Ultima X: Odyssey Designer Diary #3

Origin's Jon "Calandryll" Hanna has written a new designer diary on GameSpot, in which he talks about making a game "like no other." A snippet:
Different groups of monsters won't always do the same things, which means you'll need to develop different strategies based on the monsters' tendencies and the abilities of your characters. For example, gnolls are a different type of monster that tend to have high natural defenses and don't rely on defensive spells the way rhinorks do. So in the above example, the players' strategy wouldn't have worked. You can't lower a gnoll's defense with magical dispel abilities because its defense isn't a result of magic. Players would have to arm themselves with weapons that provide a bonus to hit, or they could bring their own defense-lowering "debuff" spells to lower the gnolls' natural defenses. Gnolls also attack in packs, so having one character draw the attention of an entire group of gnolls would lead to that character's demise very quickly. The players might also want to use more attacks that can affect an area, and they need to keep the gnolls from ganging up on one character.