Saxon1974 says:

Im still not clear on what kind of games Portalarium is going to release but I get the impressiong all Garriot cares about are MMO style games.

I sure hope he has some genius left in him though….

Sergorn says:

I most definitly with Richard Garriott’s assessment.

What made Ultima Online great and unique was the fact that it was *trully* a Virtual World. You could go out and kill monsters of course, but that was not the point: the point was doing was you WANTED and ENJOYED doing – so you could be a mighty warrior, just as much as you could be a tailor, a sailor, a fisherman, or even a thief or a killer. It had houses, player run cities, player economy essence it was a community and was a “virtual world” in the strictest sense of the term. Sure there was no quest and real stories to follow (altough there WERE some nice events), but players made their own stories. And it also encouraged roleplaying in a way never seen since.

While in the end Everquest and the clones that followed: Everquest 2, Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Dark Ages of Camelot and so on… in the end – they’re basically Diablo-like in an online environment. No more. No less. It’s all about leveling, killing monsters and gaining uber loot.

In a way this also demonstrate how much Ultima was different from the reste – because Ultima Online if anything was very much the Ultima design philosophy pushed to its paroxysm. I’ve always been very surprised that the “hardcore” Ultima community never embraced trully embraced the game on account that it had not plot while at the time insisting how much the virtual world aspect was important in the series and how Ultima IX should offer bread baking. But there was already the “ultimate” Ultima virtual world: and it was Ultima Online.

I do feel however that there is little room in modern MMO for Virtual World anymore and the failure of Star Wars Galaxies very much proved it to me.

You see SWG was basically UO 2.0. I’m done kidding. In many ways this was very much a spiritual successor to Ultima Online – which in a sense should come as no surprise since it was created by Raph “Designer Dragon” Koster, the very lead designer of Ultima Online. Indeed SWG shared a lot of common design philosophies with the cancelled UO2 too!

So it was all about the community: player based economy, housing, player cities, lot of interactivy, many non combattant skills and classes and even free PVP anywhere between Rebels and Imperials. It was also one of the rare post EQ RPG to offer dialogue within the game with bubbles over character rather than simple chatbox.

And it failed. Why? Because in the end the community didn’t care. The players of SWG didn’t want to play dancers, run cities or interacvity: they wanted to play Jedi and camp womprats and Rancors.

I’ve actually known a lot of players like this who came from the EQ crowd… and quit the game after a couple of month and maxing out their characters skill because there was no point to them anymore without more skills or without loot to find. But of course this wasn’t the point of the game, the point was the community.

This is very much after SWG that I stopped caring about MMO (altough Ultima X did interest) because it showed to be there was no room for the kind of game I found in UO anymore.

(Note that SWG also serve a lesson of how one shouldn’t WoWize your game because it lacks success: the niche but stable number of subcribers went to the drains once Sony created the “New Game Experience” which basically turned SWG into a more WoWish action approach).

Now while there is no room for that in “mainstream” MMOs… I feel however there might be potential in the social networks. In essence look at it this way: the game that have success are very simple things, even silly bit… but now let’s image a more complex online game through social network: that say would offer everything you’d find in casual game but mixed with a lot of things. You like fishing ? Come fishing in Lord British Land! You want to kill monsters ? Come too ! I think this is what Garriott is trying to accomplish with Portalarium as a way to bring a casual crowd in more gamer’s game through a social network environement.

I heard an interview of him a while back while he also made a good point about one advantage of social networks as opposed to UO: how in a click you could come and play this UOish game with your friends rather than complete strangers and other things like that.

Somehow I would expect this new Lord British game to be a UO kind of game, but with appeal to the casual crowd, and a more plot intensive approach as you’d fint in a single player Ultima – since this is also still one of his obvious goal: bringing story depth to online game (Eck I didn’t play Tabula Rasa pass a couple of hours of beta… but I know a few people who played it for very long and told me he had actually nailed it in Tabula Rasa and that the game offered lot of lore and depth – almost make me regret not playing it :P)

We’ll see.

Fenyx4 says:

In UO I was a librarian. What weird roles did others have?