Ultima’s creator is making a new MMO, and it’s built on NFTs

pcgamesn.com:

The Ultima series of role-playing games has been foundational for videogames not once, but at least twice. The original series pioneered a path that western RPGs would follow for decades, and Ultima Online was the proving grounds for many of the best ideas and solutions in MMORPGs today. Now the series’ creator is going for the hat trick: Richard Garriott, known to Ultima fans as ‘Lord British,’ is making another MMO – but this time, it’s going to be built using blockchain technology.

Garriott is working with long-time collaborator Todd Porter, and the pair say they’re well aware of the problems crypto brings with it, both in terms of the technology itself and its reputation with players.

“There’s not really any good NFT games right now, in my opinion,” Porter tells us. “I’ve not seen anything that I felt has really held up any gameplay.” Garriott agrees, and says part of that is down to the fact that it’s still early days – there hasn’t been enough time since NFTs became a major fad for anyone to develop a strong title based on the technology.

Garriott’s and Porter’s approach to designing a game with blockchain is different from others we’ve seen, but the existing experiments haven’t gone particularly well so far. Hackers absconded with $600 million worth of Axie Infinity NFTs in March, and NFT marketplace objkt.com records 27 total sales of Ubisoft’s Quartz NFTs, which it minted for Ghost Recon Breakpoint a few months prior to announcing the end of new content development. (Ubisoft, however, appears undeterred.)

The game Garriott and Porter are working on is in the early stages of production and doesn’t have an official name yet, but it’ll be a modern spin on the familiar Ultima format – a top-down, isometric fantasy