from GameSpot (http://www.gamespot.com/) An Interview with Producer Starr Long (Origin) Ultima Online Update The first Ultima game was released in computer gaming's distant past, for now-extinct systems such as the Commodore 64, Atari 800 and Apple II. Since that time, there have been seven other Ultimas - each expanding and refining the now-legendary role-playing world. Ultima has always been a single player experience - that is, until now. Origin is hard at work on the newest chapter in the saga, Ultima Online, expected to ship this summer with a beta-test set to begin any day now. Touted by many as the first game to truly take advantage of the possibilities offered by a multiplayer environment, the game is also expected to be the biggest and best of the Ultimas. In this, the first of our three-part series on the game, Starr Long, the game's associate producer, gives GameSpot the 411 on what to expect from Ultima Online. GS: Can you tell us about Ultima Online, its world and its storyline? Starr Long: It's loosely based on the series Ultima, a fantasy computer role playing game currently in its ninth installment. Ultima Online goes back to the very first Ultima and takes the splintered reality approach. The online version happens in an alternate reality. Without giving away too much, it basically establishes an alternate timeline from the numbered series of Ultimas. And it's a fantasy world...pseudo-medieval, dragons and sorcery and that kind of stuff. There are two main characters in the game that are vying for control of the world and the events happening in it. They're not really good or evil. We left it ambiguous for the players to figure out on their own what they think is right. The world is called Britannia, just like in the numbered Ultimas - and there are at least 12 cities and villages that you can go to, each with its unique look not only as far as architecture and terrain and vegetation, but also the feel of it in the sense that the computer generated characters have unique conversations according to that area. The sizes of cities are different, they're spread out, there are huge tracts of wilderness between each one. Some are on islands, and there are oceans. The scale of it is really big - there have been eight Ultimas so far and the map of this one is bigger than all of them combined. It would probably take you eight to ten hours to walk from one end of it to the other in real time. The reason we've made it to that scale is because we want it to support 2000-3000 people simultaneously. To squeeze that many people into a virtual world you need it to be pretty large. It's all in one seamless map, which as far as we know has never been done before. In fact, no one has even come close in a graphical fantasy game like this - others may support over 100 players. Genie Air Warrior has had 900 people in one game session at once, so they had 900 airplanes in the air. But as far as we know, no one has had a seamless map that everyone exists on; most games isolate everyone. Meridian 59 has a few hundred people per server and the server's completely isolated. You can't have too many people in a game. Our goal is to make the servers for up to 3000 people so it's transparent to everyone on that map. Once you get above that number - that'll take a few years - we'll start spawning clones of the world. GS: What kinds of multiplayer features does Ultima Online have? We've tried to make it as open-ended as possible. We've also tried to make it as easy as possible to use. Like traditional Ultimas it's all mouse driven with a point and click interface. To communicate with other people you type on your keyboard and hit enter and the text appears above your head - versus all the other online games where the text appears in a separate chat box. What that means is with our games it's very easy to tell who said what because the text floats above their head. And we're using third person point of view so that means you can see up to 50 people on the screen at once, versus first person where you can see maybe ten. You can customize the color of your text, and you can customize the characters on screen. Any equipment - armor, weapons, whatever you find in the game - appears on your character exactly as it appears in the game, down to the detail level of right glove and left glove. You can take the traditional dungeon hack-and-slash-I'm-gonna-go-kill-monsters-and-collect-treasure approach, or you can become a blacksmith - you can actually in the game use an anvil and metal to make weapons or armor and sell them. You can be a tailor; you can make clothes. You can be a carpenter; you can make furniture. You can cook, you can bake goods and sell them. If you don't want to do any of that stuff, you want to just hang out in the tavern and drink virtual ale and chat, you can do that too. So you can use it as an elaborate chat program. There are an incredibly wide variety of things you can do in the game. There are creative outlets as far as producing and making things as well as the more visceral outlets of hunting and killing monsters or animals. And with monsters and animals you can use their body to make hides or meat and go sell them in the town. Ultima Online Update: Part II Here is the second of our three-part interview with Starr Long, Ultima Online's associate producer. Ultima Online - the classic single-player RPG from Origin now undergoing the necessary tweaking to make it multiplayer-ready - is expected to ship this summer. A beta-test is set to begin any day now. GS: How will Ultima Online make multiplayer online gaming friendly to new players? Starr Long: There are actually tons of different ways. First of all, the interface is easy to use. There's almost no wrap-up time. You don't have to know any complex keystrokes. It's also not reflex-driven: You don't have to worry about "who clicks the fastest win" - there's none of that. It's not an action game. Unlike most RPGs, there isn't a level or experience system. The game is not level-based at all. There aren't going to be any godlike characters; Instead, it's skill-based. And the way you get skills is you either get trained in them by some computer-controlled training character, other players can train you in skills, or you can just keep trying to do a certain thing and learn that skill and get better. The way skills work is the more you use them, the better you get. The less you use them, the more they degrade over time. So if you want to be the best swordsman in the game, you have to swing your sword a lot. You have to go out and kill things all the time. You have to go get in duels all the time, or else after a while your skill will start to degrade. If you're concentrating all on one skill, your other skills will start to degrade. What that means is you can't be the best at everything, ever. You can be good at a bunch of things, but you can never know every skill in the game 100 percent. If you play all the time, you're not going to be able to know them all. Also, since you're not going to be level-based, if you're going to attack a newbie, he has a chance of killing you. You're not impervious, and you're not impregnable just because you've been playing the game longer. And finally, another way we protect newbies is you always start out in the city. And in the cities there are guards everywhere - a guard on every corner. And every time someone tries to do something illegal, attack other players or NPCs [Non Player Characters] in the town or steal things, the guards show up and, depending on the severity of the crime, they beat you up or they kill you. Now outside the cities, there are no police or guards anywhere - kind of like the wild, wild West - and anything goes. But the idea is you hang out in the city, you go learn some skills, you train a little bit, you maybe find some more experienced people or just other people to team up with, and then you venture out into the wild lands outside the cities. That's how we're trying to make it newbie-friendly. GS: How are you trying to make Ultima Online a better multiplayer online game than other games, such as Meridian 59? Starr Long: Since you mentioned Meridian 59, I'll pick on them. The first reason I think we're better may seem like a minor point, but once you start playing these games you realize it makes all the difference. It's the fact that your text appears above your head. That makes the game about 10 million times more enjoyable and more playable. When you have a separate text window in a graphical environment your brain cannot look at two things at once and process them at the same time. So you either have to watch what's going on or you have to watch the text, but you cannot do both. The other reason is our third-person point of view. With first-person point of view you could only maybe get ten people on a screen and it's very, very difficult to coordinate any kind of complex movements because you can only see directly in front of you. You don't have 360 degrees of vision. Whereas with third-person perspective you can see everybody, so you can do really cool, complicated things like flanking movements. You can say, "Hey, look - come out from behind me and go around to the right of the monster and hit him from the side." You can have speeches, where there's one person on a stand and 50 people watching him. You can march and you can direct people. Ultima Online Update: Part III Here is the third and final part of our three-part interview with Starr Long, Ultima Online's associate producer. Ultima Online - the classic single-player RPG from Origin now undergoing the necessary tweaking to make it multiplayer-ready - is expected to ship this summer. A beta test is set to begin any day now. GameSpot: What's the game interface like? Starr Long: What we've done is create a world simulation based on a resource system with a virtual ecology and a closed economic system all linked together. That means the grass graphics that you see in the game produce a grass resource. The little rabbits that hop around in the game eat that grass. Then there are wolves that eat those rabbits. And then you can go kill the wolves. It's the entire food chain. I meet a monster resource and the game automatically puts a dragon there. Now that dragon knows that it needs to eat so it looks for the nearest food. Well, there's a forest outside its cave that is producing grass and other foods which deer eat - so the game knows to put deer there. The dragon sees the deer and starts eating them. Well, a bunch of players who want some money come along, kill all the deer, take their hides and their meat, and go sell them. Now there are no deer for the dragon to eat. The dragon's thinking, "Well shoot, I need some food. And when there's no food right outside my cave I need to widen my search area for food." The nearest food might be a town full of people. So it starts attacking the town and eating the people and when you walk into that town they say, "Oh god, the dragon's attacking the town, help us and well give you money or treasure for it." And we didn't script any of that - we just set up the system and the system generates all that. Or maybe the dragon doesn't attack the people or maybe the dragon attacks all the sheep. Well, now in that town, because all the sheep are being killed by the dragon and eaten, the price of meat goes up. With our game, every action in the game affects everything else. It's very dynamic. Every time you log in it's going to be different. When you left the town you've been hanging out in and using as your base to go exploring, everything was fine. The price of everything was pretty normal and the sheep were being herded in the fields, but when you come back in this whole dragon thing's happened. So when you log on everything's completely different from when you last left the game. GS: And you can find out what's happened by talking to the other players or characters in Ultima? Starr Long: Oh yes, exactly. That's the other thing - all the computer-controlled characters' conversations are linked to the world state. Their conversations reflect what the current status is. They'll tell you, oh man, the price of meat is horribly high because the dragon's eating all our sheep. The advantage of an online game and a persistent world gives you is that dynamic world. And not only is it dynamic in the sense that we're setting it up so it can generate stuff itself, but that it also gives us the ability to add things that we want later. If for instance we want to add a new variable to the whole mix, that all sits on the server. If we don't think there are enough dragons in the mix we just tweak the dragon generator dial on our server side and more dragons appear in the game. The persistent world gives you the feeling it really is an alternate world. When you go to sleep, you know when you wake up there's going to be the world out there, and it's kept going even though you were asleep. While you're not playing most games, nothing's happening so it doesn't feel real in that sense - whereas in our game it's going to feel more real because it goes on no matter what and it's going to change all the time just like the real world. So yeah, I think we're taking advantage of the medium in ways that haven't been done before. Another thing we're doing is because it's an Internet game and not through AOL or one of the game companies, anybody in the world can play the game. People from Korea, people from Germany, anyone. And we designed it to work with all the problems of the Internet - variable bandwidth, variable latency - we designed the game to be very friendly to those things. So even if your latency is pretty bad you can still play the game. GS: Ultima has been around for so long and there are a lot of fans out there. Has that helped you in deciding how to create new aspects of Ultima Online? Starr Long: We're taking on it on angles no one else is really doing. I think that has people excited because when we start explaining how we're thinking about it, people are telling us that makes total sense. The Ultimas definitely gave us a really core fan base. There are some really fanatically loyal Ultima fans and I think that really helped us get the ball rolling. But we could have taken Ultima Online and made it just like Meridian 59. It could have been a non-dynamic world, it could only have been a few hundred people at a time, and it would have gotten people excited just because it was an Ultima game. But I don't think it would have gotten people as excited if there weren't all these ideas that we're talking about, too. GS: I know the beta test hasn't even started yet, but what has the response been so far from gamers? Starr Long: Oh, unbelievable. First of all, when we first started we were thinking we'll be lucky if we got 5,000 people to apply for the beta test. We now have over 50,000 who have applied. Mpath [only] got up to 50,000 after being online for free for six months. There are over 200 fan groups called guilds, devoted to the game, each with their own web pages. The only other game that has that many fan groups is Quake, which has been out almost a year now. And so the response has been overwhelming, more than we even imagined. The fan web sites are as elaborate and intricate as our own corporate web site - pages and pages of information all about a game that hasn't even been released yet. It's really truly stunning. The other amazing thing about the beta test is that we're actually charging for it. No one else is doing that. We asked for two dollars to cover all the costs of making the CDs and mailing them out to people. We were also thinking a side effect would be that it would limit the beta test to only the most hard-core fans, and we'll know that they'll give it a quality testing for the deal. And it turns out that it didn't discourage anyone.