Phantasy Star Online is an online role-playing game (RPG) developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega in 2000 for the Dreamcast. Players adventure with up to three others over the internet to complete quests, collect items and fight enemies in real-time action RPG combat. The story is unrelated to previous games in the Phantasy Star series.
Phantasy Star Online was the first successful online RPG for game consoles. Earlier online gaming was limited to western Windows games, particularly RPGs such as Diablo, Ultima Online and EverQuest. Believing online play was the future, Sega chairman Isao Okawa instructed Sonic Team to develop an online game for the Dreamcast, produced by Yuji Naka. Sonic Team's experiments led to the development of ChuChu Rocket!, the first online Dreamcast game. Using what they learned from the project, and taking significant inspiration from Diablo, Sonic Team built Phantasy Star Online. As Japanese internet service providers charged for dial-up access per minute, and high-speed connections were not yet widely available, Okawa personally paid for free internet access bundled with Japanese Dreamcasts.
Phantasy Star Online was highly anticipated and launched to positive reviews and commercial success; critics praised the online gameplay as addictive but criticized the single-player mode. It received the Japan Game Award for "Game of the Year" and is recognized as a landmark console game, influencing multiplayer dungeon crawlers, as well as the Monster Hunter series.
Phantasy Star Online was ported to Windows and rereleased on the Dreamcast as Ver. 2 with expanded content. Following Sega's exit from the console business in 2001, the game was ported to GameCube and Xbox as Episode I & II, featuring new characters, environments and other features. Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution, released for GameCube in 2003, was a turn-based card game. The online series continued with Phantasy Star Universe (2006) and Phantasy Star Online 2 (2012). Although Sega decommissioned the last official servers in 2010, Phantasy Star Online is still played on private servers.
Gameplay
Phantasy Star Online is an action role-playing game primarily played with other players cooperatively over the internet. Players take on the role of adventurers sent to explore Ragol, an uncharted planet. To create their character, they choose between a handful of races and classes, which define their abilities and statistics; for example, some types are better with "techniques" (magic spells) while others are more skilled with ranged or melee weapons.
Players can play either online or offline. Online, players are brought to a lobby where they can chat and organize teams of up to four. Team members can communicate by typing using a physical or onscreen keyboard, even when in different environments. Preset phrases are automatically translated between languages, and custom emoticons are also supported. Players can also exchange "guild cards" to exchange private messages and see when the other is online.
After organizing a team, players are transported to their own instance of the hub spaceship Pioneer 2, where they can buy and sell items, store money and items, heal, and browse quests. At any time, they can transport to Ragol, where combat and exploration take place. The four environments – forests, caves, mines, or ruins – comprise winding passages and large areas where enemies spawn. Players fight enemies in real time, using weapons and techniques and collecting items. Attacks can be chained for more accuracy and speed. Typically, all the monsters in a room must be defeated to advance. Each environment ends in a boss battle, which rewards the team with a large sum of experience points. Quests, taken on Pioneer 2, task players with specific challenges; once completed, the team returns to Pioneer 2 to collect their reward. Higher difficulties reward players with more experience points and better items. Some items can be used to feed the player's mag, a small creature that follows the player character and aids them in battle.
Plot The story of Phantasy Star Online is unrelated to the original Phantasy Star series and is less substantial. Threatened by the imminent destruction of their home planet, thousands of refugees arrive at planet Ragol aboard the spaceship Pioneer 2. As they establish contact with colonists sent ahead on Pioneer 1, an enormous explosion shakes the planet. Adventurers from Pioneer 2 land to investigate the explosion and search for Rico Tyrell, daughter of the head of Pioneer 2. They discover the planet overrun by monsters, and follow messages left by Rico leading to an ancient evil, Dark Falz.
Development By the late 1990s, the popularity of online gaming on personal computers had grown substantially in the West, but was almost nonexistent in Japan, where consoles were more popular. Sega chairman Isao Okawa believed the internet was the future of gaming and wanted a flagship online game for Sega's Dreamcast console. None of Sega's development studios wanted the project, as they were occupied with their own ventures, such as Jet Set Radio (2000) and the Sakura Wars series. Okawa gave the responsibility to Sonic Team, led by Yuji Naka. Sonic Team was not particularly receptive to the decision, but continued with development. After Okawa became ill, Naka sent reports to the hospital to update him on progress.
Concept Sonic Team began experimenting with the Dreamcast's network capabilities after completing Sonic Adventure in 1998. They saw the creation of an online game for Japan, a nation of console gamers, as a serious challenge, akin to creating a new genre. Much of their time was spent learning the basic elements of online gaming; they wanted to make sure the network functionality worked before developing the gameplay, setting, and story. Their network experiments became ChuChu Rocket!, released in 1999 as the first online game for the Dreamcast. Sonic Team used the lessons learned from ChuChu Rocket! to implement network technology in the larger project.
Because of the lack of Japanese online games, and the developers' experience with the genre, Naka looked to western games for inspiration, and studied three online RPGs popular at the time: Diablo (1996), Ultima Online (1997), and EverQuest (1999). Diablo in particular impressed him on a gameplay and technical level; he enjoyed how smooth the graphics and action were despite requiring significant system memory. Diablo was a 2D game, however, and Sonic Team wanted to develop a 3D game with the same degree of smoothness and gameplay. This concerned Naka, as he did not want his game to use the cheap and bland graphics associated with online games.
Naka decided against creating a massively multiplayer game similar to Ultima Online and EverQuest, which would handle many players simultaneously in a persistent world; the necessary servers would have required two years of programming, and the Dreamcast did not have a hard disk drive to support continuous online patches. Naka was also more interested in working on new projects instead of continuously updating the same game for years, and doubted Sonic Team would be able to keep the game interesting. The team therefore adopted Diablo as their main inspiration, determined to outclass it.
Art and setting Sonic Team built a science fiction-fantasy game under the working title Third World. The art style was "comic-like" at first, but became more realistic. One of artist Satoshi Sakai's early concept drawings of a dragon reminded Naka of Sega's Phantasy Star series, which had been dormant since Phantasy Star IV (1993) for the Genesis. Naka had been the main programmer on Phantasy Star (1987) and Phantasy Star II (1989). He had always wanted to develop a multiplayer Phantasy Star game, but previous hardware did not allow for it.
The team was given freedom not to adhere strictly to elements from earlier Phantasy Star games. Naka felt liberated by the decision to not continue the story from the previous Phantasy Star games. Since few of the Phantasy Star IV staff still worked at Sega, the art team felt little obligation to adhere to the previous games' style, retaining only the science fiction look and some enemy and item names. Naka and Sakai believed factors such as the change in graphical fidelity and genre were enough to differentiate it from previous Phantasy Star games.
Music The soundtrack was composed by Hideaki Kobayashi using a Roland JV-2080 synthesizer, with live orchestration on some tracks, including the theme song. Kobayashi composed ambient music for calm scenes, and incorporated more rhythm and melody for battles. He composed short four-bar melodies that are sequenced depending on gameplay; for example, when an enemy appears, the system plays music associated with that enemy. The process was a drain on the Dreamcast hardware, and gained the nickname "the crasher" among staff for how often it would crash the game during development.
Online functionality Sonic Team had conceived their 1998 Saturn game Burning Rangers as an online game for four players, but abandoned the idea due to insurmountable network problems. They used the ChuChu Rocket! networking system as a template for the online functions for Phantasy Star Online. This presented new challenges, as the new network would connect players between different countries. Sonic Team ran experiments with different internet service providers, dial-up modems, cable modems, and other networking configurations to ensure the game would work for all players. In Japan, Sonic Team gave beta versions to 10,000 users who pre-ordered the game, so they could work with a variety of equipment and internet services to eliminate problems. They wanted to run a worldwide test but did not have time. 90% of the testers were able to play online. Despite technical success, Sega was concerned that the high cost of internet access in Japan would be prohibitive for gamers and reduce sales. Japanese internet service providers charged per-minute fees for dial-up access, and high-speed options such as broadband were not yet widely available. To combat this, chairman Okawa personally paid for free internet access for one year to be bundled with each Dreamcast.
One of the biggest challenges was bridging the language barrier between global players. Sonic Team felt that developing a universal language system would be the largest barrier to a global gaming network. The team started by developing the word select system, which allows players to select predefined expressions to be translated to other players. The system had about 2000 words near the end of development, and Naka found it difficult to add more words to satisfy all player needs. Sonic Team built support for Japanese, English, Spanish, German and French. They omitted Italian and Portuguese due to time constraints. Korean was also considered because of the internet boom in Korea at the time. Japanese and English were easier to implement because the only concern is the word order and do not use grammatical gender. The language system had to be fully redesigned at least once.
Each server could accommodate one thousand players. Sega initially prepared 20 network servers to accommodate 20,000 online users for the game's launch, with room to add more servers as necessary. This was increased to support up to 36,000 players right before launch. Sonic Team partnered with Swatch to use Swatch Internet time (or "beat time") as a universal clock for the game. The clock was implemented so players could coordinate with those in other countries on when to play online. The clock system divides each 24 hours into 1,000 beats, with one beat equaling one minute and 26.4 seconds. The time was maintained directly on the server and not based on the user's clock on their system. Sonic Team decided not to add jumping to keep the levels simple and simplify the network code.