Richard Garriott here:Let me address your question about solo and multiplayer play. The game has both! The game is absolutely story driven, similar to early Ultima's. We do not intend to force anyone to play "online". That being said, I believe many or most will find our interpretation of multiplayer to enhance their experience. When the game is played online, there is a global persistent world that ALL players are part of (no shards intended), all player shops with their vendors as well as homes and other permanent structures are seen by and visited by all players. In addition, you will see and interact with other players in real time. But, the people you will generally bump into will be connected preferentially based on if you already know them, or have some other reason we think you would enjoy playing with them.

Richard Garriott - To get the current state of the persistent world, you would have to play online. If you are asking "If I play exclusively offline, can I still own a house?" then likely so, likely without "taxes". My honest expectation before starting this campaign, was that while the game could be played offline for periods of time, I did not expect people to desire to "never connect". based on player feedback, we are now exploring the "never connect" option. We should be able to provide it. We are researching these details now.

Regardless, we are not building a social micro transaction game. We will only be charging for large new downloads and things that also cost us to support. I believe we are building a game with the best features of solo player and MMO experience, WITHOUT costing YOU or US nearly as much as MMO's have in the past.

It is my hope that all the folks who think they really just want to play offline will play online. I really believe our plan will provide a deeper world to experience without either pestering you to buy crap all the time, nor interfering with your feeling of "I am the chosen hero". Yet, I understand the two camps of A) I want a solo player Ultima style game, and B) I want the UO style MMO experience (before it was "ruined"). We will provide those options, as best we can. Yet, I still hope and believe, the way we are tackling the online play will serve both camps! If not, you can play solo!

3 days into the Kickstarter and we’ve been receiving tons of great feedback, probably more than we received in the last year through our social campaign to find out what people want! Based on one of the most common concerns, we’re making a few small changes.

First, the game can be played offline, no connection required. The character used for the offline version of the game will not be useable in the online version of the game for obvious exploit/hacking reasons. We are going to investigate ways to export your online character to the single player version of the game but the offline character will not be importable into the online version.

Second, the offline single player version of the game for those who purchase it through KickStarter will not use any form of DRM. We had been holding off on committing to that because we don’t know what our final distribution system (Steam, GOG, etc) is going to be and some of them use DRM. We may have DRM of some sort on post-KS sales but we’ll commit to keeping KS versions DRM and “phone home” free for the single player version once launched.

Third, the offline single player of the game will not have any microtransactions. We know this is kind of a no-brainer since it is offline but we wanted to be perfectly clear on that since there was some vagueness in a few statements in one of our video chats.

Also, we’ll get some more exciting news about swag to you in writing tomorrow. We thought hour long video chats were the best way to answer questions but we’re finding we really need more written updates. Also, for those that prefer in depth videos we’ll get another hour long video chat setup this week!