Ultima X: Odyssey Designer Diary #1

Ultima X: Odyssey will be the next game in the long-running Ultima role-playing series, and like Ultima Online before it, it will be a massively multiplayer game. This means that you'll be able to create a single character and explore a vast and persistent online world with lots of other players, in this case, in a fantasy world based on Ultima's mythical kingdom of Brittania.

But online role-playing games such as this are notorious for being incredibly time-consuming. Not only do you have to take time to assemble a decent hunting party to fight monsters for treasure and precious experience levels, but you must find them, fight them, then recover from battle with "downtime"--sitting and resting while your characters' wounds heal. The team at EA's Origin Systems studio will attempt to eliminate downtime, thereby making the game more accessible to anyone with an actual real-life schedule. Origin's Jon Hanna explains.

Challenging Everything

Jon "Calandryll" Hanna
Lead Designer, Origin Systems

Many massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) talk about how they will appeal to casual gamers, but few (if any) actually have any real features that help casual gamers enjoy the game. The biggest enemy of the casual player (and many hardcore players) is downtime, yet developers often use tricks to force players to invest dozens of hours per week to advance in the game. With UXO, we intend to challenge this philosophy in every way possible.

Let's take a typical MMORPG scenario. You log in to the game and you only have about an hour to play. When you arrive in the game, you find a bunch of your friends are grouped together on the other side of the world. You message them and they have room in their group. Now what? Well, in most games you either start your character on auto-run or perhaps jump on an automated transportation system (like a boat or a horse) and watch as your character travels to his destination. Fifteen wasted minutes later, you can finally start playing.

Did that 15 minutes out of your hour's worth of playing time benefit you or your character at all? Nope. Was it fun? The first time, maybe. But after you've seen the same trees or body of water fly past you as your character travels, it gets tedious quickly. And what are you doing while the game takes control of your character? Probably watching TV or reading. The last time I checked, the system requirements for these games didn't include "a good book."

In Ultima X: Odyssey, this kind of downtime isn't just reduced; it's eliminated. If you want to adventure with your friends, they can teleport you to their location immediately. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, and they don't need a spell or an item to get you to them. Any character can teleport any other character at virtually any time they want. We know that when you log into the game you're there to play, not to read a book while your character runs or rides for 15 minutes.

Another trick developers use to create downtime is experience point loss (or experience debt, which is the same thing) when your character dies. You play the game for an hour and make some headway toward your next level. Suddenly you hit a bad pocket of lag or a monster attacks you from behind. You die and release to a bind point as your experience bar falls to where it was when you first logged on. Now you have to go back out into the wilderness to either regain that XP or gain a bunch of "debt" XP before you can start leveling again.

Why should you have to acquire something you already earned or spend an hour in a way that doesn't help your character advance at all? You shouldn't. In UXO, there is no experience point loss or experience point penalty when you die. You'll still want to avoid death for other reasons, but we aren't interested in punishing you if it happens.

While not directly related to downtime, another huge complaint from MMORPG players is the feeling that they have to keep up with their friends and that once they fall too far behind, they suddenly won't be able to group with those friends anymore. Considering that these games are supposed to be all about playing with your friends, I've never understood this. Developers should be going out of their way to make sure people can always play with their friends, not creating restrictions based on level or other factors.

UXO's experience point system is designed to let you group with your friends, regardless of your level difference. If your friends like to play 40 hours a week, and you can play only 10 hours a week, you may fall behind them in terms of character advancement. But despite that, you should still be able to group with them regardless of how advanced they are or how inexperienced your character is. So even if your friend has a character that is virtually "maxed out," and you just created your character five minutes ago, you can group and play together. If this means your new character will advance a little faster (a practice that is commonly called "twinking"), that doesn't bother us one bit. In fact, the sooner you get some levels under your belt, the more your character can contribute to the battles. That's a good thing.

These games are supposed to be fun, and we want you to enjoy UXO. The development of Ultima X: Odyssey has been focused almost entirely on providing a fun experience. It's time someone challenged the established MMORPG design theories, so we figured, why not us? We don't think we need to create lots of arbitrary downtime or force players to spend every night logged on to get people to play the game for months or even years. Making something fun will take care of that!