Ultima Online's lead designer is making a sandbox MMO at a new studio

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Raph Koster teams up with veterans from Disney, Marvel and Sony Online Entertainment.

(Image credit: Origin Systems)

Raph Koster, the lead designer of PC classic Ultima Online and creative director of ambitious 2003 MMO Star Wars Galaxies, has founded his own studio, and is working on a sandbox MMO that combines crafting, building and exploring.

Koster didn't give much away about what the new game would involve, but promised that it would appeal to a broad range of players. “We are going to build a massively multiplayer world where all sorts of players can come together and find ways to regardless of whether they like exploring or adventuring or socializing or PvP. It’s a sandbox world that supports many ways to play," he said.

“If you look across a lot of the most popular games that are out there, and the ways in which people play them, whether it’s PvP, or like Minecraft, or like building, some people like playing for socializing, and so on. There’s an awful lot of proven features out there that we know audiences enjoy. And a lot of them actually were born from sandbox MMOs. So we’re going to bring together those proven, fun features that we know people like, into one world.”

Koster didn't reveal when he was targeting release for the MMO. 

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.