Rock, Paper, Shotgun Interviews Kate Flack, Lead Designer of Ultima Forever

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has just posted a rather lengthy interview with Kate Flack, lead designer of Ultima Forever.

This extended interview covers many aspects of the game, and even includes the recently leaked screenshot of the Shrine of Spirituality.  Some highlights:

RPS: In terms of geography, is it going to be the same map layout as Ultima IV.

Flack: Yeah, it’s based on the Ultima IV map. The geography of Britannia and Sosaria changes over time, but we wanted to touch on the things that Ultima IV deals with so we wanted to use that map.

A couple of things have moved around slightly to make things a little easier from an MMO perspective. We’re set 21 years after the events of Ultima IV, the later games haven’t happened yet, so we’re in a separate kind of shard, if you like. But if you’ve played Ultima IV, all the towns are there.

RPS: As far as I can remember, Ultima IV was one of the first games, if not the first, to address those ethical issues. It’s more common now, with what I’ll loosely term moral choices being part of Dragon Age, KOTOR…how do you see Ultima’s virtue system fitting into today’s world?

Flack: My mission as a designer is to make you pause at the keyboard and think. You’re cast as a hero, you’re there to save Brittannia and the choices you have are virtuous ones. But jus becuase you’re trying to be good, doesn’t mean your decisions are easy.

So we put you in situations where you’re conflicted, so you might have three virtues to choose from and you pick the one that is appropriate for you. There’s a quest fairly early on in the game where a woman says that her husband has gone missing. You go venturing down into some sewers, kill a bunch of spiders and the other things you find down there, and you find his dead body.On his body is a letter to a mistress and you find out that this guy has been having an affair. You now have a choice. Do you go back to the wife and tell her he’s dead but don’t mention the affair, do you tell her he’s dead and that he’s been cheating on her, or do you go and tell the wife and then travel out to find the mistress to let her know as well.

As a designer, I haven’t assigned any right or wrong to those choices, I’m asking what do you think is the right thing to do.

RPS: That hits on the difference. Often in games with some sort of moral choice, there’s the ‘be a good guy’ option or there’s the ‘bastard button’ that you can press. If I press it I’m being a dick. It fits into Ultima to take away the bastard button and make it a choice of virtues.

Flack: I tend to think of it as taking ethics in gaming and zooming into the details. Just like in real life, the devil is in the details. Soemtimes the choices you make are nothing to do with your actions, they’re to do with your motivations. We allow the player to make quite finely detailed, discriminatory choices between the things that they want.

That’s because we have eight virtues. It’s a very intricate, complicated and high-minded system. As a designer sitting down and trying to figure out ways to measure the player’s spirituality is quite a challenge! (laughs)

RPS: So to reboot it, what do you think has to be changed for a modern audience? Admittedly, as someone who bangs the drum for the series all the time, I do appreciate that it can be difficult to show them to one of these youths I hear about and try to get them interested, particularly with the early ones.

Flack: There’s some basic stuff to do, like core controls, which have to fit the platform you’re on. Having it so you don’t need 27 differnet function keys to remember. Nice menus, quest logs, maps. Things we take for granted now.

We’ve also focused gameplay into segments. The shortest loop you can play the game for is fifteen minutes, so it’s built into these fifteen minute chunks. This isn’t sit down for six hours like with something along the lines of Skyrim. You can get in and get out fairly quickly. So, short dungeons, get in, get to the end, get out. That’s both to facilitate play on the iPad but also to accomodate groups coming in and coming out. Not everyone has hours to sit down and raid anymore. I squeeze my gaming in around a whole bunch of stuff I’m doing in my life.

You can play for fifteen minutes and have a viable and productive session, but if you do have two hours you can do multiple game loops, dungeon runs, quests, advance your virtues some more.

RPS: In terms of the free to play aspect, what kind of things can money be spent on? Will it be mostly cosmetic, or ways to speed progress?

Flack: It’s a mixture of things. We don’t gate access to content. You’ll never pay to go into a dungeon or anything like that. WE feel strongly that if people enjoy the game and think it deserves cash they’ll stick around and spend some.

You can spend money to customise your character, to unlock equipment early, or for health potions and stuff like that. Nothing you haven’t already seen in other free to play games.

So go check Rock, Paper, Shotgun for the full interview!