Ultima X Odyssey’s Lead Designer Takes GameZone.com on a Trip of this New and Exciting World

By Michael Lafferty

“We aren’t interested in using UXO’s players to test a bunch of highfalutin theories about virtual communities; our primary goal is to create a fun game.”

In the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, there is one name that stands out and because it was there in the beginning, it has almost instant name recognition. Ultima Online has a long and storied history in the world of MMPs. While many games have come and gone in the realm, UO has remained a constant.

So when a game comes along featuring the Ultima title, certain expectations are there. But you should forget all you know about Ultima and get ready to experience a new world, with new challenges. Ultima X Odyssey is not the game that has been around since 1997.

In fact, this is a new world with new ideas and new races, all powered by the Unreal engine.

Alucinor is a three-dimensional world in which six races - elf, orc, pixie, phoda, gargoyle and human – are guided by the Virtures. Choices made affect paths taken.

In the UO series, players leveled up skills by using them. To some extent that remains true in UXO. Levels are tied to experience gained in combat, and weaponry requires players to be at certain levels in order to use certain weapons. As players fight, they will gain skill and stat points, which can be used to learn or raise abilities.

The Virtues, which figured into the original UO, are also at play here. According to the Web site:

“As you adventure, you’ll be asked to help the citizens of Alucinor in various ways, leading you on quests where you’ll be faced with plenty of decisions. And in UXO, those decisions aren’t just the means to get to the end of a quest – it’s your choices that will determine which Virtues you are following.

”Through successfully completing Virtue quests, you’ll gain Virtue points, which you’ll be able to spend in various ways to enhance both your items and your character. Ultimately, you’ll create multiple characters, all of which will follow the Virtues, which will enable your original character to reach the elite status of Avatar.”

There is little doubt that while it has some similarities to the UO line of MMPs, it is different in so many other ways. How? Well, Jonathan Hanna (also known as "Calandryll"), lead designer for UXO, took us on a tour of this land.

Time to power-up for a special move. The momentum bar shows
that she is using 4 of the 7 momentum gems that she has earned.
The icon with the green arrow shows which ability is currently being powered up.

Question: Many years ago, there was a game previewed at E3 that went under the working title of Origins. Ultima X Odyssey is a somewhat radical departure from the UO series we have come to know. Is this an extension of the Origins title, or is this brand-spanking new?

Jonathan: UXO is brand-spanking new. UO is still going strong, so we decided that attempting to create another game that would compete with UO just didn’t make any sense. UXO focuses on different aspects of gameplay, including interactive combat and adventuring. I’ll talk more about these features later on.

UXO is also more heavily based on the previous Ultima single-player games than UO is or Origin (UWOO) was going to be. The Ultima RPG series is considered by many to be one of the best RPG series ever. Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar™ and Ultima 7: The Black Gate™ are often listed in best games of all time lists in gaming polls. It is no accident that the franchise has continued for over 20 years now. UXO will hearken back to the legendary world first brought to life in those classic games as well as creating new twists that will appeal to both old time fans and those who have never played an Ultima game.

Q: What is the underlying story to this game? How many races will there be? How many skill classes? Will the game use the UO skill-leveling system or are you heading in a different direction for this title?

Jonathan: The story for UXO picks up right where Ultima IX: Ascension™ left off. At the end of Ultima IX, we learn that the Avatar (the hero) and the Guardian (the villain) merged together at the climax of their final battle. UXO’s story begins with the Avatar and the Guardian struggling for control of the god-like being that they have become. The Avatar is losing this battle and creates the world of Alucinor, a place where adventurers can journey to and learn about the Virtues just as the Avatar did during his travels in Britannia. But, because the Guardian also has great influence over Alucinor, he has created his own minions to thwart any would-be heroes. Through learning the Virtues and defeating the Guardian’s hordes, the players can help the Avatar defeat the Guardian once and for all.

For Ultima X: Odyssey’s character advancement we decided to create our own unique hybrid system which combines the best aspects of a class-based system with some of the open-endedness of a skill-based system. UXO has twelve classes, or Disciplines as they’re called in UXO, grouped into four Paths. For example, the Path of the Blade includes Fighters, Knights, and Barbarians. Players who choose the Path of the Blade can select abilities (skills) from any of these Disciplines. In most class-based games you have to choose either a Fighter (a primary class) or a Barbarian (a hybrid class). UXO’s character advancement allows you to either focus on one Discipline or create your own hybrid class.

The female elf fights the reaper with the interface
turned off to get a clear picture of the action.

Q: Will the game allow PvP or is it strictly PvE?

Jonathan: UXO has fun consensual PvP, which includes one-on-one dueling and larger scale guild battles. Both dueling and guild battles have ladder systems associated with them, allowing players and groups to compare their prowess in PvP against other players on their server. Players can also wager items and gold using a secure wagering system that ensures the winner of the duel or battle receives the wagered items. This gives new meaning to putting your money (or that cool magic sword) where your mouth is. We’ve detailed one-on-one dueling on the UXO site (http://www.uxo.ea.com/feature_duel.html) and will be updating the site with specific information on guild battles in the near future.

Q: With so many MMPs slated for release this year, what elements do you think will set UXO apart?

Jonathan: UXO’s combat and adventuring will be like nothing else. We’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that both combat and adventuring will provide players with a fun and interactive experience. I’ll explain combat and adventuring in later questions to give you an idea about what makes them so special.

In addition to UXO’s gameplay features, it’s the very fact that it is an Ultima game, based on twenty years of rich history that will set it apart from the other games. Its deep storyline provides role-players with a colorful and compelling world in which to immerse themselves. Ultima’s concepts (like the Virtues, a set of guiding principles that adds dimension to a player’s choice of action and impacts how his/her character develops) revolutionized single-player role-playing games and we feel they will do the same for MMOGs as well.

Any character, regardless of their Path, can learn any Virtue. Each Virtue has abilities that players can learn, such as healing, resurrection, defensive skills, etc. Depending on which Virtues you follow, your character will learn different abilities. So you can make an Honorable Paladin who learns extra defensive capabilities, a Spiritual Ranger with the power to resurrect, or even a Compassionate Barbarian to take advantage of advanced healing abilities. Combining the different Disciplines with the different Virtues allows you to create very diverse and unique characters.

Q: What do you consider to be the key ingredients for a successful MMP today, and how does UXO fit into that concept?

Jonathan: First and foremost… fun gameplay. That might seem like a simple concept, but all too often the developers of these games get distracted trying to make some kind of world simulation or virtual experiment and forget to make a fun game. You can go back and read reviews of MMOGs and see how often the reviewers mention that while the game might be pretty, it lacks fun content and is full of systems that force players to do things they don’t want to do. These games are often more about theories than gamplay. That won’t be the case with UXO.

We aren’t interested in using UXO’s players to test a bunch of high-falutin theories about virtual communities; our primary goal is to bring people together as a community and create a fun game. Whenever we develop and try out a feature, the first thing we ask ourselves is “was this fun?” If the answer is no, then we modify the feature until it is.

More specific ingredients would also include mechanisms for players to form groups such as parties and guilds (which I’ll discuss below), simple to use interfaces that need no explanation, a new player experience that immediately makes players feel a part of the world and a part of the action, worthwhile short-term and long-term goals, and stable, consistent gameplay. All of these ingredients are part of UXO’s designs.

Additionally, we think it is very important to make sure players have a sense of accomplishment for their individual achievements. While playing with thousands of other gamers is very cool, you don’t want to feel lost or unimportant. It is our goal is to make each player feel like a hero right from the start.

It's combo time! The lightning bolt over the ability icon which lets the player
know that ability can be used next as part of the combo.

Q: Will this game have a crafting system or player-based economy?

Jonathan: We don’t have what most people would consider a traditional crafting system, but players will have the ability to create unique items through what we call adventure crafting.

While adventuring through the world, your character will obtain magic items, some of which may be special intelligent items. These items can gain experience points and levels, increasing their effectiveness and making them powerful over time. Your character won’t lose experience points while leveling an item, so there are no negative effects from doing so. Players can sell these items to other players or keep them to use in battle.

In addition to intelligent items, some items also carry the ability to be imbued with special properties. When you complete quests in UXO, your character will gain experience in the various Ultima Virtues (Honor, Compassion, Justice, Spirituality, Valor, Honesty, Humility, and Sacrifice). You can either spend these points to gain special Virtue powers or you can imbue Virtue into an item, which creates unique properties on the item which are otherwise impossible to obtain. Like intelligent items, these items can be kept and used, or sold to other players.

Intelligent and Virtue items won’t be very common, so you can imagine that they will be a highly sought after commodity. Players who spend the time to find and create these items will find themselves making quite a good living!

With the economy, we’re not trying to do anything overly complicated. In fact, it is our opinion that complicated economies in video games are not only overkill, they also commonly lead to imbalances and broken systems. UXO’s economy is a simple “gold in” and “gold out” structure, meaning we have ways to obtain gold (like monster loot) and then ways to spend that gold, such as purchasing items from NPCs or paying gold to purchase quests. As long as we keep those two aspects of the game balanced (a high priority), the economy will be fine.

Q: Does the game have guild/clan structures and if so, what are benefits of being in one?

Jonathan: UXO has a very easy to use guild system. First, you don’t have to own a house or visit an NPC to make a guild. The guild interface is part of your character’s main interface panel and you can access it from anywhere you are in the world. Once you form a guild the guild master has access to a multitude of options such as naming the guild’s ranks and setting permissions, setting the daily and recruitment messages, and sending and accepting guild battle requests. You can also search for other guilds and read requirement messages that they have. So not only is creating a guild easy, but finding one is simple as well.

Q: Does the game have quests, and will there be live events? Will the game have content upgrades on a regular basis?

Jonathan: As I mentioned before, UXO’s adventure system will be one of the features that makes it really stand out above other MMOGs. It has a number of unique elements that combine together to create a fun and highly role-playing focused experience.

First, the quests in UXO come to you, which means that you don’t have to read a bunch of websites to learn where the quests are. The people of Alucinor will need your help and they aren’t shy about asking for it. Once you accept a quest, you’ll have the opportunity to make choices that will change the direction of the quest, the reactions of the NPCs and monsters, and the reward you get. So you don’t have to follow a predetermined story in order to succeed; you can actually role-play the various situations and create your own unique adventure. The choices you get to make are based on the Ultima Virtues, so there are no wrong choices. Just decide how your character would react. UXO’s adventuring puts the RP back in MMORPG.

The game will most certainly be continuously updated after we ship, including the addition of new quests. As far as live events go, I can’t say whether we will have those or not for now. One really neat thing about the adventure system, though, is that we can create large scale events behind the scenes and then start them while the server is still running.

Q: What kind of control system does this game have? Has the interface been streamlined for accessibility, or will players need to take time to learn the fundamentals of using it?

Jonathan: The interface has been designed to be so easy to use that you are almost unaware of using it. Players can bind keys to the different actions available to them in the game for convenience, but by default we use the WASD keys and mouse for movement, similar to most first person shooters. This control scheme gives you much better control of your character over having to click on the ground to move, which can be very cumbersome in a full 3D environment.

We’ve done away with slash commands so you don’t have to worry about learning hundreds of different commands just to play the game. For example, the character’s names in the chat window are hyperlinks. Clicking on a name brings up a list of options, including sending a group invitation, challenging to a duel, or putting the character on your ignore list. No more typing “/partyinvite calandryll” to invite someone into your group. Everything you need to do is presented to you in the interface and you can create your own hotkeys for most actions.

Q: Tell us a little about the combat system? Is this a hack-first/hack often to win, or is the combat system a little more intellectual, with tactics and defensive elements coming into play?

Jonathan: The major aspect of combat that separates it from other MMOGs is its interactivity. No more clicking a monster and sitting back as your character automatically attacks while you occasionally hit a function key. We coined the term “sandwich combat” to describe this kind of system because they often require so little input from you that you can literally start a battle and leave your computer to get a sandwich while your character automatically wins the fight. It doesn’t say much for a game’s features if you can advance your character without even being at the keyboard.

In UXO, you are in control of every sword swing, every spell cast, and every block. You can attack more slowly to gain a bonus to hit, or you can swing as fast as you can to attempt to overpower your foe. Defense also plays a very important role in combat. UXO’s combat allows you to actively block attacks during a fight instead of just relying on your character’s natural base defensive stat. In addition to all of this, your character will have access to a large number of special abilities and spells.

As your character hits creatures or blocks a creature’s attacks, he will gain momentum. You can use momentum to either power up your abilities or string multiple abilities into powerful “combos,” creating additional effects during a fight. Managing your momentum will be an integral part of combat, and the key is knowing when to spend momentum to power up an ability and when to save it for a chance at pulling off a killer combo.

Combat is very strategic. If you wade into a battle in UXO and don’t think about what you are doing, or if you try to use the same strategy over and over again, you won’t last very long. The Guardian’s minions are very intelligent and will use different tactics during battles, giving you the opportunity to counter their tactics with your own in order to prevail. Most MMOGs have one strategy that almost always works, usually involving stunning or memorizing all but one monster and then killing them one at a time. In fact, not only is it the only effective strategy, but deviating from that strategy will almost always result in the entire party getting killed. That’s not strategy. You can read more about UXO’s combat on the uxo.ea.com website here: http://uxo.ea.com/feature_combat.html

In UXO, different monsters will require different strategies. Monsters will not only attack in groups, but they will support each other and attempt to counter your attacks or defenses. You’ll want to learn each monster’s tendencies and then formulate strategies to take advantage of their weaknesses. Even then, if you find a strategy that works, don’t be surprised if a monster does something unexpected, forcing you to change your tactics on the fly!

Q: At this stage in the development, what is your favorite character and class, and why?

Jonathan: My favorite race is the Phoda (http://www.uxo.ea.com/story_phoda.html), a small rodent-like race that is very unique to UXO. They have really cool animations, run on all fours, and just look really distinctive. As far as classes, I’ve always been partial to Paladins so I’d have to say they are my favorite. Paladins are adept at attacking head-on, but can also play a more support-oriented role if the need arises.

Share | Digg This | Glink It

---