Richard Garriott just can’t seem to stop giving interviews these days! This time, he sat down with Eurogamer to discuss Portalarium’s upcoming game, Ultimate Collector, and where the garage sale-focused casual game fits into his wider plan:

“Ultimate Collector really is the backbone of the next game,” Richard Garriott told Eurogamer.

“None of the art is the same, of course, and there are absolutely no roles in Ultimate Collector, like there will be in the next game, but the tool-suite is continuing to evolve.”

Rather than develop and test all of the necessary Ultimate RPG features at once, Garriott had Portalarium make simple casino games to establish (and help fund) “fundamental” back-end tools like friends lists, buying and selling, real-money transactions and Facebook integration.

Ultimate Collector expands Portalarium’s capabilities to avatars, houses, secure trading, object collection “and all these other kind of things that are more role-playing-like”. But still no combat, no magic, “not the diversity of roles to play”.

You’ll recall, Dragons and Dragonettes, that in reporting on Ultimate Collector yesterday, I mused that it was probably a fundraising effort as much as anything else. I wasn’t wrong in that guess, and I kind of mused that the game might also be a means for Portalarium to grow out some of the other technologies that it would need to create a massive RPG with a strong social component. BanditLOAF, from the Wing Commander CIC, actually got a chance to see an early build of the game earlier this year, and he said that it’s actually rather cool:

. It’s basically Animal Crossing on Facebook, which alone should make everone involved very rich (I think; there seems to be an x-factor in casual gaming that no one has exactly cracked yet, having to do with how you get exposure for your game regardless of how good/appealing it is.) What I saw had some surprisingly deeper RPG elements, too. There was a kind of ‘crafting’ system that involved repairing and appraising the items you collect. If anything, it seemed like it was too complex for the audience.

Sergorn is correct about this being the start of the “portal” in Portalarium, too. Richard Garriott explained that you could for instance have a card table in your house that you click to jump to the Portalarium poker game… and when the “ultimate RPG” appears, you’ll travel to it through a moongate in your back yard (uh, the unlicensed equivalent of a moongate, I mean.)

Not just a game, but an app launcher and game catalogue frontend, then. Intriguing!