24

ULTIMA ONLINE (1997): PUTTING THE ROLE-PLAY BACK IN COMPUTER ROLE-PLAYING GAMES

Origin's Ultima Online, first released on September 25, 1997, is one of the most important games of the modern era. It marks a critical turning point from stand-alone single-player products to massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs, a genre that seems destined for dominance. Although Ultima Online was knocked from its throne by Sony's EverQuest in 1999, which was itself conquered by Blizzard's World of Warcraft (also known as WoW) in 2004, these and all later massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, owe a massive debt to Origin's pioneering game. It was Ultima Online that established the model and proved the viability of the MMORPG. Origin certainly didn't do everything right, but the painful lessons they learned proved invaluable for all subsequent MMORPG developers.

Promotional screenshot showing the key elements of a recent version of Ultima Online.

In this chapter, we'll discuss the often tumultuous history of Ultima Online, but also explain why the genre is so appealing to so many modern gamers and developers. As we'll see, perhaps its key feature is not technological but social, bringing together gamers from all over the world to share and experience a persistent virtual world.

Ultima Online was not the first MMORPG and certainly not the first online role-playing game that enabled multiple players to simultaneously enjoy the same persistent world. Predecessors include multi-user dungeons (MUDs), as well as the original Neverwinter Nights, The Shadow of Yserbius, and Meridian 59. Before delving into the intricacies of Ultima Online, let's take a moment to examine these earlier networked games.

The logical starting place for any investigation into MMORPGs is MUDs, an early genre of computer game popular among college students and others with convenient access to mainframes. They were quite limited graphically; like Rogue (see bonus chapter, “Rogue (1980): Have @ You, You Deadly Zs”), MUDs were usually housed on UNIX machines that could only output graphics in the form of character sets. Unlike Rogue, which used these character sets to depict crude graphics, MUDs were usually prose-based; players read textual descriptions of rooms, monsters, and so on, just like in text adventure games.

A sample character creation screen from Ultima Online. Although not as robust as later versions and other games, all the essentials were there.

The original MUD (simply called MUD) was created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, students at the University of Essex in Britain. It was essentially an effort to combine the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the popular tabletop role playing system, with the computer game ADVENT (Adventure), also known as Colossal Cave Adventure (1976). The two were fans of text adventures like ADVENT and Zork (see Chapter 25, “Zork (1980): Text Imps versus Graphics Grues”), but felt they suffered from low replay value. Once you've solved all the puzzles, what's to keep you playing? Trubshaw and Bartle felt that perhaps the key was integrating gameplay from D&D. Their finished product was essentially a text adventure game with a D&D-style character creation and combat system. Players could also chat with one another and share in the adventure, a critical feature that would distinguish MUDs from most other types of computer games.

MUD quickly became immensely popular, even when the administrators of the university's DEC PDP-10 mainframe limited its use to off-peak hours. Bartle eventually made a commercial version of the game for the pioneering proprietary online service, CompuServe, called British Legends, though not before placing the name “MUD” into the public domain and allowing it to become the generic name by which such games would be known. MUDs offered countless opportunities for fantasy fans to explore rich worlds and test their mettle against the fiercest monsters, but the real appeal was connecting to like-minded people and forming or joining online communities. In many cases, by the time players were burned out on the game itself, they had built close friendships and would log in to the game simply to chat. Others became self-appointed or official mentors, helping novices learn the interface and improve their characters.

MUDs continued to gain popularity throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, especially when the rise of the Internet made it easier to connect home computers to mainframes; prior to the Internet, most home users who wanted to go online had to connect to private networks like CompuServe or America Online (AOL). In addition to countless other features, these networks offered many online games for their customers. Simutronics's Gemstone series, for instance, debuted on GEnie in 1988 and attracted quite a large following. Although certainly lucrative, the private and costly nature of these services limited their appeal, especially when people discovered they could connect to a much larger public network for a much lower rate. One by one the private networks shut down, but MUD fans found that they had many more alternatives on the Internet than they ever had before. Indeed, the demand for MUDs was great enough that they split into different types for diverse applications. Perhaps the most popular type of these were MOOs (MUD Object-Oriented), which abstracts the chat and social functions from MUDs and are still used in various academic settings. Professors at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, for instance, use them to teach English to students from other countries.

Even in the late 1990s, the majority of MUDs were still entirely text- or ASCII-based; transmitting graphics would have taken too long given the slow dial-up modems of the era, and games programmed for UNIX, while accessible via terminal programs, were typically limited to character-set graphics. However, a logical work-around to this problem was to put a game's audiovisuals on a disk and then use the bandwidth merely to update object locations, send messages, and handle the players’ input. This could all be done “behind the scenes,” with the installed software servingas an intermediary between the host (the mainframe running thegameworld) and the client (i.e., the user's personal computer). The host tracked the locations and activities taking place in the gameworld, whereas the client provided the userwith a handy graphical interface.

One of the earliest examples of such a game is Habitat, a Lucasfilm Games product that debuted in 1987 exclusively for the Commodore 64. It ran for a brief period on Quantum Link, the service that would later become AOL, and was only available during nonpeak hours. It offered a third-person perspective in a 2D world, and the players’ characters could communicate with each other as well as interact with the world itself. The focus was on social activities, and there were many fun things for players to do—write books, visit theaters, or even get married. The developers watched how the players performed and expanded the game accordingly, graftingon new features as they saw fit. The game didn't offer RPG elements such as leveling or skills, but did pioneer many of the technologies that would show up in later games. The license changed hands a few times after the project shut down in 1988, reappearing on Japanese and American networks in various incarnations.

A more successful early MMORPG was Beyond Software's Neverwinter Nights, a game hosted on AOL between 1991 and 1997. This popular online role-playing game was based on SSI's Gold Box engine, the code behind such successful multiplatform games as Pool of Radiance (1988) and Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989). For many years, the game earned high profits for AOL and Beyond Software; the addictive gameplaykept paying customers online for hours, racking up hundreds of dollars worth of fees. However, in 1996 AOL switched to a flat-fee rate, and games like Neverwinter Nights posed serious problems. AOL's ideal customer was now someone who made only minimal use of the service, logging on once in a while to check email, not playing Neverwinter Nights from dusk to dawn. AOL finally pulled the plug despite opposition (and no doubt some canceled subscriptions) from fans.

Sample screen showing Ultima Onlines “shards” or servers that a player can log onto. “Latency” and “Packet Loss” indicate relative performance on each shard for this particular user, which is a key issue forany online game.

Other efforts at graphical online games failed as well. One of the most spectacular failures was Sierra On-Line's ImagiNation Network (INN), also known as The Sierra Network (TSN), which operated from 1991 to 1996. The service focused mostlyon boardgames, but did offer a role-playing game called The Shadow of Yserbius (1992) and two sequels. The game was shut down in 1996 when AOL took over Sierra's network. Like Neverwinter Nights, it was seen as financially incompatible with a flat-fee structure. The Shadow of Yserbius offered four-member parties, turn-based combat, and colorful graphics—it was certainly ahead of its time.

Ken Williams, the CEO of Sierra, blames the fall ofthe network on a series of bad corporate decisions. In a 2006 interview with Philip Jong of Adventure Classic Gaming, he confessed that “I now know that we should have continued alone. … Wesold half of TSN to AT&T, and quickly mired the project in big-company bureaucracy. As all development ground to a halt, I tried to unbreak the logjam by selling all of the network to AT&T with the condition that Sierra could have a proprietary position to build the games that would run on the TSN. … This was also a disaster. … There became an ‘us versus them’ mentality between Sierra and ImagiNation.”¹ Still, it's unclear how any private network could have survived the rise of the Internet.²

By the late 1990s, it was obvious (at least to sensible developers and publishers) that the Internet was the future of online gaming. One of the best advantages the Internet offered game developers and publishers was independence—there was no need to negotiate and share profits with a giant corporate entity such as AOL or CompuServe.

It's here that Archetype Interactive's Meridian 59 enters the picture, an MMORPG published by 3DO in 1996 for the PC. It was billed as the “first-ever Internet-based 3D MUD,” and indeed seems to live up to the hype. Here we have all the features that are now a staple of the genre: 3D graphics, RPG-style combat, player guilds, mail systems, and regular “expansions,” or updates to the content or interface. The graphics were similar to those seen in id's Doom (see Chapter 5, “Doom (1993): The First-Person Shooter Takes Control”), and even offered some of the same limitations, such as the inability to jump. After buying the game, players were assessed a $10 monthly fee for access, a figure that has remained stable (give or take a few dollars) for MMORPGs ever since. 3DO pulled the plug in 2000, but some of the developers cofounded Near Death Studios and keep the game online today.

A promotional screenshot from Meridian 59, showing the implementation of a newer 3D engine.

Despite their innovative ideas and addictive gameplay, these games existed on the margins of the gaming industry. Although all of them enjoyed a core community of intensely loyal fans, most gamers lacked the requisite knowledge, interest, or resources to play them. The situation is comparable to that faced by Origin and Sierra throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when their early adoptions of advanced graphics, sound cards, and mice risked alienating gamers with older machines. Origin's decision to bring ahigh-profile Internet game to market was yet another bold gamble for Lord British and seems to be the last time the famous developer wouldsweep the table. Ultima Online was the first truly “massive” online RPG, the first to reach over 100,000 subscribers, peaking in 2003 at 250,000. Although its market share has declined, itis still actively played today.

Ultima Online's development was rife with drama and frustration. Despite his name recognition and fame, Garriott had a hard time getting his publisher, Electronic Arts, to fund the project. How would gamers react to an online-only game? Many were skeptical of the pay-to-play model—why would gamers buy a game and consent to a monthly fee to play it when they could buy other games outright? Although Electronic Arts and Origin finally came to an agreement, the relationship was sorely strained. According to Garriott, “I wish that things had worked out better with Electronic Arts. … We constantly tried to tell them that we understood the online game business and give advice, but the company had a very different agenda.”³ The constant bickering at last led Garriott to leave Origin and abandon his legendary Ultima franchise altogether.

Ultima Online’s debut was catastrophic. Like many of the MMORPGs to follow, the first few weeks were subject to intense growing pains as some 45,000 gamers swarmed on to the “shards,” or servers running the game. Gamers found crashed servers, long lag times/response delays, glitches galore, and the mobs of “pkillers,” or players who roamed outside the cities wantonly killing any other players naive enough to leave. Origin moved quickly to fix these problems, but the blare of negative publicity permanently tarnished its image. GameSpot's review of the game gave it a “poor” score of 4.9, calling it a “major disappointment.” The reviewer seemed incensed at the lag times and “extremely frustrating” gameplay.⁴ Other reviewers were more forgiving, including Emil Pagliarulo of The Adrenaline Vault. Although acknowledging the game's problems, he still wrote that “no game has completely and utterly immersed me in a gameworld so involving, so life-like.”⁵ Fortunately, most of the worst problems faded in intensity over time, and a series of regular updates, patches, and expansions helped immensely.

Many of the things players found appealing could also be found in MUDs. New players were encouraged to talk to others, make friends, and explore the immense gameworld together—all aspects that are difficult if not impossible for stand-alone games. The social nature of games like Ultima Online hearkens back to the tabletop game D&D, which is intensely social, but also larger fantasy events such as Renaissance fairs (Ren fairs) and the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), all of which fascinated Richard “Lord British” Garriott. For instance, many players took it upon themselves to form posses to deal with the aforementioned “pkillers,” a phenomenon that the game's developers didn't anticipate. The buzzword “emergent gameplay” was coined to describe such phenomena, and the developers often added direct support for them into the code of updates and expansions. Although the manual points out that “it is possible to play Ultima Online on your own,” “the community” is what makes the game special. The manual also encouraged the sort of role-playing one might find at an SCA event or Ren fair: “While ‘Sup’ may be completely appropriate among your friends in the game, when speaking to strangers a nice ‘Hello’ or even a ‘Hail’ will go a long way to improving the opinion others have of you.” It also encouraged adherence to grammar rules, but one suspects that those who'd type “Plz Halp me kill the dragon” would be the least likely to encounter, much less follow, such advice in a printed manual.

Besides MUDs, Ultima Online was also influenced by Origin's own Ultima VII: The Black Gate, often considered the finest of the single-player Ultima games (see Chapter 23, “Ultima (1980): The Immaculate Conception of the Computer Role-Playing Game”). The definitive feature of that game had been its intricately interactive gameworld; gamers could do so much more than just hack and slash monsters. Ultima Online extended this functionality to a persistent world, so that players could perform all sorts of tasks, develop trade skills, and even earn a virtual living making and selling things to other players. Ultima Online also offered a 2D, isometric perspective comparable to Ultima VII, albeit with improved audiovisuals.

New players could opt for two basic templates for their characters: adventurer or merchant. The former was made up of the traditional RPG classes, such as warriors and mages. The latter was more concerned with the economy and trades, such as tailors and fishermen. More advanced players could distribute their points as they saw fit. Overall, it's an impressively flexible system. The game also boasted an inflation system for items; the in-game merchants would adjust their prices according to how many of a certain item they had in stock. This feature necessitated traveling to other towns to find better trading conditions. Skills were enhanced by a brute force approach, improving with each successful use.

Promotional screenshot from Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss.

The early game relied mostly on other players to deal with pkillers. The game used a simple color scheme to differentiate innocent from neutral or guilty characters, and a “karma” system encouraged law-abiding behavior. An innocent character was blue; killing one would decrease karma as well as get the offender branded as a murderer. The murdered player could then offer a bounty on the assailant's head—the idea was that other players relentlessly seeking these bounties would discourage such deviance. Murderers were also instantly attacked by town guards, and dead murderers lost a “substantial” amount of stats and skills. However, murderers could wait it out—every eight hours lowered his or her murder count by one. However, players who couldn't get the hint would become “long term murderers,” and have towait 40 hours rather than eight per tick.

All of this talk of karma and pkilling may seem superfluous, but it was actually a vital issue for Origin and all subsequent MMORPGs. The fear was that some novice players would be so turned off by the pkilling aspect that they would leave the game, taking their $10 monthly fees with them. One of the first questions MMORPG fans ask about a new game is how it handles “PVP” meaning player vs. player combat, as that factor will determine much of the gameplay.

Another key consideration is death, or what happens to players whose characters were slain. In Ultima Online, fallen characters would return as a ghost, with no loss to stats or skills unless they were murderers (who'd lose 20% of all stats and skills!). These ghosts could be resurrected by traveling to a healer, shrine, or mage, but would then have to trek back to their corpse to regain their material possessions. This trek could prove quite difficult, because newly resurrected characters were given only the most basic equipment.

Ultima Online offered plenty of other advanced features to keep players invested in the long term. Probably the most important feature was houses, which players could build once they had accumulated sufficient capital for a deed. Houses were primarily places to store one's accumulated possessions, but could also serve as stores for selling crafted items. Unfortunately, houses tended to get routinely deleted by the system, so it was important to log in every few days to “refresh” one's house.

Players could also join one of 13 professional guilds, arranged by profession (Thieves’ Guild, Fellowship of Blacksmiths, and so on), as well as player-run guilds. Occasionally these player guilds would engage in “guild wars,” which allowed members to kill certain other players without fear of losing karma.

As we've already seen, there were plenty of opportunities for players who were more interested in socializing with other players than killing monsters. One such player, “Adamantyr,” speaking at Armchair Arcade, was one of only 15 beta testers to become a “Seer,” a high-ranking player with special powers. Instead of roaming the countryside killing monsters, Adamantyr became a bartender and chef. The small bar where his character “Ben Kahns” set up shop became a popular hangout:

I hosted guild dinners and had dart contests, gave out little known trinkets in the game like glass mugs and dough-nuts (which were in the game art files and item lists but not in game), and generally had a good time playing a cheerful happy-go-lucky bartender, always ready to lend an ear. I had a regular crowd who would always show up; I'm still good friends with several of them today. My only vice was I usually would have him make fun of players with weird or silly names, and humored players roleplaying as elves or orcs (there were no races in UO initially, a state I personally think they should have kept). It helped that I can type 85–95 words per minute, so I could quickly and easily respond to questions, without using Internet shorthand or leet speak. (Which I despise.) I even ended up doing the services for in-game weddings, both in my green robe (seer disguise) and as Ben.

Even Lord British himself showed up to the tavern to meet the colorful barman. Still, even Adamantyr eventually burned out on the game. “Working volunteer work like this is, in many ways, just another job.” Constant struggles with malicious players had finally turned him off his favorite hobby.

All in all, Ultima Online was a staggeringly ambitious game that offered a multitude of options from the beginning, but it was only a small fraction of the game it has become today. Electronic Arts churned out several expansions between 1998 and 2007, many of which significantly altered the gameworld and the gameplay.Ultima Online: Renaissance, which was released on April 3, 2000, doubled the size of the gameworld by offering a “mirror image” world called Trammel, which forbade pkilling. Although some players rejoiced, others were displeased, feeling that the change threatened the economy. The problem was that now players could more easily level up and work on skills and crafts, since they didn't have to worry about pkills. With the risk factor reduced, if not eliminated, the markets were soon saturated with products and inflation soared. Other critics, such as Michael E. Ryan of GameSpot, complained that the game was “getting rather long in the tooth,” with audiovisuals that looked quite dated compared to its competitors—particularly EverQuest, which had been released a year earlier.

EverQuest had several advantages over its rival. For one, it offered 3D-accelerated graphics, which gave it a distinctly modern look compared to Ultima Online. PVP combat was moved to a designated server, which made it much easier (and less frustrating) for new or less aggressive players to flourish on the main servers—the emphasis there was on cooperating rather than fighting with other players. There were several means in place to ensure cooperation, such as monsters that were difficult if not impossible to beat alone. It was also less prone to lag than Ultima Online, even with dial-up modems. It did, however, punish death more severely: dying cost experience points as well as a tedious run to one's corpse.

Promotional screenshot from EverQuest: Gates of Discord.

EverQuest surpassed Ultima Online's userbase by the end of 1999, reaching more than 400,000 users in 2004.⁶ EverQuest eventually became successful enough to capture the attention of the mass media, though—as we might expect—their coverage was often sensationalized reports of addiction. They seemed particularly puzzled by the fact that players were willing to offer real money for objects or money in the game. Much was made of a study by Edward Castronova, an economics professor at California State University, Fullerton. Castronova's study suggested that the gross domestic product, or GDP, of Norrath (the gameworld of EverQuest) was somewhere between Russia and Bulgaria's, and that the virtual currency was worth more than several real-life currencies. The public's fascination with the “real value” of virtual economies would crop up again and again in discussions of Second Life (starting in 2003) and other popular MMOs. Like Ultima Online, EverQuest was regularly expanded; there were 14 such enhancements by 2007. On November 8, 2004, Sony released an official sequel, EverQuest II, which upgraded the audiovisuals and incorporated digitized speech for NPCs.

It's likely that the timing of EverQuest II was a response to Blizzard's World of Warcraft, released just a few weeks later. Blizzard was already a major player in the online gaming world with its Battle.net service, first introduced in 1996 with Diablo(See Chapter 4, “Diablo (1997): The Rogue Goes to Hell”). Blizzard had been the first company to really profit with an online model, and their hugely successful games had made them one of the most influential companies in the industry. Blizzard's trick was to use the free Battle.net service as an incentive to get more players to buy the game—in effect using the Internet as “added value” for their product. Naturally, this same approach wouldn't work for a full-scale MMORPG, but Blizzard seems to have had no problems making the transition to a subscription model. Much as EverQuest had done back in 1999, World of Warcraft soon became the MMORPG, rapidly seizing market share but also swelling that market to unprecedented numbers: on September 19, 2008, Blizzard announced that the game had reached 10 million subscribers.⁷ When we consider that past developers were boasting about hitting milestones of 100,000, this figure is truly amazing.

A scene from virtual world, Second Life, which mirrors many aspects of reality.

What was it about World of Warcraft that generated—and generates—so many sales? Besides impressive audiovisuals and an intuitive interface, the developers also seem to have benefited from a careful study of what had come before. Although there are many aspects of the game that we could talk about, perhaps the most significant is its careful balance between PVP and PVE, or Player vs. Environment. Although, like EverQuest, World of Warcraft offers dedicated servers for PVP, the rules for PVP on regular servers are relaxed. Players who want to fight other players have several options at their disposal, from harmless duels to battlegrounds, where members of the two opposing factions (Alliance and Horde) clash in battle. However, at any time players can flag their characters for PVP, making it possible for any other flagged character to attack them nearly anywhere in the game. The game encourages PVP mostly in the battlegrounds, where players can compete for special titles and equipment.

Promotional screenshot from EverQuest II: Kingdom of Sky.

PVE is probably where World of Warcraft shines the most, however, ensuring that even the most antisocial player has plenty of things to do. This is most evident in the quest structure; there are hundreds of possible quests to fulfill, many of which are easy enough for a solo player to complete. There are also quests for groups, which usually involve entering an “instance.” This concept of “instances” is particularly important, as the problem it solved was one of the main complaints about EverQuest. The problem is that the nature of MMORPGs makes it hard for one person or even one group to complete certain objectives, such as defeating a specific foe. By the time the group arrives on the scene, another group has already killed the beast. To make matters worse, some players may opt to “kill steal” or “boss camp,” meaning to either swoop in at the last minute to finish off a monster (and thus gaining the treasure and experience), or simply hanging around where the monster reappears after death, selfishly killing it again and again before anyone else can respond.

The “instance” solves these problems by making certain areas of the game unique to an individual player or group. When a group enters an instance together, a special version of that area is created just for them; no other players are allowed inside. This technique makes it possible for a player or group to “run instances” without interference. Furthermore, Blizzard included a “looking for group” tool to help players find others in search of groups to run these instances (a popular activity, since the monsters in instances tend to drop more gold and better items). Although even World of Warcraft is far from perfect, it seems to be one of the best-balanced of MMORPGs, with just the right level of complexity. Expansions have been much less frequent than we've seen in past MMORPGs as well; The Burning Crusade was released in 2007, and Wrath of the Lich King in late 2008. However, Blizzard has regularly issued patches, which add content as well as tweaks to the gameplay.

Promotional screenshot from World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

There are of course many, many other important and innovative MMORPGs that we could discuss in this chapter, but it seems clear that the trinity of Ultima Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft are by far the most important, at least for the computer games industry. Console gamers have traditionally enjoyed little access to MMOs, though that seems to be dramatically changing. Probably the two most talked about console-based MMORPGs are from Japan: Sega's Phantasy Star Online (2001 in the United States) and Square's Final Fantasy XI (2002). Phantasy Star Online began as a service for the short-lived Dreamcast platform, but was later ported to the Nintendo GameCube, PC, and Microsoft Xbox. Unfortunately, its status as a true MMORPG is open to question; it offered a fully playable stand-alone mode and a game-matching system comparable to Blizzard's Battle.net service. Although scores of players could interact with each other in lobbies, the actual gameplay areas were limited to four-person groups. Final Fantasy XI debuted in the United States exclusively for the PC, with a Sony PlayStation 2 version arriving in 2004; in 2006, a version appeared for the Microsoft Xbox 360. Sony Online Entertainment also released EverQuest Online Adventures for the PlayStation 2 in 2003, but to a decidely muted reception. Though none of these games can rival the enviable success of computer-based MMORPGs, the future of console MMOs seems bright. All three of the current consoles have made Internet access a highly desirable—if not necessary—feature, and an increasing focus on MMOs seems all but inevitable.⁸

After the roaring success of EverQuest and then World of Warcraft, Ultima Online seemed to sink further and further into the background. Still, it still had a considerable base of loyal users who refused to emigrate. Electronic Arts continued to support this community, steadily releasing expansions and various compilations. Third Dawn, which debuted on March 7, 2001, offered a 3D client and a new area available exclusively in 3D (it was later available in 2D as well). However, the results of this facelift were uneven, and critics like Michael E. Ryan of GameSpot warned that “compared with the competition … Third Dawn doesn't have all that much to offer.”⁹ Many Ultima Online fans continued to use the 2D client, which they found easier to navigate.

Promotional screenshot from Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn, showcasing the improved visuals.

On June 27, 2007, Electronic Arts unveiled Mythic Entertainment's Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn, yet another attempt to revitalize the aging MMORPG. The goal was not just to update the audiovisuals but to make the game more inviting to novices. Unfortunately, even though critics seem generally pleased with the enhancements, it seems to have had a hard time attracting attention outside of the existing Ultima Online community. Neither GameSpot nor IGN even bothered to review it.

Garriott returned to the MMORPG scene in 2007 with Tabula Rasa, a shooter/MMORPG hybrid that eschewed the prevailing fantasy settings for sci-fi. Garriott had successfully generated enormous buzz around the game, consenting to dozens of interviews and taking every opportunity to plug the product. Despite some intriguing ideas such as “morality quests” and the ability to clone one's character to try out new professions, the game was no World of Warcraft killer, despite rumors of a $100 million development that spanned more than six years. For whatever reason, the game failed to win over many subscribers, and its user base remained paltry compared to the competition. Tabula Rasa went from being the gaming media's 800-pound gorilla to its elephant in the room. As discussed in the previous chapter, like so many other MMORPGs that were unable to quickly build a sizeable audience, Tabula Rasa eventually shut its servers down for good.

Even as Tabula Rasa and even Ultima Online eventually fade away, Richard Garriott's legacy as one of the world's most innovative developers will never diminish. Just as his Ultima series practically defined the CRPG for decades, the influence of Ultima Online on modern MMORPGs is simply undeniable. If later developers were able to do better, it was only because they had spent so many pleasant evenings in Brittania, studying under the noble Lord British.

As the case with Tabula Rasa shows, the MMO model seems at once promising and threatening for game developers. On one hand, the subscription model has proven quite lucrative and sustainable for the winners. Why settle for a one-time sale when you can rake in fees month after month? However, it's proven difficult for even big-budgeted and greatly hyped new MMOs to lure gamers away from the dominant MMO. Neither the aforementioned Tabula Rasa nor Funcom's highly touted Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (2008) seem to have dented World of Warcraft’s subscriber base. The latest serious contender is Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (2008), a game that Steven Crews of TheMMOGamer describes as a “hell of a lot like WoW.”¹⁰ Although quite promising, this game, or any other, is unlikely to topple Blizzard's champion. Despite this issue, developers do not have to have the number one MMORPG as long as they can attract a respectably sized community of dedicated players, and it seems likely that at least some gamers will gradually become disillusioned with World of Warcraft and seriously start exploring the alternatives.

¹See the interview at http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/197.

²Sierra would launch The Realm in 1995, a graphical MUD officially released just months after Meridian 59. It was later taken over by Norseman Games and is still online today.

³See Scott Steinberg's “A Chat with the Lord” at http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/february03/british/.

⁴See Desslock's review at http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/ultimaonline/review.html.

⁵See http://www.avault.com/reviews/pc/ultima-online/3/.

⁶See http://championsofnorrath.station.sony.com/headset.jsp.

⁷See http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/080122.html.

⁸Interestingly, as both the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation offer web browsers, many browser-based—and often free—massively multiplayer games have been made accessible.

⁹See http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/ultimaonlinethirddawn/review.html.

¹⁰See http://tinyurl.com/3h6nyn.