Wow! Lord British Proves The RPG Genre Owes Its Soul to Ultima

[AlarictheVisgoth]

First off, every RPG--regardless of whether they're fantasy, survival, or realism based-- owes their existence in the gaming market today because of Ultima.

 

And Ultima franchise owes its existence to the great Lord Brittish, Godfather of all RPG genre today.

 

I was waiting for my Kingdom Come : Deliverance to download on Steam and stumbled across this gem on Richard Garriott while surfing. It's somewhat dated being posted on Ars around Dec 2017 so this discovery is much to my chagrin:

 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/12/an-afternoon-with-lord-british-creating-ultima-onlines-unknown-virtual-ecology/

 

I'm astounded because I'm an old school Ultima gamer. Played Ultima 1 - VII Black Gate/Serpent Isle. After enduring some 20 hours torture watching my stiff legged Avatar superceede Super Mario Bros running/jumping all over my VGA screen, I quit Pagan for a week. Then crept back due to sheer brand loyalty. Only to suffer a game breaking bug right near the middle of the game's story.

 

But was forced to abandon the series at Pagan when it became clear the Exceptional Asshats had acquired Origin in the late 1990s. This EABorg assimilation was painfully evident decline in game play, game mechanics, and RPG story writing quality starting with Pagan. And what the fan base had to endure in the SP genre beyond that game release. I had mixed fears when it became clear EA was ending the SP Ultima franchise for a radically dynamic world called Ultima Online. So I never bought the last SP Ultima game before UO went gold, one of my biggest regrets to this day.

 

But with all the hype that UO was bringing in the mid 1990s, I, like thousands of other devoted Ultima gamers, bought my first Pentium I. I joined several guilds, fan site bulletin boards, and braced for the inevitable. After the craziness of game launch had died down (in which this time I believe a player succeeded in murdering Lord British) I discovered that being online wasn't such a bad thing after all.

 

Life really began picking up playing UO after that until I made a horrifying discovery: the entire PKing murdering PvP population of Quake had quit their demonic realm ...and started taking up residence in UO :laugh:

 

Anyhow, despite all the bittersweet nostalgia this article resurrected, I had NO idea Garriott had such insanely ambitious plans for the Ultima franchise. I can only wonder what might have been -- and how Ultima would've revolutionized the immersion of RPGs in the late 1990s -- had they not been destroyed by the EABorg. But thankfully, I'm seeing elements of Garriots economic simulation vision in games like Kingdom Come and Ark Survival.

 

The man was clearly lightyears ahead of the rest of the gaming industry where his innovation and strategic vision of RPGs was concerned. :cool:

[HeyYou]

I was playing pen and paper RPGs LONG before Ultima came along. I believe Dungeons and Dragons was the first pen and paper RPG....... And that came out in the 70's...... Long before even personal computers were popular, and WAY before the Internet even existed.