Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step
filfre.net
filfre.net
Ugh - those omissions are not self-serving. The reality (which we all see) is that the dev team f*cking hated the game, probably gave up on quality, and everyone knows it. But saying so is an attack on the people Garriott screwed when he screwed up; the omissions are of other people's contributions to his faults, not his faults themselves.
The apology was _incredibly_ well-written: it highlights all of garriott's mistakes, in detail, and places the blame squarely on his own shoulders: he could say "EA is evil because they enforce business discipline," but instead said "they did their job as a business, and I didn't so mine as a creator."
If anything, this was probably _too_ self-blaming (we all know EA would just replace him if he didn't bow down, accomplishing nothing). But don't criticize him for failing to throw his team under the bus. Knowing very little, I'd love work for this guy, based on that apology alone.
https://explorers.org/news/news_detail/richard-garriott-elec...
I am a finance guy, and I think we need to find a way to rework the system to reduce or end a lot of finances excesses. Especially VC pressures, mergers and acquisitions that remove founders, and other issues like that.
I want a new RA2 :/
At this rate I'll just learn C# and join the project I think
- people have finally cashed out so motivations are changing
- an investment has been made, so people start accepting business goals are important.
So reading this story I wonder if EA is the villain here, or human nature.
Now I do blame EA for popcap. I'll never forgive Plants vs Zombies 2 with literal pricetags in dollars on all the plants.
Nobody "cashed out", because the stock options turned into so much hot air. You couldn't have pried business goals out of EA with a autopsy kit. They were interested in IP, and in "leadership". They deliberately drove the rest of the business into the ground to get rid of most of the devs.
And, talking to other people acquired by EA, that was far from the exception. In general, anybody who worked for EA in a non-exec role can tell you: If you wonder who the villain is, you could do worse than guess it's EA "leaders"
That was the first time I read the apology, and the apology immediately raised red flags for being one that was only half of the whole picture and engineered to put blames on others; the self-criticism is simply there to induce sympathy.
In my opinion, the fact that there is nothing in that apology that directly addresses the departure of Ultima VIII from everything(?) that fans were expecting then is one of those, and the biggest, red flags.
I would have some sympathy for getting a burnt pizza from a pizza kitchen that's under lots of pressure and the staff are being worked to their bones; but I would not have any sympathy for the manager's apology for giving me a burnt toast made with sliced bread.
I have not played the Ultima games and I don't like EA much.
Edit: missing "to".
The jury has been in on EA for a long, long time: they milk franchises ruthlessly and eliminate talent and entire acquisitions the second it fails to meet their terrifyingly all-consuming goal of gigantic profits.
Not if I were paying for pizza, no. They need to have some pride as creators and not serve me bread as if it’s pizza.
The Ultima fanbase has always had a cultish love of RG for many good reasons, sure. Firing the guy would not be a smart business decision.
We're also only hearing his side of it. I tend to think EA was in the wrong, but also know that it's almost always the case one side of a story is biased, even if unintentionally.
The decision makers directly above him could have easily replaced him without actually replacing him, but I don't think they would have cared about the bad PR from cutting him at all. Acquiring a studio or rockstar is both good pr and good for business, but firing be a bad employee or cutting a failing studio is also good for business as far as shareholders and execs were concerned.
Only if you believe businesses are run by mustachio-twirling villains who sit around trying to ruin games for fun.
Manager or Exec B fires a failing, unsuccessful or insubordinate employee, or saves the company money by reducing headcount and the complexity of running a studio. Good for business!
They're two separate, distinct operations. A and B are not necessarily the same person, though they can be. It's not a planned evil scheme or anything like that; the separation of time alone makes them independent events with independent motivations (in most cases, as tearing down another person's sandcastle to build up your own does happen sometimes too).
"Don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower" and so on.
To answer your business-management-related question though, I am looking at the price of their stock over since 1990.
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/EA/financials
1990: $0.xxx
2000: $20
2010: $17 (valley between 2008-2013)(the global financial crisis?)
2015: $55
2021: $145 (there is a drop between 2018-2020 down to 100)
Whatever these guys are doing, judging from their stock price, it works. Shareholders like them.
Sales/Revenue filed:
2016: 4.37B
2017: 4.81B
2018: 5.16B
2019: 4.93B
2020: 5.47N
Cash cow...
Can’t you folks use decimal points correctly?
As someone in England, I know of no-one who would call it a period rather than a point. Period is considered an Americanism.
It's like Hollywood. There is always a multitude of starstruck 20 year-olds who would happily do the job for free, just for a chance to "make it big". Larger employers count on it and it distorts the salary/work-life balance economics of all the junior and mid-level employees in the industry.
The video game industry is a tournament. I have nothing but respect for the talent it attracts, but you have to be a little bit crazy to enter it.
Ultima IV holds a special place in my heart that I'll never forget. I played it as a kid and then played it again, finally beating it just three years ago.
I haven't actually played through more than the first couple of hours of VIII, but probably will eventually. I did really try to get through IX, though and it was really frustrating both how buggy it was and that the hardware requirements were so far ahead of my machine.
and everyone's. I actually tried playing it with a ton of video cards because buying video cards was my biggest hobby at the time. I think the Matrox Mystique handled it best overall from what I remember.
There's no such thing as an exact apology. There's a discontinuity between under-apologizing and overapologizing, there's no point where it's neither an under- or over-apology.
What REALLY killed Ultima was the absolute state of Ultima IX. Also released in an unplayable state, the patches rolled in. Finally after about two months, it was playable but as one progressed in the game, incongruities almost immediately popped out. The lore had been changed, sometimes substantially. And this wasn't the worst thing - it became clear after not too long that the game wasn't done at all. This was later admitted by an Origin team member who released the real plot, and later on people attempted to fan-patch the game to make it more like it had been planned originally.
Of course, EA is to blame for all of this, but Garriott shares this blame for allowing them to take too much control away from his organization and okaying the releases before they were ready.
http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/nitpicks.htm
Hacki's page is still THE internet resource for the pissed off former Ultima fan.
ooof. i tried to play it but got into some boring dead end where i didn't know what to do next and figured i missed something but realized i just didn't care and would rather do some chores than keep playing.
i was just confused that anyone liked ultima at all and forgot about it.
kind of interesting to see the story behind that game (i forgot about it so much that i never bothered to look into why it sucked so much before today).
The game is chock full of astounding details like this. Feeling poor? Just thresh some wheat, take it to the mill and grind it into flour and bake some bread and sell it.
- The game's villain, The Guardian, is described as a destroyer of worlds, which is the antithesis to Origin's motto: We create worlds.
- The Guardian uses two acolytes named Elizabeth and Abraham (EA) who, benign in appearance, spread funds throughout Britannia for evil purposes.
- The Guardian has set up three devices named Generators that prepare his conquer of the land in the shape of a Cube, Sphere, and Tetrahedron, respectively (EA logo).
- Alagner's notebook reads: "(...) Already, The Guardian is promising to be a powerful threat. Magic in Britannia has taken a turn for the worse in the past few years.", a possible side reference to EA's push for creative control over RG.
The World Building was incredible. Nothing quite like it since which is surprising. The NPC schedule system is actually quite simple. Simple systems that allow for the bank heist :)
If I ever create a game it will be very focused technically on world building. Multi-resolution AI system to create those local details and also track NPC schedules, movements, and etc globally.
IMHO, there would still have been a lot of winds against the series anyhow. The exponential increase in the difficulty of technology was not playing well with Origin's high level of aggressiveness on that front. And perhaps a bit more controversially, the series just wasn't headed in a good direction; after the impressive founding of the series' reputation on the virtue system in 4 and 5, the series was headed ever faster into a nihilistic undercutting of its own foundations. (And I'd highlight the undercutting aspect over the nihilistic aspect; while I'll cop to being less impressed with nihilism than probably the average HN reader, nihilistic RPGs aren't intrinsically a bad thing, but in this particular case it undercuts the foundations.) Even a fully-realized Ultima 8 was never going to fit the series very well, and IMHO could even have ended up with a worse story in some aspects than we got.
On a side note, Ultima IX was not only not a good game, it's the only game I know of that ever sent me a complete set of new CDs with an updated version on them months after release without me even specifically requesting it. I still remember the mostly (entirely?) blank white tri-fold (or quad fold?) cardboard CD enclosure it came in with all new disks. I don't think I ever used them, partly because I already had that version or one better from the internet prior to it arriving, and partly because the game still had such horrible performance on my moderately good system that I had already given up on it because the gameplay itself wasn't nearly good enough to make me subject myself to that.
It'll happen once VR takes off, even if that takes another 20 years to happen.
For the first year or two at least.
And Ultima Online has been running since 1997 and is still going ?!?!
That it is still "Online" with active players is an extraordinary accomplishment. It really is one of the most important games in video game history.
(Note FFXI and WoW are also remarkably long-lived MMOs.)
Also imagine playing a full MMO on a 233 MHz CPU with 32MB of RAM and downloading updates via blazing fast 56kbps dial-up internet...
GameSpot gave it 4.9/10. ;-)
It's effectively "free money" for EA now I suppose
As I never found anything close to Ultima Online, I basically stopped gaming entirely. UO raised the bar too high.
It was all downhill after WoW. It was a great game, but it was precisely because it was so good that it soon hegemonised everything. Rather than being one possibility out of many, it became "the" MMORPG, in that due to its success every subsequent game copied WoW, often superficially, and maybe even sometimes accidentally. Its specific conventions became the genre itself.
Some time ago I got a craving to play the Tibia version from my childhood and it turns out there's an active server called [1] Classictibia where you play using the 7.1 client version on a faithful recreation of the world from that time - a real blast from the past!
I posted a few articles on my blog after it was shut down in 2011. Here's one of them, going into the crafting system:
https://benovermyer.com/post/2012/star-wars-galaxies-craftin...
Now, ten years later, it feels like I documented a part of history that hasn't replicated itself. I can't help but feel really sad about that.
https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/
He has a book called Postmortems where he compiled essays (many found on his web page) about his early days writing MUDs and developing fantasy worlds, including UO and SWG.
I still remember the day I gave a friend of mine my DAoC accounts. He later sold them when he quit, and gave me some cash back :)
Anyway, there was definitely more community back then, if only due to how there were basically no modern quality-of-life considerations. No auto-group finder, minimal instancing (no instancing?), loss of items on death... you had to lean on others to help you out and they would, because eventually they'd need your help.
A classic example is doing a corpse run to recover your items. In a modern MMO, you die and can rez at some convenient spot with all your items. No real loss or penalty for tough fights, no risk.
In AC, you lost xp on death, lost items on your corpse, and had to make your way back to your body to erase the xp penalty and get your stuff back. I think the timer was something like 3 hours before your corpse would decay and either anybody could loot your body or time items disappeared. I think UO and EQ were the same. Some of the most memorable corpse runs where when you lost your armor and had to get some friends to come with you since you were now half naked and perhaps weaponless.
What are games today missing? They're not persistent open-world sandbox games. Sure we have open-world games, but they're not sandbox and often not persistent, and we have sandbox but they're not open-world and often not persistent too.
I can't do it. I can't adequately describe what games today are missing which UO had. It's a quality of the combination of all the features UO had that just resulted in the best memories and fun I've had when gaming. I just don't see enough support for player-generated content as UO had, which I suspect is a big part of it too.
Raph came from a background of roleplaying in MUDs, and both UO and SWG had very active roleplaying communities. He designed games that brought together a diverse set of player types and nudged them toward interacting with and depending on each other. In SWG you could (if so inclined) play for months without ever picking up a weapon or venturing outside a city. Professions like Dancer, Image Designer, Tailor, Merchant, Architect, and Politician were on equal footing with the combat professions and you had a certain number of skill points to distribute between all ~30 of them.
Entire player-created cities with shuttleports and malls and parks were constructed, mayors were elected and set policies. City founders worked to entice the best crafters to set up shop in their town (due to an incredibly deep crafting system that resulted in a wide range of qualities and styles of crafted items - people ran full-time businesses just staying on top of the frequently changing mineral deposits and mining high quality materials to sell to crafters). You could place almost any item in your house or guild hall, people decorated elaborately to make their towns and spaces unique.
The planets were huge and very little was marked - you would just go adventuring. One time very early on in the game, someone was running around Mos Espa on Tatooine, getting together a group to head out to Fort Tusken. Like most people at that point, I hadn't been there and didn't know where it was, so I joined up. Once we had assembled a full group of 20, we met on a bridge and headed out, running across the countryside in a line behind this guy for 15 minutes straight. Later they would add mounts and vehicles to the game - early on there was a lot of running. Finally we arrived, and he instructed us to wait outside the fort. He ran in and pulled a couple Tuskens over, and they handily slaughtered our entire host in seconds.
At this time the game still had corpses, so we all woke up as ghosts back in town and had to run all the way out again.
I remember that and other moments from SWG like actual events that happened in my life, moreso than any other game I've played. It's basically inconceivable to me that something like that would happen in a game like WoW where every quest and character and item is fully mapped out and codified, and you largely progress along the rails. In SWG you picked a starting profession and were dropped off in a city, and that was basically it. You had to go run around and observe and talk to people to figure out what you could do. There was so much wonder. UO and SWG were committed to creating rich virtual worlds where players had the tools to write their own stories together. I believe they were ahead of their time and we will eventually see more games like this.
EvE online has largely taken up this mantle and has done amazing things, but the space-based gameplay is a turn-off to many.
UO always seemed like more of a sand boxy 'lets see what happens' kinda world. Meanwhile MMORPGs all seem to be more 'lead you by the nose progression'.
I miss more of the 'lets see what happens' kinda games.
However it was quickly eclipsed by Everquest which came in 99 and I would say is far more important to the MMO landscape than UO ever was. Asheron's Call quickly followed EQ and while it never had the numbers was the first no zone MMO - you could travel anywhere and no load except into dungeons which were nothing like what people are used to today.
It was certainly a time for experimentation to see what players liked and disliked and for all sorts of fun bugs if not exploits in each game to rile a community.
- legend of mir 2
- phantasy star online (dreamcast)
- lineage
- myth of soma
- ragnarok online
- many more
Ultima Underworld however was awesome and when thinking back was a true gem.
That's unthinkable in WoW - the game is 100% focused on progression and advancement.
This is the best test for whether a game really allows freedom in player interaction. If players can have fun and build characters without ever relying on game-mechanical progression, they have true freedom. I made more money in UO running dice games next to the bank than running dungeons.
Ultima 6 - http://u6project.com/wp/ (sorry for non-https link)
Ultima 5 - https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_V:_Lazarus
Worth a shot if somebody finds the originals too difficult to get into now. (Though gameplay is brutal regardless, I keep running out of food when adventuring - the map doesn't show your position, you need to use landmarks (eg; follow the edge of this lake) and the compass to orient yourself)
(disclaimer: I did some map/dungeon building some 15 years ago for the U6 one)
Nuvie (for Ultima 6, Martian Dreams, and Savage Empire) - http://nuvie.sourceforge.net
Exult (for Ultima 7 and 7.5) - http://exult.sourceforge.net
Pentagram (for Ultima 8) - http://pentagram.sourceforge.net, now merged into ScummVM - https://www.scummvm.org.
All of these use the original game files to play the games and offer improved user interface options, higher resolutions, graphics scaling, wider fields of view, gameplay improvements, etc. These are a great way to play these old games on a modern computer.
Nuvie is also good and has seen much more rapid progress in the last decade. It's great that these projects exist and of course dosbox will run both games smoothly and has for a long time too.
I'm more skeptical of the remakes myself, the original graphics in VI and VII still look great, it's one thing to give, say, a 3D shooter game the enhanced remake treatment. Real-time 3D rendering speed and quality has improved by leaps and bounds yearly or so for decades now. But pixel graphics can't really be improved with any technology ducks to avoid scaler warring and you lose all the charm by translating the games into the 3D rendered realm.
There is a new release within the last year. And there are still lots of commits happening, including several within the last 24 hours.
Also, even though the wilderness is geographically smaller in the single-scale games, it feels bigger because the player has to traverse the wilderness at 1X speed. Also, to make travel more interesting and to encourage exploration, the developers fill the wilderness with secrets, side-quests, hidden items, creatures, etc. The wilderness becomes part of the game, whereas in the older games the wilderness was just a bunch of blue or green on a map.
It's news to me that this game was a disappointment to fans.
Unsurprisingly given what I wrote above, I absolutely loved Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire. Also not set in Britannia but in a pretty cool pseudo Aztec world.
U3 was my intro which was a huge world and an epic grind for gold. U4 blew us all away with its depth. Remember at the time titles like Bards Tale and Wizardry were the main go-tos for party based RPG. So U4 was truly epic with it's NPC interaction and depth of plot.
But this was still the 1980's when Apple //e's mostly dominated the computer game scene. The big switch to PC happened around U5, but for those of us still shelling out money for the franchise, it became repetitive with U6 and U7. Odd that Garriot would blame EA for the NFL cycle when Ultima started to feel like it.
Ultima Underworld was a fun preview of 3D and a refreshing departure from the tops down U# series, but U8 just ... hurt. I had bought my first Pentium machine and was quite disappointed with how much of a departure it was. You literally leveled up by whacking things, anything, thousands of times. The plot was lame, the game play was uninteresting.
But I was already bored of Ultima titles by that point, so it was more tedious than reviled. I think until UOnline, U4 was the high watermark, IMHO.
Great article though, it was written with care by a fellow enthusiast of times long gone.
> The plot was lame
I can't agree with this. It was thrilling and involving!
It probably has to do with what you said: you had expectations about Ultima. I didn't. That it was action oriented didn't bother me, for example. The other game I liked was Savage Empire, which is not set in Britannia either (I liked it more than Pagan, I'll grant you that!).
U5 built a massive world. U6 took it further with npcs with lives and schedules instead of just being a static display in a shop, U7 built on that and felt like a living world. U8 took us out of the britannia we loved, and put us into a much smaller world with no companions. It would have been fine as a different game, or as a section of a larger game.
Also... I hated the jumping puzzles because the movement was so clunky. I'm pretty sure those existed, but it has been 20 years so maybe I'm remembering that wrong.
The atmosphere, the mystery around the pentagram, the "There are people yet I am somehow alone" feeling, the hostile environment and most of all, the music and sounds that put you somewhere between fear and despair made a great experience back then - so immersive that I had to stop playing at night because I felt fear.
The article touches on this:
> Indeed, it’s quite common to hear today that Ultima VIII really wasn’t a bad game at all — that it was merely a bad Ultima, in departing way too radically from that series’s established traditions.
U8 was pretty great too, but somehow not the same as U7; what was gained in graphics quality was lost in sheer scope and detail.
The Soundblaster "Edutainment Pack"? I have a feeling I got the same exact package.
The game world in every game was amazing in their time, the most interesting combination of ideas and stories I have ever known. Every game in the series attempted to be a pioneer in some way or another, and almost every one succeeded at it.
Which makes it triply sad how fast and how deep the series fell after 8. Even though very different, 8 was still solidly Ultima. It tasted like it. It also tasted like it was not quite Ultima, and of course now we know why. The bean counters ruined it, like they ruin most artistic things. Well, ultimately Garriot ruined it, because he sold Origin Systems.
And now we have Shroud of the Avatar, in which Garriot and the whole management team became bean counters as well and the game is, well, not very good. It probably too tried to pioneer something but I'm not sure what that is.
Older me probably could have worked out the UI (maybe clicking on the character image) but young, post-fight me got lost and felt helpless, which is exactly the sort of thing you should not feel in an adventure game.
I think the series probably peaked with U6.
I spent several years within this world, met hundreds of friends I already forgot, tried countless tournaments, fights and lived so many memories.
Maybe it's just nostalgia, but this game showed me, what it means to love something you spend your free time with. Maybe it even transfered somehow to programming later on.
8 was a huge disappointment. I couldn't figure out how to do _anything_, the movement and controls were so thoroughly broken, that I gave up in 30 minutes, completely frustrated, not being able to figure out how to do anything.
(speaking of Mass Effect, a lot of people seem to love the second part, 'because it is so character driven', but I felt myself confined to corridor missions. The freedom of descending on a planet and driving it around was the most appealing part of ME experience, which was absent from 2 & 3 installments)
Ultima Underworld II, of course, was designed to be an Ultima game from the start.
It had an enormous impact on me as a child discovering games in the mid 90s. I got a copy of UW on a games CD I got bundled with a Creative Soundcard[0]. This also came with so many other fantastic games, of which another was Ultima VII.
By the way, the most ingenious thing UW did was its acrobatics mechanics, when you subtly could jump for longer and longer distances, and I didn't even realize that it was increasing up until I restarted the game and suddenly found out that I can't make a rather casual jump over some chasm, which could be easily jumped over in previous save. I don't think I ever saw such things in other games, only some platformers have shown something resembling that.
I don't think it's trivially an awful game. I've heard a lot about how wonderful Ultima VII is, but more recently I get the impression (after reading articles like http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/08/ultima-vii-black-gate...) that there's another side to it: also dramatically flawed in many ways, maybe less obviously so than Pagan but the writing may have already been on the wall. Assuming everything just went terribly at the end and blaming on "the bean counters" seems a bit lazy to me.
I think that's selling The Digital Antiquarian (filfre.net) short. It's an impressive body of scholarship. If the author has a fandom bias, it's for text adventures, not Ultima.
The earlier games do a better job of staying coherent to their main questlines: while there's some NPC interaction, you're expected to be in puzzle-solving mode for the bulk of it, looking for hints to the next item or location. This presentation of the game as a "solvable puzzle" was the norm for 80's gameplay, since the capacity for simulation was so limited.
With VI, suddenly the gameplay occurs at a single uniform scale and camera perspective. It's still using tiling compression to achieve that scale, so there is visible repetition, but the effect is that now it's easy to get lost. This is carried forward into the interactions, which now have a larger depth and persistence to them, and not everything is puzzle-centric. Ultima VI is coherent to Origin's motto of the time, "we create worlds", but at the expense of being a consistent "questing" experience. The increase in detail rather adds new "and now the hero must go to the toilet" style moments that break with the scenario.
Ultima VII just goes even farther down this path - it's very much a world, to the point of still rivaling AAA experiences of more recent years, albeit at a fraction of the graphical fidelity, with the absolute minimum of animation that could suffice. Playing it for long periods can leave you with a headache because the perspective and scale and detail combine into composited scenes of dense, tiny pixel blobs all representing various objects - the eye never gets a chance to rest. While the game is not overtly that tricky, it still draws on many of the tropes of older RPGs in this highly detailed setting, which adds a sense of unease: Sometimes a thing triggers in a dungeon and you're just not quite sure if it was a programming bug or it was intended as a trap.
And it's so hard to stay focused on the main quest in VII without being systematic about it that most players will likely have their fill long before that. Besides the issue of getting lost and having trouble finding an NPC when they move around on a schedule, there's still no quest tracking(this just wasn't a thing yet), but it does automatically give you keyword topics, so you can blunder around, trigger a lot of things and then forget what happened, where previously you were going to have to take notes anyway just to know what topics to type in.
And Ultima VII has some of the simplest, least gratifying combat in the series - there's no more turn-taking and it nearly plays itself, with the tactical decision making coming mostly in preparation and various gimmickry with the engine. The combat is a small element supporting the world instead of a definite thing explored on its own terms.
Lastly, in a literal sense Britannia started getting smaller with VI and VII, when you look at how much the towns are getting crammed together. The sense of "travel" isn't there because the landscape is truncated.
So in that light, VIII is a continuation of several trends. It's more graphically intense(actual animation now), but it made further cuts to the RPG framework, and further pushed the detail instead of the overall worldbuilding scope.
I think the main issue Ultima had with these later games was with making the increased detail cohere well. It made the programming more fragile, stretched the asset counts, and pushed people's PCs to the limit while being less of a straightforward dungeon crawl each time and a little more of a tech demo, and then with VIII finally hitting a point where the production process didn't get to fully flesh it out. The baton of detailed worldbuilding was passed to Ultima Online, which I do think deserved all its success.
This article is about Ultima VIII, a very different experience.
I had a great time in UO and spend a surprising amount of time making and selling furniture. My career ended when I entered the game, only to discover that a house had been placed on that location and I was unable to open the door to exit. :(
I think games now are so focused on providing a slick game experience to everyone, and it make things so predictable and controllable that it takes a lot of the whimsy and delight in discovering something new and unexpected.
World of Warcraft is the perfect example of that, it really nerfed a lot of the whimsy out.
I also remember going all-in on fencing because the super-fast attacks, while not super effective, would give someone enough pause for me to run away.
There was some other great stuff, like kiting mobs to town to get killed by guards, being able to keep your bank chest open wherever you went, that one time a guy killed Lord British, etc.
September 1992 - Origin Systems acquired by EA for $35m
March 15, 1994 - Ultima 8 released
...
I will credit Garriott and Molyneux as being some of the most [overly] ambitious game designers, and this is not at all a bad thing in my opinion. Not everything they did worked, but when it did, they created history. And even when it did not work, at least they attempted to break new ground.
This reminds me of Seymour Cray... he had his share of setbacks, many due to ambitious designs, but when he succeeded, it was historic. (CDC6600, 7600, and Cray 1 come to mind immediately)
GTA and other games are more about repeatable grind and forcing users to buy in game currency, less of a story line and game play. Look at what they did to Cyberpunk 2077, forced it to be released and it has the same repeatable side quest issue. Watch Dogs Legion story was mediocre story line, but the gfx are pretty darn good. Control had a very interesting story line and good gfx. Death Stranding was interesting but boring walking around.
World of Warcraft is all over the place, its really trying to force people into guilds, and the casual aspect isn't as fun, and the gfx are really outdated.
Its almost like, the games out now are super high quality gfx with shitty story lines. Or outdated gfx and good story lines. Is there any game people are even looking forward too anymore? Really feeling let down in the story/gfx department of newer video games.
What's not mentioned is that Ultima Online destroyed any chance that the Ultima franchise would ever come back as a single player game. So much was left on the table after Ultima VII that this is really a shame.
I'm working on something that is highly inspired by Ultima 6 & 7, but is it's own thing. These are my takeaways of what I set out to share and improve upon (from the U7 model):
- shares the skewed 45* orthographic view... I love this perspective.
- world is much larger than Ultima 7's, underworld is substantially larger.
- NPCs have needs (think Tropico) and that will influence what they do
- story driven, but many in game events are unscripted
- similar inventory style to Ultima 7 (bag if items), but much easier to organize
- everything is interactive (bake bread, forge a sword) but not streamlined like a modern crafting system
- camera view is further out, so the game feels much larger than Ultima 7 ever did
- more consistent pixel art (not a mix of scanned graphics and hand drawn pixel art)
- real-time pausable combat- combat un U7 is terrible and a step back. I'm attempting to make it less chaotic, but not take away from the immersion.
- the world has a stability factor, so good and bad events can happen if the conditions are right
I think, if done right, one can take the spirit of the Ultima series forward from where Ultima 7 left off. What I'm doing is currently at the stage of mechanics building, but I encourage anyone to make the development effort if they are so inclined. There's a great game to be made if someone can take the torch from Ultima 7 and made a proper modern inspired game.
I remember taking over a house in the first town and stealing so much stuff from everywhere to decorate it.
I haven't seen that kind of dynamic item management in a game engine I don't think ever since. The worlds have become super static.
I think that lent a lot of magic to the game as well.
Garriott tried to create this level of immersion in Shroud of the Avatar, but it was absolutely done to a fault. I hated going into towns, everyone's houses looked silly and out of place. Cities just looked like giant swap meets. Gamers are terrible designers.
In Ultima 7, it was single player so you weren't there to impress anyone or get a laugh. It was pure immersion. I had such a fun time as a kid discovering all of the weird things I could do in the game.
To me, a total neophyte to the series, u8 served like a nice introduction. The linear plot makes it easier to not get lost (this was pre-internet, if you got stuck you bought a paper guide). The graphics were nice, well animated (for the time). The jumps were not great but not a huge hassle, at least not for someone used to platformers, as I was. I found the different kinds of magic interesting, and I liked the titans. The inventory management system, with bags for reagents, and keys hidden behind cushions in drawers, was something I had never seen before.
My favorite bit was the fire mage that would teleport to your location and insta-kill you if you attacked a citizen.
I had an honest good time with it.
I am glad that Steam/GOG/Xbox/Sony with digital downloads lowered the barriers to entry for independents to make and publish fun quirky and enjoyable games again.
>> In truth, jumping in Ultima VIII wasn’t “kind of busted” at all; it was completely, comprehensively busted. Figuring out where any given jump would land you was a black art, thanks to the sloppy mouse cursor and the impossibility of accurately judging depths in the game’s canted isometric view. The only way to get anywhere was to save before each jump and give it a try, then reload and adjust until you got it right. After four or five attempts, you might just manage it if you were lucky. Then you got to rinse and repeat for the next jump, out of what might be a dozen or more in all to get across a single obstacle. In order to fully appreciate the horror of all this, you have to remember that every single save or restore would have taken on the order of 30 seconds back in 1994.
I may be remembering aspects of this wrong, it was a long time ago!
My father had all the Ultima games, when I was younger I tried playing VIII and couldn't figure out how to jump properly, which meant I couldn't go anywhere interesting, so I quit. It is very unintuitive to click and hold to jump on a desktop game.
Anyway, I played Ultima 8 to death as a child - explored the map obsessively. Eventually I hit first jump puzzle and "abandoned" any attempt to play it properly after that.
But I also liked Ultima IX (the 3D Ultima), despite being plagued by bugs and terrible performance in the beginning, it was eventually brought into pretty good shape by enthusiasts.
/me raises hand, I'm one of those lowest-common-denominator played who discovered Ultima with VIII and loved it a lot
PDS: Here's what happened, (in one word no less!):
Corporation.
>"Richard Garriott invented a system of ethics, and then each game challenged or threatened that system:
Ultima IV – The Virtues are Confronted
Ultima V – The Virtues are Corrupted
Ultima VI – The Virtues are Attacked
Ultima VII – The Virtues are Ignored
Ultima VIII – The Virtues are Abandoned
Ultima IX – The Virtues are Inverted"
PDS: Now where have I seen this pattern before?
versus
>Yet the actual EA executives in question have vociferously denied micromanaging the project, insisting on the contrary that it was conceived, created, and finally shipped on terms dictated by no one outside of Origin.
Someone is lying. Either a new deadline was imposed on an existing project by EA executives or it wasn't.
Interestingly, we've seen some great success stories of franchise games shifting play style. Off the top of my head: Yakuza 7 Like a Dragon, Final Fantasy VII Remake and FFXV.
It sold well, so I guess it is technically successful, despite not really feeling successful in terms of being a better game.
And they shipped a terrible game after all that? Incredible!
The manual was amazing though, with the cool descriptions of the world and all the different types of magic. Game publishers/developers really knew how to make manuals those days. But the game itself just didn't make sense.
You should be fine with DOSBox.
ah, so this is where Blizzard got the idea for the travesty that is modern World of Warcraft