Ultima Online

Lord British's role-playing games are well known for their tremendous attention to detail, particularly with respect to character interaction. The Avatar could carry on long conversations with any of the hundreds of individuals he encountered, either coaxing or coercing them into revealing their suspicions or thoughts. The non-player characters in Ultima games were fiercely distinctive, and as believable as they were memorable.

Richard Garriott decided to take the next step with Ultima Online, a game whose population doesn't just seem real - it is. Ultima Online presents an all new game engine featuring a Britannia many times larger even than Ultima VII's. Though Internet-based Multi-User Dungeons (also known as MUDs) have existed long before Ultima Online, Origin's will be the first such game to use a highly advanced graphic interface. It will also boast the boldest set of features: servers capable of handling thousands of simultaneous users; a virtual ecology, with natural food chains and social economies; and the promise of an ongoing story. Garriott himself will play Lord British in Ultima Online, just as the game's Executive Producer Starr Long will play the possessed King Blackthorn. Though Ultima Online doesn't fit into the Ultima story at any particular point, the conflict between British and Blackthorn suggests a time period just before the events of Ultima V. Ultima Online is the boldest spin-off of the main series yet, but it's a calculated one according to Garriott: "Everyone on the team has been hot to do an online Ultima for years... there was always a question of when to do it and when will there be a real market for it." Work began on the product in 1995, followed by a pre-alpha test which generated huge consumer interested. The subsequent 1997 beta test, with an unprecedented 25,000 registered applicants, cast Origin once again to the forefront of gaming innovation as harbingers of the largest online multiplayer game of all time.

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