Gamasutra Interviews Kate Flack
As if a new cover image weren’t enough for one day, there is also a lengthy interview with Kate Flack, lead designer for Ultima Forever, over at Gamasutra. It begins with a short outline of Ms. Flack’s history in the gaming industry, from her start making MUDs to her present position at Mythic Entertainment, before moving on to that subject we all care about…Ultima:
…it’s a great privilege to get to work on Ultima. It’s a huge IP; it’s had millions of people play it and some very talented designers work on it. It’s a huge pair of shoes to fill. When I came to thinking about the game and I thought about the creative brief that I’d been given to fulfill, I ended up thinking, “Well, I don’t want to replace anyone’s memories.”
We’re not here to overwrite the canon; we’re not here to change things and say, “Oh, all these memories that you have aren’t important.” So what we did with Ultima Forever is we set it 21 years after the events of Ultima IV — so V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX haven’t happened yet. We kind of created our own Ultima time stream; we kind of cordoned it off and said, “Okay, this is where we’re working, and this is what we’re doing.”
We did things like — obviously, the technology is a little bit more sophisticated — so we can do things like a quest log. We can do things like 3D graphics. We can do maps. All the kinds of things that your modern player expects: more sophisticated UI, not having to remember 27 different function keys, and all those kinds of things.
But from a creative point of view, I think that games reflect the time that they were made, so when you go back and you look at the original interviews with Richard, he talked about it being a reaction to Mothers Against Dungeons & Dragons, a way of saying, “Hey, games can be good.”
She also offers a note on how ethical decisions and Virtues factor into gameplay:
You have a multiplayer game, and you have virtues…you have some really interesting design possibilities that come out. Very often in roleplaying games, when you have the choice to be nice or nasty or whatever, it’s about how you treat NPCs, whether you save NPC A or NPC B. Well, we’ve got that. Our NPCs do ask you for help. You can take quests and make choices; they branch out and all that. But you also have interactions between players.
For example, we have a thing called an honesty box, which is just the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where you’re adventuring in a dungeon and there’s a chest. You open it up, and you have a choice; I can either share this with the group, which means we all have five gold, or I can take it all for myself. Am I willing to steal from my party? My party’s not going to know, but what we do is we take away your honesty because you stole. So it’s interesting to figure out whether players will on average steal from each other or whether they will on average share. I don’t know how it’s going to work out, but we will have that metric; we will know.
But, more than just that:
As you’re playing through the game, everything you’re doing earns you virtue points. For example, if you bother to go off and mentor someone, you’re giving up your time, so we give you sacrifice points for that. The person who’s being mentored gets humility, kind of admitting that they need help. You can already see that there’s a virtual circle there, a healthy relationship between two people, which is good for them; they’re both leveling up their virtues, but it’s also good for the game and good for the community as a whole, because this game is built around playing together and helping each other out. I think that’s really exciting.
…What we try and do when we give you a quandary is we give you three options that are equally valid. It’s not up to us to judge a player; we’re just there to make you think. So NPCs will come up to you and say, “Hey! What should I do in this situation?”
Okay, I shouldn’t excerpt any more. Read the article in its entirety for a bit more insight into Ms. Flack and Ultima Forever.