How Lord British is Returning to RPGs  Ultima creator Richard
Garriott reveals plans for Utimate RPG.  There are many people
with good reason to be excited about Richard Garriott’s return
to making RPGs. Ultimate RPG, his free-to-play, socially-
connected take on the genre that he has done so much to
popularize over the past 30 years, is in development, and
targeted to release in the next 18 months.  Take, for example,
those of you ancient enough to have played the original Ultima,
launched in 1981 and massively influential in the subsequent
design and culture of role-playing games, a bona fide Big Moment
in the early development of video games, one in which first-
person dungeon-exploration was merged with text-based
storytelling and top-down combat-adventuring.  Perhaps you owned
a shiny PC in the early 1990s, that faraway world of seminal
games like Doom, The 7th Guest and Syndicate. Maybe you played
the visually appealing, isometric open world of Ultima VII, felt
yourself lost inside its convincingly bustli