Unhelpful

The Ultima series is largely acknowledged for coming into its own when it embraced a gameplay asthetic which had a moral dimension in Ultima IV.

Now it’s time for Ultima. Online.

The problem? It’s not 1997, it’s 2001.

Calandryll has been busy talking up the concept of adding virtue to the formula which constitutes Ultima Online. It’s an ambitious goal. It’s going to be a coding and exploit-ironing hell.

But does it really matter?

I won’t pretend to be objective about Ultima Online in general. When I quit the game, I feel I had a chance to suitably say my piece already. Had there been someone at OSI very early on using Calandryll’s approach to fight Raph’s albatross [*], I very well might still be playing the game.

It obviously mattered to me. But who is all this new virtue-related content aimed at? Ultima Online today is not, by and large, a world inhabited by Ultima fans. A case in point is UDIC (Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter - a loose organization of fans of the single-player Ultimas). UDIC was for the most part very excited about Ultima Online. They’d played the Ultima series over many years, and Ultima Online seemed to be a way to mix some of the best of Ultima into a brand new online experience. It’s very telling that the majority of them either quit Ultima Online by the middle of 1998 or never actually joined in part because of the feedback of other UDIC members who wanted something more than the PvP-centric world which was, then, part and parcel of everyone’s Ultima Online experience - whether they wanted it to be or not. The nature of PvP may have been the final nail in the coffin for some of these players, but the fact that Ultima Online just didn’t seem very Ultima-like was something that would be a lot more difficult to fix, and nobody seemed to be interested in addressing that in Ultima Online’s peak growth period.

These hardcore Ultima fans are the sort you woo with a virtue system. Most of them either played or considered playing Ultima Online and found it lacking. Hell, UDIC barely exists anymore, thanks to a triple play of Ultima 8, Ultima Online and Ultima 9 which were an abandonment of the series’ moral dimensions so pivotal to the U4-7 experience. Thrice bitten, uh … shy four times? You’re not going to change Ultima Online and get another chance with that audience. It made up its mind a long time ago, and it’s not looking back.

So then, who is left to appeal to with this content? The existing Ultima Online playerbase? To what end? To prevent them from wanting to jump to a new game? A virtue system isn’t going to speak to that. I don’t have the numbers here in front of me, but it’s safe to say Ultima Online is in maintenance mode in the United States and in many of the largest markets in Europe and Asia.

Wouldn’t development time be better spent on the dozens of promises OSI has reneged upon over the years, rather than make content which would have been dead-on for public launch, but is largely irrelevant now? Ultima Online’s remaining players aren’t interested in virtue for Ultima’s sake, and that’s exactly what this risks being seen as. That the developers have suddenly pulled this most Ultima of concepts out of their hat and decided to make a go of it is in itself admirable…

…but for it to be relevant, I hope they’re also working on a time machine. Set it for March 1997 and make a six month plan out of it.

See you then.

[*]This is a reference to Raph Koster writing in reference to Ultima lore: “Trying to satisfy the thematic desires of the player base was one of the greatest challenges we faced–it was hard enough trying to make player policing work without also having to make it be “Ultima.” It’s both the biggest boon and the biggest albatross around your neck.”

Discuss: The virtues of restraint.