Confessions of an RPG Developer

An ultimatum
Ultima wasn’t doing too well, either. Origin’s deal with EA had initially proved fruitful – Ultima VII, its expansion, Ultima Underworld (1992), and its sequel (1993), all performed beautifully – but when the team went into production with Ultima VIII: Pagan (1994), it became clear to Garriott that the two company philosophies didn’t exactly mesh. EA’s love of one-year development cycles ‘Worked very well with their sports games,’ according to Lord British, but not with games as complex as the Ultima series. The result? Pagan was buggy, had many plot sequences and areas hacked off, leaving unfinished quests and story arcs throughout the game, and sported a much less refined and consistent storyline.

Although Ultima’s reputation had been tarnished somewhat by Pagan’s shortcomings, there were a group of fans in Rockville, Maryland, who remained faithful. Taking Garriott’s ‘moral test’ mechanics and general world flavour, and stirring lightly with Might and Magic’s non-linearity, Bethesda Softworks created The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994), the first installment in one of the most successful modern RPG franchises still breathing. Adopting an attitude of ‘freedom before story’, Arena allowed players to explore an astonishingly large world – infinite in size, actually – and venture into literally countless dungeons and towns; the goal was to give the player everything he could possibly want in an RPG, and then let him create his own story in place of the game’s (as put by Arena’s creator, Julian LeFay) ‘vanilla’ storyline.

Todd Howard, executive producer for the last two Elder Scrolls games (Morrowind and Oblivion), considers the primary appeal of the series: ‘I think it’s the whole idea of creating your own persona, and then doing whatever you want in a big open world. It’s both parts together. We’ve always wanted to create the ultimate fantasy world simulator. We want to, for as many moments as we can, give you a sense of wonder – that you really are this other person in this other world.’

Over time, D&D-based CRPGs evolved into their own entity, separate from the Gary Gygax franchise.

The sense of wonder was increased in 1996 with the release of The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, which featured a more gripping storyline, gorgeous visuals, and a much less repetitive gameworld. Meanwhile, miffed by Pagan’s commercial and critical failure, Garriott decided to change Origin’s course and take the Bethesda message to a much more literal level. He wanted to put you in his world – not as the anonymous spectator who exerts limited control over a specific character in a game, but as you and your friends would follow suit. In doing so, the man who’d already revolutionised gaming gave life to what is now one of the game industry’s most lucrative genres: The MMORPG.

There is more than a little bit of satisfaction in Garriott’s voice when he remembers how Ultima Online (1997) struggled into being: ‘Well, by no means was Ultima Online the first online game; before it, the most popular online games were on the AOL BBS system.’

‘People would dial up to AOL, and they had some multiplayer games that could hold a thousand people. And so we were already talking about how Ultima would be a great game to do in multiplayer for quite a few years. We just had this innate belief that, “If you build it, they will come.” This was right as the Internet was becoming popular and right after we’d been sold to EA. And the way EA develops budgets for products is that if you have an idea, you first take it to the sales department, and they do a sales projection, and depending on that projection, they determine what kind of budget you might have for your game.’

‘Sadly, the biggest-selling online game in history prior to UO had only 15,000 subscribers. And when you do sales projections based on 15,000 sales, you basically have no budget. So EA, for a while, just said “No”. But we kept pestering them for about three years, and we continued to press why we thought it would be successful. We finally got a grant of about $250,000 to do a little experimental prototype. Taking the graphics engine from Ultima VI, I think, and the code and art from the previous Ultimas, we put a little prototype together.’

‘We went on the Web and said, “Hey, anyone who wants to playtest this game with us, please send five dollars for the privilege of being a beta tester, so we can afford to send you a disc.” 50,000 people signed up. And that was already, with no advertising, so radically in excess of the lifetime sales EA had expected that UO immediately went from being the bastard stepchild that no one believed in to the most important game in the EA world. After that, the purse strings opened up.’

UO went on to become a massive success, inspiring hordes of developers to try their own spins on the MMO formula – EverQuest (1999), Asheron’s Call (1999), EVE Online (2003), City of Heroes (2004), World of Warcraft (2004) – and also remains an active and popular game to this day. Garriott had conquered the online world; what about the offline one?

His much-maligned return to single-playerdom with Ultima IX: Ascension wouldn’t arrive until 1999, and although Bethesda had been busily trumpeting freeform RPG design throughout the pre-millennial decade, gamers’ hunger for strong, story-based RPGs in the Ultima vein was left woefully unsatisfied. Luckily, just as the future was looking exclusively online with UO’s release in ‘97, a true classic arrived to prove that assumption wrong: Fallout.

Somehow sensing that there was more to the ideas and mechanics in Wasteland than met the 1986 gamer’s eye, Interplay developed a new post-apocalyptic property, marinated it in some truly devilish humour, a compelling (and large!) world, tight dialogue and a wonderfully-realised turn-based combat system.

The result? One of the best games of the ‘90s, and an RPG that still has a frighteningly – yes, frighteningly – passionate following. But that wasn’t all the Californian company had to offer – a year later, after acquiring the rather stale D&D license, Interplay released BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, a deep and elegantly scripted D&D RPG; essentially, it was a Gold Box with a contemporary finish.