Sergorn Dragon Interviews Richard Garriott

Sergorn Dragon has enjoyed a fairly robust, ongoing dialogue with Richard Garriott via Twitter, and last week he had the chance to sit down for a lengthy interview with him as well, on behalf of both Dagon’s Lair and his own site, La Légende d’Ultima. He and Lord British talked for about an hour, and Sergorn tried to put a lot of focus on the single-player aspect of Shroud of the Avatar, which thus far hasn’t been as heavily publicized as the game’s planned multiplayer modes and features have been.

I won’t attempt to excerpt much (let alone all) of the interview here; you can both read and hear it at both Dagon’s Lair (part 1 and part 2) and La Légende d’Ultima (part 1 and part 2) in both English and French. But here are a couple of tasty excerpts to whet your interest:

…what lead you to essentially decide to go back to your roots? I mean it’s been about fourteen years since the last Ultima game and since then you’ve been focusing more in MMO’s, you’ve done Tabula Rasa, more recently you’ve done Ultimate collector, and you know I think a lot of people didn’t expect you to go back to a more story driven fantasy RPG in the vein of Ultima. I mean was there a sort of spark that made you go: “Okay this is it, now is the time…»?

Mostly it was that I actually I wanted to do this for many years, we’ve just kept deciding not to. You know when I first parted company with Electronic Arts, that of course was a very sad day for me to be separated from my life’s work effectively. Then I thought about trying to compete with my own in the first five years, to try to invent a new Ultima that had to compete with Ultima, and that seemed both very difficult and you know I just wasn’t sure how I wanted to reengage Ultima as a property. Then for the next five years, I finally got around and saying look, you know, EA and myself are to just get over this and we had to frankly had to work together to make the next Ultima, but those discussions collapsed without going very far, then I’d go off going to something else, I come back again to try to consider reconnecting with Ultima. For whatever reasons, it does not work, I go back off and make something else, and finally I’ve said look, if I really can’t go back and recapture the word Ultima that doesn’t mean I can’t go back and pick up what really is the spirit of Ultima and why it worked and since no one else is doing it, everyone else is chasing you know, very different models of games, that compared to what I would do, and even Electronic Arts has not really gone and extended and created new Ultimas, they have no one who really wants to follow on it. So I’m saying I just finally got tired of waiting. I finally said: look, I’m tired of waiting; it’s been almost fifteen years. If anybody can pick it up and do it again, it’s me, I have a very specific plan for how I want to do it, so it’s time to go.

Here’s another:

…one of the main selling points of Ultimas I think were its NPCs. I mean it generally avoided what I’d call filler NPCs, and always tried hard to have NPCs that felt like actual people with their names, their own lives, and really existed just to give depth to the world whereas you know how in many RPGs NPCs are just there because they have a role in the stories, or are a quest giver. And so we were wondering if the aim for NPCs in Shroud of the Avatar is to offer the same sort of character and dialogue depth.

Absolutely. You are absolutely correct. Just like I am very devoted to making sure that players are in a world where everything around them, that they can look and see and touch reacts correctly to their direct interaction, just like I’m devoted to making sure that your personality is studied and the way you play the game studied by the game itself, I’m similarly devoted to make that the main characters in the game come across to you not just as the person you click on next to get to the next point, but that they are the person who you get to know and care about because they have been created with enough depth to make relevant.

Which leads to my next question which is tied to this. We do see some NPCs moving about in the gameplay videos, but is the plan to have full NPCs schedules for them?

We’re talking about that right now, so schedules: yes. How full remains to be seen. But the game does have day/night cycle, the game does have these astronomical effects I was talking about, they do change already, the schedules of NPCs so at the very least they’ll have what I call a day and a night time, plus how to react during invasions kind of schedules details.

Those were from the first part. Here’s one from the second:

…So since I think of the big thing that is setting Shroud of the Avatar apart from the single player Ultima series is the multiplayer aspect, what would you say to those people who are predominantly single players, to make them want to try the multiplayer aspect?

Yeah, so first I would say, don’t forget you can play this game completely solo player and offline. So if that really is the way you prefer to play, fear not we will support you in playing it and the game is being written as a story driven traditional Ultima style game, so I hope to make you very happy.

That being said, here is why I believe that you should play online even you prefer solo player. Because if you play online, you can still play solo player online. Meaning you don’t see any other player ever in the world but what you do see is all the persistent world changes that all of the players add into the game. And so if for example I’m playing the game solo player and I come back to the town where I live or I’m visiting with some regularity. If a player has built a new blacksmith shop that is producing fantastic weapons, his vendor will be there so I can buy and sell some great new creations he’s created. If we have, we’re hoping the put even the ability for people to make art in the game, if there is a person who is an artist in the game and is maybe creating painting you can put on the wall of your home, you’ll be able to go and see through their vendor of the NPC vendor that is at their shop, the art that they sell. So all of the persistent contribution will download to you as long as you at least play online. And I think that there is no harm even to the solo player experience, I believe it is only beneficial to the solo player experience to see the world grow and evolve due to the contribution of other players.

At any rate, do read the whole thing, and give it a listen as well if you have an hour you can set aside. Sergorn poses a ton of questions to Richard Garriott, about the above and many other aspects of Shroud of the Avatar, and you should hopefully come away from both parts of the interview with a better sense of just what the game will be, and what Portalarium has planned for it.