Richard Garriott's "Ultimate Ultima" @ GamersGlobal.de

Parc sends in this article-slash-interview with Richard Garriott from Gamescom, discussing his plans to make an "Ultimate Ultima". Garriott, if you recall, runs an outfit called Portalarium who do online social games like Poker and others. According to my Google-fu, Garriott doesn't have the rights to the name "Ultima" but is looking to make a fantasy-themed MMO-meets social game. "Farmville meets Monster Slayer" is one of the quotes but my German isn't good enough to know the exact context.
Original German article here at GamersGlobal and Google translation here.
More information.

The text says that the complete interview will follow - and that he wants to allow roles to be played which have been available in UO, but not since then : Merchants and Fishermen.

And the article says (it isn't clear whether this quote is from him) that eventually all [traditional] classes of MMOs like "Supporters", "Tanks" or "Damage-dealers" direct lead only to the killing of monsters.

If I inerpret this correctly, he wants more than than.

He wants what the German-language term of "Bauer-Gaming" (in stark contrast to "Power-Gaming") says, too.

If In understand it correctly, it will be a new UO in the end. He doesn't speak of any offline game anymore … At least that's how it appears to me …

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
He doesn't speak of any offline game anymore … At least that's how it appears to me …

I don't think he has talked about an offline game since the 90s. I just don't think that is even on his radar anymore. He seems to think the time for that has passed.

I am always looking for more sorts of non combat interactions in role playing games, but in MMOs I don't know how you will keep the combat people from being jerks to the non-combat people outside of rather silly artificial systems like teleporting insta-kill guards. I guess you just have to limit the PvP to certain zones or even just keep it in arenas or whatever.

I don't think the average Farmville player will take kindly to being murdered and having the turnip field razed.

The more I hear him talk the more I start to think that I enjoyed Ultima VII and UW1&2 as much as I did in spite of him rather than because of him. I also get the feeling that having a developer commentary track where I got to hear him talk about the game would have ruined the experience at the time.

I have never complained about anything on this board…
Matter of fact it is a place I come almost everyday even if it is just to take a peek..
STOP posting anything about him please…
Growing up he was the best…I would like to remember him that way…please put him a home and his family can visit him on holidays and every other Sunday….

Garriot's been consistent even back when he was doing singleplayer Ultima games. He's always wanted a living world where everyone could join. I remember reading something about it I believe in RUN magazine when I was a kid.

I don't like how he ditched singleplayer like a bad habit, but it's not like he's flip flopped about the issue. The technology wasn't there back when he made the early Ultimas and when it did catch up Ultima Online was made as fast as he could sell the idea to someone.

Yeah this "New Britannia" game he wants to make at Portalarium, sounds pretty like an Ultima Online 2.0.

I wouldn't mind since as far as am I'm concerned no other MMO ever came close to Ultima Online so… *shrugs*

Oh and Richard Garriott actually did talk about offline games a few years and expressed that he would like to make single player RPGs again (that was back when he was still as NC Soft though and he said "This is not gonna happen of course since NC Soft is an online only game company") - but I think after having done single player RPG for twenty he just more interested in trying new stuff, ten years ago he saw MMO as the "new Frontier" so he worked on that, now he see social space as the new frontier, so he wants to work on that. I think it's not so much that he doesn' care about SP RPGs anymore, but more that he want to focus on a single thing.

That being said from what I've gathered from his other Portalarium related interview, he still very much want to bring single player quality storys and quests into a MMO space (which was the plan for the original Tabula Rasa, though the end result failed miserable at that), so I'd suspect his "New Britannia" to have more plot compenant than UO ever had… but I feel it is a long time coming anyway

-Sergorn