page_title: Phantasy Star Online
section_title: Concept
hierarchical_section_title: Phantasy Star Online / Development / Concept
caption_attribution_description: English&#58; photograph taken at the 2015 edition of the "Monaco Anime Game International Conferences" (MAGIC) organized by Shibuya International in Monaco.Français&#58; Photographie prise durant l'édition 2015 Du "Monaco Anime Game International Conferences" (MAGIC) organisé par Shibuya International à Monaco.
context_page_description: Phantasy Star Online is an online role-playing game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega in 2000 for the Dreamcast. It was the first online RPG for game consoles; 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.
  Before Phantasy Star Online, online gaming was limited to western PC 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.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: Producer Yuji Naka in 2015
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