1999-11-01: Letter From the Producer
Letter From the Producer
Nov 1 1999 4:02PM
This was originally posted to Development at uo.com. [1]
Last Thursday night, Ultima Online was honored at the KPMG Austin High Tech Awards as best product of the year among companies with over 200 employees. Pretty amazing for a game that launched two years ago. In my opinion, it’s pretty amazing for a game to be recognized at all amidst the competition of deadly serious auditing and communication apps. In this, my first producer’s letter, I want to talk about why I think UO is still thriving, and why the mainstream technology industry and news media are paying so much attention. I’ll end by discussing some of the things I hope to accomplish in the next nine months as producer of UO.
So, back to the big awards ceremony last week. What surprised me most about my discussions with the judges and attendees is that a lot of very sophisticated e-commerce types and mainstream software developers were completely clueless that our medium — MMORPGs — even exists. They tended to get a dubious smile on their faces as I described a virtual world in which people owned houses, fought wars, built communities, adventured together, and created characters and accounts that sold for real money in online auctions. To a lot of them, this sounded like Hollywood, or science fiction—it couldn’t possibly be happening now. And if it was happening, it couldn’t be taken all that seriously. When I told them that over 135 thousand (now over 140 K!) people took it so seriously that they played an average of almost 20 hours per week, the smile changed. When I told them half the players logged in every single day, the smile faded a little more. And when I went on that, by some measures, UO gold pieces had a more favorable exchange rate than the Italian lira, the smile disappeared. All of a sudden, they wanted to know more, they wanted to know how to play the game.
My point isn’t that there are a lot of behind-the-curve people at industry cocktail parties. My point is that most people out there — even heavily wired people — don’t know that something as cool and compelling as UO exists. Along with our expanding player base in international markets, these are, I think, the thousands of new U.S. users who sign up for UO every month, who keep the game fresh and growing: the people who just found out that there’s a medium that’s cooler than film, television, and print, and that it’s inexpensive and constantly entertaining. This is why EQ can succeed and UO can continue to grow. And it’s why I predict that the same thing will happen with Asheron’s Call. There are just a lot of people out there — like, millions — who are about to discover what all of us already know. Those people are going to be joining our medium in ever increasing numbers in the next few years — from growth in both North America and overseas — and they will constitute a different demographic than experienced gamers are used to encountering in UO and other virtual environments.
So what problems does this influx of new players (by definition non-hardcore gamers) present for the existing UO community? A few: It means that there are going to be a lot of people finding out—and not being pleased—about the joys of Pking. It means that the already serious shortage of housing space in UO is going to get worse. And it means that the development team’s priorities will have to adjust accordingly.
So what are we planning to make sure that UO remains an enjoyable experience for all our players, new and experienced? The most significant change will be the addition of territory to the game. This will allow a geographic separation of play-styles: a PvP area and a non-PvP area. New players (in fact, all players) will have a choice as to which world their characters inhabit. Which presents problems of it’s own, we know. To avoid nerfing PvP (which is, after all, one of the "attractions" of UO) we intend to encourage sorties between the worlds, to build-in reasons for commerce, adventuring, and questing. The border areas should be...well, interesting. And while we want players to have a choice as to play-style, we don’t want the non-PvP world to become boring. We have some of our most talented designers working on concepts for beefed-up monster AI on the peaceful side of the border.
Far from decreasing existing players’ fun, we think these changes will vastly increase the variety of experiences available in the game. Another boost to experienced players’ options will be the party system now in the design phase, and we also have systems in concept that will make PvP MUCH more meaningful and significant than it currently is. In addition, our volunteer program is ramping up to provide a greatly increased schedule of events and event coordination at all levels within the game. Watch the "In Concept" page on the UO web site http://update.uo.com/concept.html in the upcoming months for more detail on these and other additions and expansions of Ultima Online. We hope you like what you see. We’re sure you’ll let us know if you don’t.
In any case, our long time players should have confidence that we intend to do our best to continue improving gameplay for the existing community, while accommodating the new converts that keep UO healthy and growing. After all, you are the people who got us here, the people who already know that the coolest "new" entertainment medium runs on the Internet.
Orthanc Producer, UO Live
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