Electronic Arts and Origin Systems have announced a plan that will increase their focus on Ultima Online and halt production of OWO: ORIGIN (UO2). The reason is simple, rather than creating OWO: ORIGIN (UO2) as a parallel world competing with UO, we’ve decided to put those resources into growing and improving the core offering for Ultima Online’s 230,000 loyal subscribers. In the near future and with the release next week of Ultima Online: Third Dawn, players will see new lands, new creatures, and a world that is continually evolving within Ultima Online.

Britannia, born on the Apple II at the dawn of personal-computer gaming, is the oldest and one of the most historically rich gameworlds.

RPGDot: What were the decisions to sell Origin to EA back in 1993? Would you do it again from today’s point of view? And, would you sell a new company of yours to a large company again?
Richard Garriott: Back in ’93 it was clear that even though we were a top 10 company, only the top 5 had the mass necessary to survive platform shifts. For example: we had bet on the Apple, when the PC standard took off, and nearly went out of business. Yes, I’d do it again. It has a cost and benefit.

In somewhat of a strange twist of events, Richard Garriot (AKA Lord Brittish and founder of Origin Systems) announced today that his company, Destination Games, would join Korean-based online game developer NCsoft. Garriot gave further details on his plans for his development team, which apparently involves NCsoft’s game, Lineage: The Blood Pledge.

Garriot’s first task will be to help introduce (and help implement) Linage: The Blood Page in Europe and North America. Garriot will also work on other online projects, but isn’t saying much about his plans right now.

I’ve heard from a few sources that Paul “Sage” Sage and Kirk “Runesabre” Black are leaving UO. As always this is a rumor, but with Sage going to E3 “unofficially” to hang out with an “old friend who is not in the business”, it stands to reason (in my deluded mind, anyway) that he is going to see about hooking up with Richard “My Alter Ego is a Registered Trademark” Garriot’s new company or possibly to hook up with the Star Wars Galaxies team (either way he’ll be with former friends from OSI – OSI has more or less supplied every MMORPG development team in existence with at least 2 or 3 warm bodies).

He also plans to make an appearance in the Lineage world with his electronic alter ego. “In Ultima Online fiction, Lord British has already left Britannia (the fictional land he ruled in Garriott's games), so this is a great opportunity for him to go and visit new worlds,” he joked.

Garriott, Starr Long and NCSoft’s Jake Song (the creator of Lineage) will work on creating a new multiplayer title that will attempt to capture both U.S. and international audiences. The game, currently code-named “Tabula Rosa”, won’t be out for roughly another two-and-a-half years, but WRE was able to uncover a few details.

When I was originally scheduled to meet with David Swofford to discussion the future of Ultima Online, he mentioned that Paul Sage, Ultima Online’s lead designer, would be with him, and Kirk “Runesword” Black, UO’s lead programmer and executive producer, might possibly even join us. That was about nine days ago. Since then, both have voluntarily left Origin Systems for parts unknown. So instead of meeting with them, I ended up meeting with David Swofford and Rick Hall.

One of the main features that Garriott stressed about the game is that it will not be designed to reward devotion. That is, the phenomenon seen in many popular online role-playing games – that you need to invest a very substantial amount of time each week in order to be as experienced as other players – won’t be inherent in Tabula Rasa.

Among the other Destination Games team members introduced last week were technical principals Jeremy Gaffney (Asheron’s Call, UWO: Origin), Bill Randolph (C&C, Ultima IX: Ascension) and Jay Lee (UWO: Origin, Navy Seals), plus creative principals Carly Staehlin (UWO: Origin, Ultima IX: Ascension), Victor Meinert (UWO: Origin, Ultima IX: Ascension) and Scott Jones (Ultima IX: Ascension, Ultima Online: Third Dawn). And another recent addition is Paul Sage, formerly of the UO Live team.

I am indeed staying at OSI. :) I enjoy my job considerably, and still feel very strongly that this community and this game are worth supporting. We have a lot ahead of us, and we still have extremely talented people at the helm.

Sage has worked on UO from before it was even released, and still feels very connected to the game. But a great opportunity arose for him, and he’s doing what he thinks is best for him. This should in no way be seen as a sign of any impending doom to UO. :)

And if you take the ferry over to the Orkneys, you can visit dozens of ancient stone monuments left by people hardier than we: Neolithic farmers, Picts, Vikings. Among them is a beautifully preserved little village, Skara Brae, where all the walls, floors, and even furniture are made of flagstones. Nowadays you can stand on the wall-tops, look down into the roofless rooms with their beds and shelves and cupboards all of stone, and try to imagine what it must have been like during the icy howling darkness of a North Sea winter’s night, five thousand years ago. People dressed in skins, huddling around the hearth in the reeking gloom, burning such driftwood as they could find, the only light coming from the fire.

“It is absolutely not a medieval sword and sorcery game,” Garriott said, “It is absolutely not a science-fiction space opera game. In fact, the best characterization for our current thought, although this could change, but it’s definitely not the first two, I would call a ‘stylized contemporary reality’. We like to believe that we are really creating a new genre.”

NCsoft earned 24.2 billion won in net profit on 58.2 billion won in revenue in 2000.

Actual violence has become so commonplace among computer-game players that concerned authorities even have a term for it that borrows from the game: “off-line PK”.

NCsoft has executed on the business plan that Destination Games is proposing. They created one great game, gone public, and now have a company that makes $80 million in revenue, and $40 million in profit. By comparison, that is already – on one product alone – about half as much profit as EA makes by shipping 100-plus products a year.

Fun: This seems incredibly obvious, but it is sometimes very hard to achieve. Basically, I think of this as minimizing repetitive actions that feel more like work than gameplay (like mining for ore or camping spawns). It also means minimizing downtime (that is, finding your corpse, camping to heal, running for one hour to get to the dungeon entrance, and so on) between multiple “fun” activities. A player should feel like a hero, not a glorified exterminator and/or long-distance runner.

What’s Planned for Ultima Online?

• At least 20 developers, primarily artists, will continue to work on the game to develop new content.
• The developers intend to continue to work on a “global events” system, to allow them to introduce dramatic, dynamic events that effect the entire gaming world and contribute to the developing, serialized fiction of the game – such as the invasion of the town of Trinsic during the Renaissance expansion, and the events that occur in Asheron’s Call.
• Related to the previous point, the developers want to introduce additional “global storylines”, and those storylines may result in different outcomes on the different shards hosting the game, differentiating the shards in material ways.
• Additional monsters, weapons and items should be introduced on an ongoing basis, and the 3D client will continue to be improved to feature particle effects and other 3D enhancements.
• There are now approximately 240,000 active subscribers to the game, 50% more than last year, and that growth has come fairly equally from the U.S. market and overseas (primarily Asia). The company believes that Europe remains an area where the game’s subscriber base as the European population gains cheaper access to the Internet.
• The company significantly upgraded its servers last year, so that there are now 23 servers, each with 4 GB of RAM. The company intends to continue promotions such as “power hour”, allowing players to gain experience more readily during the first hour they play a game in order to discourage longer play sessions. Still, most players play 12 – 13 hours a week, so the average UO player there aren’t a lot of casual gamers playing the game.
• Over 80% of players play in non-player vs. player mirror shards, a figure which greatly surprised the developers (who had initially required all players to be subject to attacks from other players). UO belatedly adopted an option to allow players to avoid being attacked by other players, long after EverQuest and Asheron’s Call demonstrated that the majority of players preferred avoiding “pkilling”.
• Despite rumours to the contrary, the company doesn’t believe there were additional account cancellations as a result of the Company’s decision to cancel Ultima Online 2.

What do Richard Garriott and Starr Long have Planned for Destination Games?

• The game isn’t the rumoured “X” game that Richard Garriott was working on while still at Origin (which wasn’t to be an Ultima game, but would have followed the design spirit of the previous nine core Ultimas), but will cull the best design features from that project as well as Ultima Online and its cancelled sequel (both produced by Starr Long).
• Richard Garriott and Starr Long don’t believe it’s necessary to gamble on creating a console game, since that’s not the area of expertise of the founders of Destination Games, and since online-only PC games have a proven record of commercial success. Destination Games will accordingly focus on PC games (one of the very few announcements to that effect at this year’s E3).
• Richard Garriott announced that he felt the business model traditionally followed by online RPGs (sale of the game at a “normal” retail price for a computer game, coupled with an ongoing monthly fee) was outdated. Tabula Rasa will be available online for purchase, with a single ongoing fee.
• Both Richard Garriott and Starr Long feel that the “virtual world” gameplay model that online RPGs, including Ultima Online, have all used may not be the best way to present a game. A virtual world isn’t necessarily easy to navigate, features frequent downtime or dull “waiting” period and is inherently full of activities that just aren’t a lot of fun, although players are charged for them – a pretty surprising announcement given that one of the primary features of the Ultima games is their ability to convincingly simulate a world better than their RPG peers.
• Instead of a virtual world, Destination Games is looking at “Theme Park” models of presentation – which would allow players to instantly choose from a variety of activities. Stripping away the “work” aspects of online RPGs and allowing players to quickly access the activities that they want to do, and allow them to conveniently access the geographic areas of the world they most want to be in. In vague terms, the duo described a stylized virtual reality of entertaining activities or areas that could be accesses at any time by players.
• Additional details concerning Tabula Rasa will be sketchy for a while, since the game isn’t scheduled to be released for 2 – 2.5 years. About 15 – 20 of the members of the Ultima Online 2 team (which numbered 45 – 50 members prior to the project’s cancellation), have joined Destination Games.

The Black Gate was a substantial improvement upon its predecessor. Ultima VI’s graphics and gameplay were already considerably more complex than those of the fifth installment, and Ultima VII underwent an equal enhancement upon VI.