Richard Garriott sat down for a short interview with Eurogamer about the upcoming game from Portalarium, Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale. During the course of it, Garriott explained that Ultimate Collector serves a greater purpose than being just a revenue-generating Facebook game:

“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”.

We’ve heard this before, of course; it has been known for a while that Ultimate Collector is being used as a testbed for certain systems that will be incorporated into the Ultimate RPG in different ways (e.g. player inventory, in-game economy). And, of course, it will hopefully also serve as a convenient means of bringing in money for Portalarium, allowing them to make the Ultimate RPG bigger and better.

We can hope, anyway!