![]() Garriott had published his first role-playing game, *Akalabeth,*in 1979, when he was 19. So why be a tailor? In fact, why not prey on the tailors? And there's no moral incentive for choosing tailoring - or any honorable, upstanding vocation, for that matter. There's no shortage of realism in this game - the trouble is, many of the nonviolent activities in UO are realistic to the point of numbingly lifelike boredom: If you choose to be a tailor, you can make a passable living at it, but only after untold hours of repetitive sewing. What he means is that the people behind UO neglected, in their obsession with realism, to create a meaningful moral experience for players - dramatic story lines or quests guided by noble purposes or even a system of civic rewards. They're making the same mistakes that first-time virtual-world builders always make." Randy Farmer, virtual-worlds pioneer and senior designer at Electric Communities, says, "Unfortunately, Origin seems to have ignored many of the lessons that our industry has learned in the last 10 years of building online worlds. Wilson's assessment is typical of the gaming-industry élite. The tragedy is that it could have been so much more." The hubris is a result of being unwilling to learn from others' mistakes. Now, Wilson resorts to the classics to express his deep unhappiness with UO: " Ultima Online begins with hubris and ends in Greek tragedy. He went into gaming believing that "role-playing games will be the true religion of the 21st century." "The best Ultima games made people realize that there were consequences to their actions," he says, "and that life is not black-and-white." A deceptively jolly person with a disarming manner and a nose for bullshit, Wilson is editor in chief of Computer Gaming Worldand a recovering biblical scholar with a PhD in Old Testament studies. Johnny Wilson, a huge fan of the Ultima series from which UO springs, sees role-playing games as interactive ethical parables. You hear hoofbeats as you watch three knights ride by on horseback, their capes flowing in the breeze, followed by a lumbering bear and a bedraggled dog.īut the true dilemma goes way beyond the bugs. The people and creatures are charmingly animated sound effects and music cues are used sparingly yet effectively. The towns, forests, and dungeons of Britannia are more than just intricately rendered details are meaningful - you can pick up and read a book on the library shelf or play a game of checkers in the tavern. UO, for its part, was introduced last September with a blockbuster marketing campaign of Hollywood proportions. *10six,*due out this summer, raises the stakes even further, with a virtual economy based on real dollars and hosting up to 1 million players at a time. A buzz is building around Kaon Interactive's *Terra: Battle for the Outland,*developed by former BBN employees including Albert Stevens and Joshua Smith, who created military-training sims for the Department of Defense. A similar game, *Asheron's Call,*will enjoy the benefit of Microsoft's marketing muscle. With impressive visuals and a true 3-D engine, Sony's upcoming EverQuestis widely expected to give UO a run for its money. And other developers have since leaped into the multiplayer arena. Ultima Online is not the first multiplayer networked role-playing game - an honor generally given to Diabloor Meridian 59. (In contrast, the graphical chat environment PalaceServer can support 1,000 users in one location at the same time, and id Software's famed Quake II can handle only 200 players.) As demand grows, Origin can launch new "shards" - servers holding parallel worlds - to support even more players.On some nights, more than 14,000 players are logged on at once. ![]() ![]() UO is massive: Each of its 10 servers can hold 2,500 simultaneous players. ![]() So what's going on here? Something out of the ordinary, beginning with the sheer dimensions of the playing field. Despite formidable hardware requirements, a steep learning curve, and wildly mixed reviews, more than 100,000 copies of UO were sold in its first three months. Zooming in from around the world, this nightly legion has made Origin's Ultima Online the fastest-growing networked game in the genre's short history. And they'll stay - up to four hours each - because of the seductive quality of pure immersion. They'll come to embroider upon make-believe lives as healers, fighters, mages, and rogues. Tonight, like every night for the past eight months, tens of thousands of players will log on to Britannia, a fictional online universe. Games like Ultima Online are grand social experiments in community building.
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