As Ultima Online approaches its 28th birthday, former creative lead reveals what it takes for an MMO to last for decades, and why they sometimes fail: "Content does not last forever"

Raph Koster knows a thing about making an enduring MMO, as he helped create one of the longest lasting MMOs of all time with Ultima Online.

Ultima Online is uniformly considered an early pioneer of the MMO space, releasing back in 1997 and becoming big enough that it's widely credited with popularizing the genre before World of Warcraft became the standard-bearer according to Koster. Point is, if there's one person to ask about how to make a long-lasting MMO, it's Koster, so we did exactly that. The answer? The friends we made along the way.

"The number one predictor of people staying in an MMO is the friends they make, and whether their friends are there - it's the biggest thing that makes a difference," Koster says. "And if you don't design towards having social development and community in your game, it will suffer over time. Content does not last forever, right?

"People go back to the same public park not because there's more park to see, but because they want to enjoy it with their friends. And it's the same thing for a great MMO. You might have been there and done that on all the content in there, but you go back because it's a place to enjoy with friends, right? So that means you have to do an awful lot of design work around enabling and supporting that."

As someone who's made lifelong friends in Ultima Online specifically and pretty much stopped playing when they stopped playing, I am uniquely unqualified to argue with Koster here. I still go back from time to time to mine some of that sweet, sweet nostalgia, but yeah, it feels kind of empty.

Koster's new studio, Playable Worlds, is working on a new sci-fi game called Stars Reach, which he's hoping will modernize the MMO genre. Koster and fellow RPG veteran Eric Goldberg bill the game as a "sandbox science-fantasy MMO where you explore deeply simulated living worlds in a shardless galaxy", with "a fully player-driven economy full of peaceful ways to play." I'm definitely getting modern spacey Ultima Online vibes from it, which sounds great.

Former Ultima Online lead wants his new MMO to satisfy the "huge, huge appetite" for "a more immersive parallel world" like the ones in Sword Art Online and Animal Crossing.