How Lord British is Returning to RPGs

The folks at IGN had an interesting chat with seminal RPG developer Richard “Lord British” Garriott, which focuses, among other things, on his upcoming Ultimate RPG, which promises to bring an experience similar in spirit to that of his earlier RPGs, but taking advantage of the mobile and social platforms we have today. Here’s a generous excerpt on the title’s philosophy:

IGN: How do you pull together social gaming and free-to-play with the traditions of RPG gaming in the Ultima series?

Richard: (I would argue that the Ultimas, as role-playing games, and Ultima Online, as an MMO, are still unique amongst role-playing games. Most other role-playing games and MMOs follow the EverQuest or World of Warcraft models. They tend to be games where every player is, first and foremost, a combatant. There are no players who are not somehow involved in combat.

(Now, as a secondary activity, many of them can do things like have crafting abilities or other roles that they can enhance. But primarily, everyone is a combatant.

“Contrast that with, say, 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.

(Well, I find this interesting, this diverse sandbox world, with all these ways to live roles within the reality of the game. I would still argue that Ultima and especially Ultima Online pioneered that, but it has largely been untouched by other creators.

(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 where they can live in a world where next door to your cafe may be a farmer where you can go buy all your crops, and there might be a combatant who comes from the dungeons or the wilderness outside who comes through to buy some of your goods or services, I think that my team and my Ultima experiences are very well-suited to do that.

(And so the game that we’re going to create, it’s important to say that it’s not a free-to-play MMO. Right now there’s already tons of free-to-play MMOs, many of them coming across from Asia, lots of them look beautiful, lots of them are fully-featured in the sense that they have quests and all the shopkeepers to give you all the various parts and pieces. But if you ever sit down to play any of these, the first thing you do is spend an hour or so creating your character, and the next hour or so collecting all the stuff you need to go out on an adventure, and the next couple of hours going out to mine or farm your level-one monsters to get your level-one gear, then farm your level-two creatures to get your level-two gear.

(And then after a few hours of investment, you say, yep, this is the same old thing as every other game out there, and you say, wow, what a waste of four hours of my time. Then you go into the mode where you’re not going to bother playing any more of these free-to-play MMOs, because on the whole they’re not worth your time.

(On the other hand, 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.

(So it will feel very familiar as a Lord British game in that sense. The challenge that we’re taking on right now, and I believe we can do very well, is that unlike a traditional MMO, where people will spend, as I just mentioned, their first hours going through the game, learning if the game is any fun, we’re being very careful to craft a game in such a way that as soon as you start, as soon as we have any indication of what kind of participation you would like to have within this world, that we will lead you to that. If, for example, farming is your thing, we’ll help you create your living space very quickly and easily, and then slowly introduce you into the broader world of what a complete virtual world role-playing game is.)