How Lord British is Returning to RPGs

[CybrSlydr]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/...urning-to-rpgs

There are many people with good reason to be excited about Richard Garriott’s return to making RPGs. Ultimate RPG, his free-to-play, socially-connected take on the genre that he has done so much to popularize over the past 30 years, is in development, and targeted to release in the next 18 months.

Take, for example, those of you ancient enough to have played the original Ultima, launched in 1981 and massively influential in the subsequent design and culture of role-playing games, a bona fide Big Moment in the early development of video games, one in which first-person dungeon-exploration was merged with text-based storytelling and top-down combat-adventuring.

Perhaps you owned a shiny PC in the early 1990s, that faraway world of seminal games like Doom, The 7th Guest and Syndicate. Maybe you played the visually appealing, isometric open world of Ultima VII, felt yourself lost inside its convincingly bustling environs, conversing with other characters. As Rock Paper Shotgun’s Adam Smith said, the first game that “made me feel I was part of a world that didn’t revolve around me”.

Or, a mere 15 years ago you bought and played something called Ultima Online, an online RPG in which players fought against one another through a fantasy world, the first MMO to hit 100,000 subscribers and whose influence on subsequent games can hardly be overstated.