Tabula Rasa Q&A
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 764
Q: Richard, your experience in the industry is legendary. What have been the most important lessons you taken away from each of your two most high profile MMO projects Ultima Online and the ill-fated Ultima Online 2 that has helped shape this game?
A: I was never on the UO2 team, but there is a good lesson there. We originally planned to do a non-ultima game after UO, as a UO2 would have to beat the ever growing and evolving UO1. But our parent company wanted us to do UO2. We noted that to make a UO2 better than UO1 would be a long hard project as it had to beat the growing UO features. Eventually others saw this too, and did not want to wait.
UO had many great lessons. Most of which were related to how little we knew about what would be a popular feature and what would be overlooked by the players. But likely the biggest lesson was how the community of players needed to be engaged more like a city's citizens and less like customers. Citizens of a virtual world have the same issues, of tax rates, pot holes and community services that real communities do. When we launched UO, we were totally unprepared for the bureaucracy that would be required to deal with it well.
