Richard Garriott: Hard at Work On His Next Game
If you have Richard Garriott in a circle on Google+, you may have noticed this message from him yesterday:
Working hard on our next FRPG! Getting back to me roots! More info to follow!
Presumably he’s talking about the Ultimate RPG, the upcoming game from Portalarium that he has been touting as the game in which he will return, in his own way, to the Ultima tradition with a new game starring Lord British. And presumably “FRPG” stands for “fantasy RPG” rather than “Facebook RPG”, although Facebook is a likely release vector for the game even so.
We will, of course, have to wait patiently for more details. Or impatiently, as the case may be.
As much as I idolize Richard Garriott for his contribution to my youthful understanding and love of computer games, I think we’re about to discover just how far his vision as a designer meets his ability as an executor of a program. As Curt Schilling learned, it’s not a matter of making arbitrary decrees, but of intimately understanding the code base and how to expand and modify it to suit the gameplay requirements of your core idea.
The core idea. The Constitution of decisions. Programmatic implementation with respect to hardware limitations and supremely clever code to circumvent them are paramount. Consistent programmatic execution of the core idea, wherever it leads, is always a good first rule.
Hopefully Garriott will make algorithms for fishing and general interaction so compelling people will be unable or unwilling to put down the controller.