discussed plans for a spiritual successor to Ultima and we now have more details, including the working title you see.

He is actually planning on two games with a focus on social networking. One is called Ultimate Collector, and the other, the one that’s of interest to us, is called Lord British’s New Britannia. The two games were unveiled at this week’s South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, which happens to be Garriott’s home, and where he is seeking funding for both games. Ultima Collector is a social networking game with a TV show tie-in. The other is obviously based on Lord British.

Garriott does own the right to use certain aspects of his past work with Origin, which was sold to EA, namely the Lord British character, and Lord British has appeared in other games outside of the Ultima and Ultima Online series.

Lord British’s New Britannia is not simply an MMO tossed onto a social gaming platform. In Garriott’s words:

the virtual world game is not just an ultra-light MMO shopped on social media. I think that would be a failure.”

Unfortunately, very few details were released.

Full story: Gamasutra

Richard Garriott Plans a Spiritual Successor to Ultima

Update: Lord British’s New Britannia Announced.

Kotaku has a lenghty article up discussing Richard Garriott’s future plans, as well as a look back at the start of Ultima Online and how it went from an adventure game into a “social experiment” that saw the influx of players who were interested in non-combat pursuits:

“Most of the games at the time were about combat,” said Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series. “But Ultima Online was a place where people made careers that had nothing to do with combat.

“It was a bit like some Ville-style games, there was shop keeping, farming, managing pets and displaying things in your house.”

Garriott talks a bit about some of the “Ville” games, such as FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille, and what he thinks of them and where he plans on positioning his next game from his company Portalarium. He was a bit cagey about what it would be about, saying that it was as “smallish game”, but that it would have a niche within social gaming and would be original. Once that game is finished, he has plans for something that interests a lot UO players:

“Once we get that game built, then we’re going to move on to the next grand Lord British game,” he added, referring to the name of his in-game persona for the classic role-playing games he’s made in the past. “It will be the spiritual successor to the Ultima legacy.”

Read: Kotaku
Image: Wikimedia Commons