Talk to Origin Systems' Starr Long about ULTIMA ONLINE and one word dominates the conversation: "Cool." Long, the game's associate producer, is justifiably jazzed about ULTIMA ONLINE'S impending release. Few online games can match the scope of ULTIMA'S Britannia, which will include 16 cities, a virtual ecology, a banking system, and just about everything else you'd find in the real world as well as the occasional orc lord, zombie, and dragon.

After an hour-long discussion with Long, we walked away wondering, in the age of the online game, if Origin has finally lived up to its corporate motto: "We create worlds." Anyone who has taken a long look at ULTIMA ONLINE will certainly say "and then some."

Going from Rooms to Worlds

"Most other online role-playing games work on the room mentality," said Long. "You go into a room, something happens, you leave, and the room resets itself so it's the same the next time you go there." Such a scenario can create not only monotony, but staffing problems.

"In order to keep people coming back to a room in a MUD, you constantly need to reedit the room contents, which often means bringing on new designers. Before you know it, the ratio of designers to players is close to 10 to 1."

The first thing you notice about ULTIMA ONLINE is that Origin is committed to bringing off-line quality graphical presentation to on-line games.

That wasn't a feasible plan, even for a company with Origin's deep pockets. The only way to give users a dynamically changing world was to build a system that modeled a world and could generate events and dilemmas on its own. "What we decided was not to go with [the room] mentality. We wanted to simulate a real world. Our virtual ecology, for example, is a complex system. The rabbits need grass, the wolves eat the rabbits, and the wolves die without meat. They actually catch and kill rabbits." And of course the wolves are dragon food. Kill too many wolves, and the dragons will look elsewhere for dinner--like the nearest town.

Like the real world, actions have consequences in the world of ULTIMA ONLINE. Cool, indeed.

Call it a simple feature, but Origin has found its "text over the head" chat environment is much more user friendly than other online games.

Building and Selling an Online World

While Long is the game's associate producer, Origin didn't spare any of its people in creating ULTIMA ONLINE. Twenty-one team members helped bring the concept of an online world to reality. "We went out and looked at what all the other multiplayer games had done and what makes interaction fun and what makes it stay interesting over time," Long said.

What Long and his colleagues found is that games are more entertaining for many people when others are involved. They call it the "DOOM Phenomenon."

"Storytelling and single-player games are still great, and there are people who aren't social who prefer these types of games," Long concludes. "Single player games are still a significant marketplace, but DOOM taught players more than anything else the fun of playing with each other."

Origin also decided to commit itself to high-quality presentation, a rarity in the multiplayer game industry so far. "One thing that we're committed to that's important to online gaming is providing the presentation value you'd get in a stand-alone game," Long says. "Up to now, you've had to put up with [poor presentation values] to play multiplayer. Graphics are important when they enhance the reality of the experience."

To handle both high quality graphics and the enormity of the ULTIMA ONLINE world, Origin found it necessary to sell the game as a CD-ROM. The original plan was to have ULTIMA ONLINE be downloadable, but Origin discovered the bandwidth wouldn't support it. This creates a distribution problem of sorts because the immediacy of getting online requires a physical retail purchase--something even a 20MB game can avoid. ULTIMA ONLINE, however, is far bigger, weighing in at over 100MB.

There will be a full-price retail version that will be packaged in the traditional Origin manner. It will include trinkets, a manual, and a large map among other goodies. With pricing strategy presently a hot topic among game developers, Long said the nature of the game demands a flat monthly fee. The CD-ROM will include an as-yet unspecified amount of free time. "At some point, you'll need to start an account," Long said. "We're not going to be more expensive than what others are charging, and we're offering a truly unique game." With the average shelf life of CD-ROM games being about 90 days, Origin eventually plans an array of other distribution ideas to continue the retail presence of the product. Of course, the original package version with its manuals, maps, and other bonuses will appeal to the first batch of ULTIMA fans.

One surprise is that, in addition to the flat unlimited account fee, Origin is also planning an hourly option for the casual player "who only wants to put down $5 or $10 a month," Long said. Apparently the market is segmented between the casual and hardcore online player.

The user interface for ULTIMA ONLINE and many of its aspects blend the best of Origin’s boxed ULTIMA products, but make changes necessary for online play. In this example, we see that the standard windowing interface is kept, but the graphic scale is smaller than past ULTIMAS.