Online games have been around for years, but until recently they have had a few problems, such as being duller than an anesthesiologists’ convention, slower than an ’87 Yugo, and buggier than the alien planet in Starship Troopers.
But the next generation of on-line games is here, and this breed is exciting, fast and–alas–still buggy. But if you’re like the thousands of people who have been playing Ultima Online lately, the odds are you’ll be having so much fun that you’ll be able to overlook the occasional glitch.
Ultima Online is the breakthough program of Internet gaming. According to market research firm PC Data, Ultima Online was the 4th bestselling PC title for the month of September, the highest an online game has ever placed, even though it wasn’t even for sale until September 25th. It has since sold over 70,000 copies, and its distributor, Electronic Arts, has just shipped 80,000 more, making it the fastest selling Internet-only game ever.
In addition, Ultima Online has shattered records for the number of players. Whereas most online games support just two to eight simultaneous users, recently almost 12,000 players were logged on to Ultima at the same time. At any one time, whether noon or midnight, an average of over 5000 players are exploring its virtual world. More than half of the people who have bought the game log on daily.
In this role-playing adventure, they are exploring a medieval land called Britannia, a magical place filled with dungeons and dragons, heroes and villains. The game offers more than 190 million square feet of land to explore, from rustic villages to tropical islands to dark netherworlds. To see the entire world at once, you’d need 38,000 17-inch monitors. Moreover, Britannia has its own ecology, limited natural resources, day/night cycles and intricate economic system.
When you begin the game, you create an alter ego called an Avatar, with his or her own strengths or weakness. For example, you can elect to be a clever mage or a brawn-bound warrior. Once in the world, you’ll spend your time adventuring, running a business or just socializing. Players who elect to develop certain skills can specialize in such diverse trades as animal training, mining, blacksmithing and forensic evaluation.
Richard Garriott, the game’s designer, says; “Ultima Online has far surpassed our expectations, both from a business standpoint and as a grand social experiment. People are flocking to an environment where they can live an alternate existence, launching their own personal and business lives within a virtual world.”
Garriott can be often be found online himself, playing as his avatar Lord British, the benign ruler of Britannia. What has been most gratifying to Garriott is that the game has developed in ways its creators never expected. For example, Garriott figured that like-minded players would band together and create guilds. But he never foresaw the offbeat nature of some of the over 500 guilds.
Some guilds are sophomoric, such as The Cow Killers; others are sublime, such as the Thespian League, which is devoted to providing entertainment for other players. And still others are just mind- boggling, such as the guild of assassins known as the Dethroners, whose proclaimed goal is to kill Lord British.
Lotsa luck. Britannia also has its own underlying ethical system. Unlike the world of Doom, where sociopathic violence is the norm, Britannia is a kinder, gentler place. Those who want to fight evil monsters or scoundrels will have plenty of opportunity, but anyone who assaults innocents or who consistently engages in anti-social behavior will be put in their place, most usually by other players.
Like all Internet games, Ultima Online has its share of glitches, and the program occasionally hangs up. It also requires a ton of resources to play: you’ll need a Pentium 133 system or better, with an astounding 261 megabytes of uncompressed storage space available. A nice touch, though, is that users with slower modems are not put at a disadvantage to users with faster ones.
Ultima Online sells for $64.95 and comes a handsome cloth map of Britannia, a month of unlimited play (each month after the first costs $9.95), a 30-day membership to Worldnet, and a copy of Netscape Navigator. For more information, check out its free Web site at www.ultimaonline.com. Odds are, you won’t be alone. The site records eight million hits weekly.
