How Ultima Online Shapes Playable Worlds

For those that don’t know, Ultima Online is celebrating 25 years of continuous online play this month! Our CEO Raph Koster (Lead Designer on Ultima Online) helped bring UO to life all those years ago, and continues to draw inspiration from that original vision. And here we are, 25 years later, building new playable worlds. Worlds that feel alive and dynamic, where you can play from any device; using modern cloud-native architecture.

Playable Worlds

Riffs by Raph: Sandbox versus Themepark

I just watched a couple of videos about sandbox vs themepark games (in particular one by NerdSlayer and another by Josh “Strife” Hayes)… One thing that struck me about the ways players often talk about this (because at this point the history is so old) is that people think of sandbox as the older version of MMOs, and themeparks as newer. But that’s not right – sandbox is not the older form. Sandboxes are the evolution of themepark MMOs, not the antecedent.

Playable Worlds

Playable Worlds Raises Over $25M Series B With Strategic Investment from Kakao Games

Playable Worlds announced today that it has secured over $25 million in Series B funding, led by Korean video game publisher Kakao Games Corp., a subsidiary of Kakao, and with participation from return investors BITKRAFT Ventures and Galaxy Interactive. New investors Lilith Games and Gaingels also joined the round, which follows a $10 million Series A in 2020. This strategic investment will be used to drive Playable Worlds’ talent recruitment and fund its cloud-native sandbox MMO game currently in development.

Press Release

Raph Koster’s real talk about a real metaverse

Not many people can say “been there, done that” on the metaverse. But Raph Koster, CEO of Playable Worlds, has been making online worlds for more than a quarter of a century. He gave a speech about what he’s learned from that experience at the GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 online event on January 27th, 2022. Koster has worked on online game worlds such as Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Star Wars Galaxies, and he understands the difficulty of interoperability, how people behave, the importance of creating standards, and the need to focus on fun.

VentureBeat

Riffs by Raph: How Virtual Worlds Work - Part 5

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Ownership of anything digital is illusory, and always will be. Then again, it’s illusory in the real world, too. Ownership is a convention, not physical reality. This is why we have sayings like “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, which basically means “you can claim you own something all you want, but if you don’t physically have the object, it’s pretty hard to enforce.” In digital settings, of course, you never physically have anything. At best, you have a physical container of data.

Playable Worlds

Riffs by Raph: What does Cloud-Native even mean?

First, let’s get real: the cloud is not really new. After all, there used to be a time where we ran software on mainframes remotely, and used a pretty dumb terminal with a thin client to connect to the mainframe. Today, instead of a mainframe, we have remote server clusters with tons of compute power that can launch and shut down a multitude of servers to allow for rapid changes in demand. There’s incredible sophistication in what has changed, but it’s still mostly tech plumbing.

Playable Worlds

Riffs by Raph: Thinking Long-term

The reason why businesspeople need to use other words is because “fun” isn’t particularly measurable. For one thing, it’s really different for different people. Some people find fun in raising cute pets, and others in turning them into giblets and loot. Some enjoy building, and others tearing down. There isn’t anything wrong with that! A person’s taste in fun will evolve over time, by quite a lot. When we were little kids, we all liked games that seem trivial or random to us now; one of the biggest characteristics of fun is that we outgrow it.

Playable Worlds

Raph Koster guests on "Countdown to Classic" podcast.

Josh is joined for an epic chat with MMORPG legendary designer Raph Koster, the current CEO of Playable Worlds, and former lead designer and creative director of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, respectively. Listen in to one of the best chats the show has featured, as Raph talks everything from Richard Garriott’s castle, to his thoughts on micro-transactions and their place in gaming, to his current work with Playable Worlds.

Countdown to Classic

Welcome Back, Koster: Why an MMORPG vet is back building a new virtual world

This is what makes Koster's involvement with Playable Worlds notable: he seems intent on applying lessons learned from decades of studying online game communities, and passionate about building a shared world where combat isn't the focus. 'There are so many ways to exist and interact with these alternate, fictional worlds that to say combat is The Way is just so reductive,' he said. 'We've really started getting that lesson; for me it was a lesson we came into on Ultima Online.

Gamasutra

Playable Worlds has a 'different mindset' on engagement

I would go further and say it's not just those sandbox-y elements; there are lessons we could be pulling into MMOs from other kinds of games all together. There's this impression that an MMO has to be something heavy, something you take two hours to do every session. I think there are a ton of lessons we've seen in everything from mobile to indie games showing you can have things that are deep and really engaging but don't require you to make them your principal hobby taking up hours and hours every day.

GamesIndustry.biz

The award-winning designer behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies says it's time for his 'dream to be fulfilled.'

“I’d say that our goal, though, is to make a sandbox that looks forward, rather than one that looks backwards. There are many lessons to build on, but we’re not out to build a museum to old gameplay. We’re going to bring the best of that stuff forward to the modern day, and blend it with the best of now to hopefully make something that works for tomorrow.”

Yahoo Finance

Playable Worlds Raises $2.7M to Create a New Sandbox MMORPG, led by Raph Koster, Designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies

Playable Worlds, an online game company created to change the way immersive worlds work, announced today it has raised $2.7 million in seed funding, led by BITKRAFT Esports Ventures with participation from 1UP Ventures and several game industry angel investors. The company is led by a distinguished team of developers with many decades of collective online game experience from Disney, Marvel, Sony Online Entertainment, and venture-backed startups.

Press Release