Richard Garriott and Brian Fargo on Bringing Meaning to RPGs

Earlier this year, USgamer ran a series of retrospective articles dedicated to a number of notable genre-defining role-playing video games from the early 1980s. The articles featured plenty of quotes from the games’ creators, including Ultima’s Richard Garriott, Wizardry’s Robert Woodhead, and The Bard’s Tale’s Michael Cranford. And now, the latest article in this series takes a detailed look at Origin Systems’ Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar and Interplay Productions’ Wasteland, listing them as examples of “a new era of maturity for RPGs,” and using Richard Garriott and Brian Fargo as its primary sources.

A few sample paragraphs:

Garriott learned his fans hadn’t found the meager amount of text contained in the early chapters of Ultima to be a disappointment. Instead, like an impressionist painting, the games’ terse dialogue boxes provided just enough information to help fire their imaginations. Fans happily filled in the details themselves, becoming their own de facto game masters. “I began to see people reading story meaning, even though there was no real story in those games,” he says. “People began to read between the lines and think I was trying to tell them something meaningful, when I wasn’t.”

Equally enlightening were the anecdotes players shared about their behavior. “Some people liked to replay the game to be quite sinister,” he recalls. “They’d go kill off all the villagers. They’d steal from every shop. They liked to kill my character, Lord British. I realized these people were playing to min-max their way to the top, not to play any story they perceived.” To Garriott, these patterns of behaviors spoke to failings not of Ultima fans but rather shortcomings in his own game design and the conventions of the genre at large—flaws, he realized, that were incumbent upon him to correct.

“The bad guy was just sort of waiting there for them, not doing anything bad to be worthy of your wrath. You were the plague of locusts killing and sweeping up everything in order to become powerful and rich. I thought, ‘There’s something wrong with that.’ I was expecting people to be heroic. But I’m the one who put in the feature that you could steal from the shops, right? They couldn’t have killed the NPCs if I didn’t allow it.

“So, I said, ‘OK. I’m going to switch it up.’ I started writing Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar. I deliberately said, ‘I’m going to let people play the way they’ve been playing, but if you go through the town and kill everybody or you steal from that shop, that person’s not going to want to help you in the future.’ If you need [a key item] but you’ve been stealing from that shop, they’ll go, ‘I’d love to help the hero, but you are the most dishonest thieving scumbag I’ve ever met, so I’m not going to help you.'”