Richard Garriott: "What is a Lord British 'Ultimate' Role Playing Game?"
Richard Garriott has posted a lengthy missive on his Facebook page which asks exactly that question: what is the “ultimate” Lord British RPG? It begins with a look at the Ultima series, proceeding trilogy by trilogy and examining the innovations and achievements of each. Then, as has been the case with various keynote talks he’s given recently, he shifts focus to multiplayer gaming, MMORPGs. The third section discusses social and mobile gaming (mostly social gaming), and the potential in that space.
All of that, though, is just the build up to his answer to his own question:
I continue to debate how much of the new world designs to discuss in public as we work. Some part of me wants the new direction to be as new as possible to you when it arrives fully realized. Another angle is that this world will ultimately be your world, and player participation could both help me in its crafting as well as clearly communicate its depth long before its ready. So, we will see. Likely a mix of secrecy and sharing will be the right path to tread.
Here is what I feel is safe to say: Lord British’s Ultimate Role Playing Game, which may be called “Akalabeth” or may be called “New Britannia” or may be called “a name I cannot yet say as it describes the setting I am considering and think I should keep secret at least until I know if it’s likely true,” will be an Ultimate RPG. You will have customized Avatar homesteads and real roles to play in a deep, beautifully realized highly interactive virtual world. It will have virtues and the hero’s journey reflected back to the player. It will have the best of synchronous and asynchronous features in use. Fiction will support your arrival from earth into this new world. I even hope to make maps, coins and other trinkets available to players of the game.
But, please be understanding. It took 25 years to craft all the detail in Ultima. The new world will start smaller, thinner and lighter. It will have fewer features than some or most MMOs. Critical elements of the story I have just told may be missing upon launch. But fear not, this is where we are headed. Come play with us in the brave new world. Help us grow it. Teach us about what you have learned in your years of playing. Invite in your new friends who are new to gaming. They will be a new spirit and provide new ideas about what to do. They will likely not tolerate bad instructions, bad interface or huge upfront fees, which is a good thing! We will teach and learn from them as well.
He even has a word for those who despair that he won’t be able to deliver any sort of worthwhile gameplay experience using the browser as his medium:
…when traditional gamers look at all the “Ville” clones out there in the world, take heart! See not what is popular now, but rather what is happening in this new era that also would benefit them! A great game, like a great movie, need not be inaccessible to the masses. Great story and depth need not come at the cost of up front effort, pain and cost. Free to play does not mean the game has to be riddled with advertising and calls to spam your friends. But, for those unwilling or unable to pay fairly for what they now play, asking them to work for the developer and find us players is not unfair. Great games can and will be made in this new era, to the benefit of all, traditional and new players. We intend to be a leading maker of such games.
My own views on the potential in the mobile and social spaces (or, if you prefer, the casual space) is well-known to most of you, unless you’re only just discovering the site today. In turn, some of you have made it clear that you really don’t think there’s anything worthwhile that can be achieved in the casual space. Others are cautiously sceptical, still others cautiously interested. And frankly, I love the discussions that take place on the site when these topics come up.
I, for one, am betting on Garriott’s success in this effort. And I think what he comes up with will serve as a model for future game development…even beyond the purely casual space. Frankly, I’m looking forward to it, especially if they can get Portalarium games working across multiple platforms with cross-device synchronized savegames that are as seamless and as reliable as Amazon’s Whispersync technology. Good gravy, would I love to see that. But then, not unlike Lord British himself, I do the majority of my gaming on my iPhone these days. Of course I’m excited to see what he has in store.
The kicker is: I think you should be too, Dragons and Dragonettes. And so, evidently, does he. Or, at least, he wants you to give it a try.
I’ll definately be taking a look. But chances are I’ll be sticking with games like the Elder Scrolls, unless his game is substantially different from what I’m expecting (I’m not saying he is doing anything bad… in fact he is probably taking the same approach I would if I had a team and resources… but there are just games I play and games I don’t)
Will his game work on my rotary??
I skipped man days of highschool to play through Serpent Isle and flunked more than one university course so I could cut wood from trees to make arrows in UO. Though I revisit Britania often, I think it might be safe to try a new LB game….or I might be headed towards divorce!
**sigh**
This doesn’t sound interesting at all…it also doesn’t sound even remotely “Ultima”
Just take the Ultima IP and make a real RPG…don’t screw around with it wasting time with MMOs or ridiculous FB games. No one needs another MMO…especially another F2P one…
Sorry, but it sounds to me like LB never came back from space…
The problem is that the property, it its current state, doesn’t have the clout to really do that. Or, at least, that’s the impression I got at Mythic earlier this year. There’s a lot of love for the series at every level of BioWare and EA, but not enough conviction that a new AAA Ultima game will hold its own today…or be able to deliver an authentic Ultima experience.
Are they right in that assessment? I’m not totally convinced, but I think they’re more right than wrong.
If Ultima is going to come back as an AAA IP, some smaller scale successes with the franchise will need to happen first, to re-prove the strength of the name and its legacy.
His interests just changed. He moved on to MMOs, now on to social games. Expecting him to go back to single-player Ultimas (which is what we as Ultima fans pretty much want) is a bit silly. It might be what we (I use this generally, though I know not everyone thinks that) want, but if he wants to make a successful game (selling to more than just old Ultima fans) he can’t go back (not without spending a lot more money and taking more time than I’m guessing he is allowed to). A single-player Ultima couldn’t sell like he needs to, unless it was on the scale of the Elder Scrolls. And it just isn’t what he is interested in doing anymore.
“Just take the Ultima IP and make a real RPG…don’t screw around with it wasting time with MMOs or ridiculous FB games. No one needs another MMO…especially another F2P one…”
That’s a damn sad way to look at it. The Ultima IP is meaningless. It’s the spirit of the game that we cherish, not the name. Fuck Dupre, Iolo, and everyone else. There was something much deeper than names and places that made the series dear to us, and if it’s in Garriott’s new game then praise the Lord.
Also, you’re right WtF. We who have so much love for our childhood friends that titillated us in the day underestimate the apathy and ignorance of subsequent generations of “video game fans”. Just calling a game “Ultima” (or Castlevania, Ninja Gai Den, Zelda, Mario, Kid Icarus, Wizardry, Zork, Prince of Persia, etc.) isn’t enough to make one’s hairs stand on end. As time moves on people forget. The newer generations never even knew. It’s one of the saddest things about getting older, I’ve discovered.
Back to TFA, I think it’s fantastic that Garriott is being so honest and open to feedback regarding the new project. It’s a very innocent and inquisitive attitude which you don’t really see in the industry in general. I couldn’t have hoped for anything more. Humility, no less.
Personally, I’m very excited about this. Will Richard Garriott succeed with his New Britannia? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the prospect seems very exciting.
I honestly don’t care that it’s not a “big AAA RPG game”. There are already more than enough of those.
I also can’t help but notice… that he feels really sad about not being able to revisit the Ultima IP. He seems to me he really cares about doing a new Ultima and is really dissapointed EA didn’t want to join forces with Portalarium to do this. I’ll keep my finger crossed that he has the opportunity to revisit Ultima some time down the road.
“There’s a lot of love for the series at every level of BioWare and EA, but not enough conviction that a new AAA Ultima game will hold its own today…or be able to deliver an authentic Ultima experience.”
Personally… I feel they’re wrong. As a matter of fact I see no logical reason why a new AAA Ultima game would not work. It’d need to be modernized and rethought a bit sure, but I wouldn’t need to sacrifice all that made Ultima Ultima.
I mean in essence, an Ultima game today wouldn’t feel that different to what the Elder Scrolls series offers. It wouldn’t be on such a huge scale, but pretty close in many ways. You could make the same argument about Pyrranha Bytes’ Gothic/Risen games. So if there can be millions of Elder Scrolls sold… there’s no reason a well crafted and properly marketed Ultima game wouldn’t sell. I think the name still has value actually even if modern gamer don’t know this, they could push from a marketing standpoint how the “greatest RPG series of all time” or the “grandfather of all RPGs” is coming back with a vengeance… and it could work.
I think the lack of a AAA Ultima game more likely bodes down to two words: Dragon Age. It’s no coincidence the last attempt from EA to have a AAA Ultima game made (then at Obsidian) happened before they bought Bioware. But now EA already has a AAA fantasy IP with Dragon Age and they probably feel that by creating a new AAA fantasy RPG, it would self compete with Dragon Age. Hence the lack of interest for a AAA Ultima game at this point.
I do think it’s silly too because, the more virtual/open world approach of Ultima as opposed to the cinematic Bioware exeprience means they probably would not compete with each other.
Admitedly EA has Reckoning coming in term of open world RPGs… but they don’t own the IP so Big Huge Games might still go elsewhere for future Amalur games.
I still don’t see a problem with going to the store to buy a game and then installing it. Call me old fashion but I lothe digital downloads. I much prefer to browse games on the shelves and hold something physically in my hand, read the back of the box etc etc. I feel cheated with a digital downloads, Especially when the prices is not too much different to the boxed version.
Digital downloads are only good for the companies. Saves them money. A real shame as the industry is plagued with this these days. Not only computer games but music, photos etc etc..
That piece is really interesting, very keen to play.
I think a lot of people who work within EA would love to see this a success. Some would be interested to help out, too, I bet.
I’m the opposite. I think digital downloads are great (though I agree they should be cheaper than getting the instore version). Games are software. Buying from the store isn’t getting you a physical game… just some other physical stuff. The game is not the DVD… it’s the software on it.
My thought is why not throw the game up for $20 or $30 as a digital download, and if people want the cloth map or physical manual or imperial coin or whatever, they can buy that (as long as they aren’t ridiculously priced). If a new Ultima game came out I’d buy the game (as a digital download) and buy the map, ankh (I figure it’d be an ankh for a reborn Ultima franchise), soundtrack… and whatever else as well. They could also throw together a collectors edition to buy in-store that contained the lot. I’m over getting “physical” version of games. I don’t have anywhere to put another bookshelf.
Personally I’m just not fond of digital distribution, and even more so I miss the times of good old actual boxes. When PC games moved to crappy DVD cases, that broke something in me. Buying a game felt like buying an actual item you know… it had a box, manuals, sometimes trinkets – opening the box was part of the fun.
Now of course I know games and down the road probably eveyrting else are moving toward digital distribution but that saddens me. I can recognize the practicality of it but it’s just not the same. I mean it’s like book – I’ve gotten into ebooks lately because it’s more practical to have your book library in a device… but I still prefer a good old book on paper in the end when I can.
I guess collectors edition are a good alternative though, you get value items which is nice, even if the price is sometime too much now. I guess if there WAS an AAA Ultima game made, it would have collector edition that would include the cloth map and trinkets we used to expect from a regular Map. Which is sad in a way.
Oh well. I’m just an old fart 😛
Back in my poor highschool days of downloading roms and emulators. I could have the entire sega genesis lineup. Sure, I’d browse through the lot of them to see what they were like. But the games I could sit there and play were often times the games I had in real life.
There is something incredibly shallow about not getting a box and case. And at this point in gaming the instructions are practically worthless. The game will teach you how to play it. Now I don’t have anything to read when I’m taking a dump.
Digital downloads are only good for the companies. Saves them money.
Uh, have you seen the prices on Steam lately? It also saves you money.
“This doesn’t sound interesting at all…it also doesn’t sound even remotely ‘Ultima'”
Actually it’s a logical extension of the living, breathing cities of later Ultima games.
Not sure if he’ll pull it off, but I have more faith in this vision for Ultima than as a big budget “Skyrim with ankhs.” Big budget titles have become far too bland and homogenized, playing it safe to maximize profits because they cost so much to develop. (see first-person shooterization of franchises like Fallout, XCOM and Syndicate)
For me, indie titles are increasing where it’s at in terms of innovation and fun at a reasonable price. Who can afford to shell out $60 a pop for this glut of holiday releases? It’s ridiculous and unsustainable.
“Digital downloads are only good for the companies. Saves them money.”
Saves consumers money too… not necessarily on day one, but Steam has some amazing daily/weekly/holiday deals. I think paid $5 for Dawn of War 2 during a THQ Store sale, got the key via email, added it to Steam and minutes later I was playing. It ain’t all bad unless you’re a hoarder. 🙂
(I do have concerns about long-term availability though… we won’t be buying these games off eBay 20 years from now, when they’re gone they’re gone.)
“Actually it’s a logical extension of the living, breathing cities of later Ultima games.”
Agreed. Ultima Online, as much as some longtime fans disliked it, was very much the epytome of the virtual world aspect that Ultima has championned over the years.
This new project seems like the logical continuation of it, though with obviously more story elements, since story was a strong part of Tabula Rasa and it seems to be Garriott still wants to nail the storytelling aspect in a multiplayer environment.
I can understand the skepticism, but I gotta disagree about this not being Ultima-ish. In essence it does feel like spiritual successor from teh way he talks of it.
As regards digital downloads…well, I’m all for them, in both the mobile and desktop contexts. It was one thing when games came with maps, trinkets, and lushly illustrated manuals…but those days are mostly over, except in certain special cases (e.g. Skyrim). And frankly, I’ve no particular need or desire to clutter up my bookshelves with relatively plain game boxes that have a DVD and a thin pamphlet of keyboard shortcuts in them.
And yes, I suppose there’s a risk that Valve might one day fold and with them will go my catalogue of Steam games. Then again, optical discs get scratched; ask me what happened to my family’s copy of Discworld Noir some time. Perfection is an aspiration in the world, not a reality.
Anyhow…Matt and Sergorn raise some interesting points, and I think between them capture the fundamental nature of Garriott’s essay. It begins by looking at his first games, at the Ultima series and his development of the interactive open-world concepts that we all came to know and love in the series. He then moves into Ultima Online, his application of all that development and learning to online gaming, and discusses his failure on the same space with Tabula Rasa.
And all of this is a big preamble that points toward — yes — where he wants to go next. It’s all been learning, for good and for bad, that he wants to apply to his next venture, which he sees as the fusion of everything that has gone before, unfolded piece by piece in an accessible, collaborative way.
Ultima was about more than the living world though. It was about the characters, the story, etc. Stuff that is much harder (nigh on impossible) to pull off in an MMO.
You could take away the bread baking, the cups and knives, the wine kegs and everything else interactive from Ultima games and it would still be an Ultima in my opinion. Ultima was about the story, exploring with your companions, the people of Britannia… Take away the companions and the unique townsfolk and you lose Ultima.
Ultima Online was a very awesome game, but it was a different type of Ultima. Any game where I don’t have Dupre, Katrina, Julia… or other companions to take their place… can’t be a real Ultima in my opinion. That is still the one area where Elder Scrolls… in fact, pretty much any game apart from some select Bioware game… will always fall short.
Of course, that said, if it is done right then MMOs could replace companions with real people. And unique townsfolk with real people. I don’t think any have done that right yet though. There are guilds, and you can do quests in groups and stuff… but it doesn’t really work the same yet.
Thepal:
I prefer to reserve judgement on this until the NDA on The Old Republic lifts. At which point, I may have something to say on the subject, as will (I am sure) others.
I’ve seen TOR. And yeah… not sure what we can mention. But it is Bioware, which is automatically an exception to every rule. What I’ve seen didn’t involve a lot of groups though… so I’ll have to wait to see more of that before I can judge its full effectiveness.
I enjoy my old game boxes, and wish they had complete contents and that I hadn’t lost the rest of my collection. I have bookshelves aplenty for that.
DRM makes even hard copies useless without running unauthorized patches to free them should the DRM mechanism die.
Emulation and illicit downloads keep games alive and is a stopgap for long term IP-holder, distributor or play facilitator failure. The game industry has never formally thanked the people for archiving their data and keeping it running.
In any case, Ultima had some cool story premises and some cool executions of specific story arcs, but from Ultima (I) to Ultima IX the GTA-style sandbox was always present and forward facing. Even Ultima (I) had “PvP everywhere” as soon as you entered a town. The message was pretty clear that you had real freedom and the rest was history.
@Thepal – I’ll grant story was important in Ultima, probably more than anything else for many fans.
But I’d argue from a game design perspective it was almost secondary to what Richard Garriott was aiming to achieve.
I mean let me put it this way:
Imagine a game, which a strong world simulation component: night&day cycles, interactivity, detailed NPC schedules and activity, a sandbow aspect… but suffers from poor story/writing.
Now imagine a game which tells a great story in Britannia… but play like say, Dragon Age. So in other words it has none of that.
I’d argue the more Ultima-ish game would always be the first one. THe second one might offer a good Ultima story to be sure, but it wouldn’t be a good Ultima game.
Also frankly: companion has never been an intergral part of Ultima to me, basically because – they sucked. Nevermind the fact they tended to act like different person in every games, the thing is… they were nothing more than armed pack mules and had no other purpose outside of giving more firepower and inventory space to the party. They rarely had anything worhtwile in dialogue, never had any role to play in the story. There were exception with the WoUs and Serpent Isle, granted (where companion had a fair bunch of dialogues and roles in the story), but most of the time they were a nice bonus sometimes… but frankly not to something to sleep over.
Or to keep into the comparisons, Gothic and Risen may not have a party per se but they’ll always far more like Ultima games that anything Bioware has ever produced in spite of their strong party focus.
As for companions in MMO, I’ll argue that going to adventures with a small bunch of roleplaying friends in Ultima Online, gave me a party that felt more real than anything in any single player Ultima game.
Regarding digital download, I guess I can agree having DVD case isn’t that much of an improvement over them now, but it’s just well you know – this almost feels like losing to Piracy to my old school spirit. I mean really back in the day, the fact that when you bought a game you ha nive box, a nice manual and so on… that felt like a huge reason NOT to pirate a game to the broke kid/teen I was even when everyone was doing it with everything. I just liked having a proper game with the box, in a way it felt like I was being rewarded for actually buying the game. Now well, you buy game because it’s the proper thing to do, because it supports developpers and publishers… but in essense you can even argue you get a worst deal with the legitimate games because of all they crappy DRM they are pushing on us. Basically – they’re going at this the wrong way and were I once felt rewarded for buying the game, now I almost feel punished for buying because I’m suspected of being an evil pirate even though I Bought the game in question.
Also I agree about the prices as mentionned above – I’d be more receptive to buying a game on digital download day one if it didn’t cost the same price as a boxed version.
I’m not usually bothered by DRM; copy protection has been a constant thing in games for as long as I can remember. Then again, I don’t own many Ubisoft games…so perhaps I just haven’t been victimized by DRM as some have.
The thought of losing games because e.g. Steam goes buh-bye does suck, which is why I prefer to buy from Impulse (which, at least in the case of EA games, means I can also get the game via Origin). At the same time, would that be any worse than what happened when I lost the (lengthy) manual for Wolfpack and could no longer pass its “Xth word of Yth paragraph on Zth page” copy protection?
Well to me the problem is not so much the DRM per se as it the principle of it. Altough I could certainly name a few games even from the CD era which had issue installing nowadays solely because of the CD Check. But as I said it’s more the principle of it, I don’t like how publishers treat us customers like all potential pirates, and how they are trying to kill the used game market.
Regarding Steam someday dissapearing, yeah this is also why I have issue with the way it works. If I buy a downloadable game, I want to be able to “own” it and play it in ten years even if the downloading platform is gone – which would not be the case with something like Steam. This is why I’m more receptive to something like GOG.
I have yet to play a facebook game. I see that it requires special privilages and such and have never felt the desire.
But now that I have an android I’ve been playing some of the games out there. Where most are complete trash like fruit slicer and ninjump… I mean wtf. This is that old flashgame trash I played a long time ago. But some games are pretty solid like dead rider, space physics and some 2d rpgs. Even angry birds is a pretty cool game. Dumbs down the worms formula, but its still a “game”.
If they don’t stick to the dumb down formula forever, and forget about highscores. There’s potential for mobile gaming. But ‘casual’ or ‘social’ games send a chill down most gamer’s spines and for good reason.
I borrowed an itouch a few years back as collateral for a loan. I mustve had it for a good month. My gf played it a bit and told me to check it out. And I looked at the racing game for like 5 seconds and went back to playing real games.
But hey even sonic cd is on iphone now! And if genesis sonic games aren’t real games I don’t want to play real games!
Sergorn out of curiosity why do you say gothic games are like ultima? I -love- gothic 1. I’m old enough to remember reviewers say gothic 1 is what ultima 9 should’ve been, but I don’t see it as anything close to ultima in style.
Two things in Garriott’s missive just jumped out at me:
Granted, these things did occur. And yet, look what has transpired since then, especially in light of the most recent expansion to the game (Stygian Abyss) and the recent producer’s letter from Jeff Skalski. Ultima Online did, indeed, stray from the original Ultima vision…but it has since been given over to people who want to move it back toward that baseline.
That’s not a judgement on whether or not UO would have been better than it is now had Garriott remained at the helm, by the way. It’s just a simple observation of which facts Garriott mentions, and which facts he neglects to mention.
Then there was this:
The use of the term “megalomania” implies a psychological disorder, and would be improper to use here. But a lack of humility, at least, is evident.
Now…is he right? Is he wrong? I don’t know, and I suspect it’s too early to tell. Would EA be able to make a better Ultima with Garriott’s involvement? Maybe. Then again, maybe not; Serpent Isle was made with essentially no direct involvement from Garriott, and its excellence as an Ultima title is beyond dispute. The proof will be in the new Ultima game itself, if one is ever released. And also in New Britannia (or whatever it ends up being called). It will be up to us to look at both games and judge them accordingly.
“Sergorn out of curiosity why do you say gothic games are like ultima? I -love- gothic 1. I’m old enough to remember reviewers say gothic 1 is what ultima 9 should’ve been, but I don’t see it as anything close to ultima in style.”
I think it’s very close to Ultima in term of design philosophy – it’s all about offering a solid virtual world, a lot of interactivity, NPCs schedule that makes the world alive and so on. It felt indeed a lot like an “advanced” Ultima IX kind of game, and a lot of the stuff it did (like how you’d have companions for select quests) were things planned but cut in Ultima IX.
So in term of design philosophy this felt a lot like an Ultima to me – I guess not so much is one expect an Ultima to be overhead with a party, but that never was an essential aspect of Ultima to me.
But it’s clear Ultima was a major influence to Pyranha Bytes.
If you’re talking from a story or feel standpoint though I would agree it was not very Ultima-ish though (well except for Risen which felt like an Ultima VIII prequel)
“That’s not a judgement on whether or not UO would have been better than it is now had Garriott remained at the helm, by the way. It’s just a simple observation of which facts Garriott mentions, and which facts he neglects to mention.”
I think he was obviously trolling here, though I’d argue it’s not undeserving because OSI and EA really DID drive UO into the ground with crappy add-ons after Garriott’s departure. Granted things have turned around somewhat thanks to Mythic but one could argue the harm is already done because no matter how many neat Ultima stuff Mythic brings… UO will still have its elves and Ninjas 😛
“Now…is he right? Is he wrong? I don’t know, and I suspect it’s too early to tell. Would EA be able to make a better Ultima with Garriott’s involvement? Maybe. Then again, maybe not; Serpent Isle was made with essentially no direct involvement from Garriott, and its excellence as an Ultima title is beyond dispute. The proof will be in the new Ultima game itself, if one is ever released. And also in New Britannia (or whatever it ends up being called). It will be up to us to look at both games and judge them accordingly.”
I think he’s just pissed EA declined his offer to work on a new Ultima. To be fair though, Garriott is likely unaware of whatever is being worked on a this point in time and if we judge EA’s use of the Ultima name ever since he departed I would probably share his view about Ultima requiring Lord British. That being said I do hope that if EA releases a quality Ultima game, he will have the honesty of recognizing it.
Oh and of course, while I don’t doubt the passion behind Garriott’s words here – there’s obvious PR talk at work here, he’s not gonna say “EA is gonna great Ultima without me of course, but hey come look at my spiritual successor anyway!” when he wants to bring his old fans to Portalarium 😛