In an interview with Eurogamer, Richard Garriott said that his current project dubbed as Ultimate RPG could theoretically become Ultima Online 2. Nothing is set in stone as of this writing, but he admitted that he and EA were on speaking terms and may work together again in the near future.
"We've actually talked to Electronic Arts about [Garriott leading Ultima Online again]," he said. "I would love to have access to the Ultima property. We've had discussions at very high levels with Electronic Arts about access to the property. We're in discussions with Electronic Arts even now about a possible marketing and distribution relationships and things of this nature."
He said there's a split within EA about a possible collaboration: one side that's all thumbs up over the idea, and one half that's resistant because some people have their own ideas about future Ultima projects, and some that seem to have their own ideas about Garriott's possible involvement. Regardless, he's open to the idea of a collaboration, but the Ultima "spiritual successor" wouldn't be a clear, direct sequel.
"If you look back at Ultimas 1, 2, 3 - they weren't related to the rest [of the games]," he said. "Five of the later six games were all in literally the exact same world with the exact same characters and cities I actually think it's time to move on from that regardless, so even if we were to have access to the properties of my historical work, I don't think I would change my current plans. I'm very confident of the current plans as the right way to evolve my creation, regardless."
But the game will keep its isometric presentation whether it's Ultima Online 2 or Ultimate RPG, yet Garriott's team has created a toolset that will allow the game to be either isometric or an actual non-flat 3D presentation. It will also be free-to-play and have the ability to perform on any major platform (notably PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Android, etc).
"We are platform agnostic," Garriott explained. "We will do social media, we will do downloadable executable, we will do web browser and we will do mobile, iPhone, iPad, Android. Our intention is to do the same game across all those. I don't want to do the game where it plays on everything except your iPhone and we'll do some miniature trading game or some hamstrung version. That's not my interest."
To read the full interview, head here.
