Colin Campbell at IGN sat down with Richard Garriott to talk about the Ultimate RPG. However, the actual interview portion of the article is only about two-thirds of the length of the article, which actually begins with a pretty decent retrospective of Garriott’s successes and failures over the course of the last thirty (and more!) years.

Lord British was evidently quite pointed about remaining mum on the plot and visual style of the Ultimate RPG, which are things that may still be up in the air and yet to be decided upon for all we know. He was happy to talk about other aspects of the game, however. And he leads with an interesting observation that I hadn’t considered before:

…Ultima Online, where two-thirds of the people may have been combatants, but the other third of the people could easily join the game and participate in the game and never be involved in combat. Those people did roles like running a pub, or they were pet-tamers, or they were farmers or fishermen.

…

If you look at the games that became popular in social media first, they’re games about farming, about running a cafe, about managing your pets. To me they’re all a dissection of the things, the non-combat roles, that we proved to be popular with Ultima Online.

So if there’s anyone around who can take this new group of players who like farming and pets and cafes, and introduce them into a deeper reality…I think that my team and my Ultima experiences are very well-suited to do that.

He’s also adamant about the fact that whatever the Ultimate RPG is, it won’t be a run-of-the-mill MMORPG. What will it be?

…it is absolutely going to be a full-blown Lord British virtual world where you will be able to get in and play all the wide variety of roles that people are accustomed to, with the depth that people are accustomed to, with the overlay of virtues and social commentary that people are used to out of my games.

Will it be a free-to-play title?

Well, on mobile it may very well have an app cost, a modest app cost. But yes, it will be a free-to-play model. Exactly what the gateways to payment are is something we’re still debating as a team. Just so you’ll know my bias going into it, I am fairly motivated to do it in a method which is not what I’ll call the traditional social media product. I’m a big believer in what I’d call the ‘fair handshake’.

And…most importantly of all…when will we see it?

It’s a least a year out. How much beyond a year, that’s hard to say, but it’s definitely more than a year away.

Now you know!