Infinitron: To me, the the most interesting thing is not to point out how and why Ultima 8 and 9 are bad games. We all know that already, let's move on.
I'd like to see some inquiry as to how and why Ultima diverged so sharply from what the vast majority of its fan wanted it to become. There are questions here that it seems nobody has dared to ask.
Kenneth: Because making games only to satisfy the demands of established fans is ultimately a losing strategy. D'uh.
Or how about: because Origin's design style was always "technology first, story later". They built the engine, then figured out what sort of tale they could tell with it.
Infinitron: Except that's not relevant to what actually happened, Kenneth. With Serpent Isle, Origin were on the cusp of creating a type of experience that would only a few years later be proven to be extremely popular with wider audiences. But they stepped back from that, did a complete 180. One of the biggest blunders in gaming history.
Kenneth: Serpent Isle was built by a different team, though, rather than the core Ultima group at Origin. There was some crossover of talent, yes, but the point is that SI's development was divergent from core Ultima development. SI did indeed achieve some very impressive things at a technical level (though, one notes, this came at the cost of it being a more linear, less open-world game than U6 or U7), but that technical evolution was largely separate from what was going on in Ultima development in general.
Infinitron: That doesn't mean they couldn't have learned from it. Warren Spector's team was on the cusp of creating a "western JRPG" type of game experience, _a full decade_ before KOTOR.
I mean, that's not even my favorite kind of game, but it would have been truer to the Ultima name and a more natural evolution if they'd have gone that way, instead of making a bid for the Prince of Persia crowd. AND it would have been more financially successful.
Like I said, a tragedy and an epic blunder. I guess all that complex scripting that SI required seemed like a non-viable development strategy at the time. 20 years later and games are all about scripted events.
Infinitron: To be fair, a lot of PC gaming companies lost their way in the mid-90's, crushed between the meteoric rise of the first person shooter genre and the CD-ROM full motion video multimedia extravaganza hype of the time. Origin was no exception.
Kenneth: I think you're on to something noting the shift in technology. And, to be fair, the shift in the market. SI was a heavily-scripted linear game in an era where minimally-scripted sandboxes were the norm.
Infinitron: Re: Origin games being primarily about the tech
The "Holy Triad" of Ultima VII-Underworld 2-Serpent Isle made fans believe Origin was progressing the Ultima franchise from a series of loosely related adventures, towards a setting with lots of lore and tight continuity, on par with something like the Forgotten Realms.
I don't feel this was a foolish expectation. That's how it felt like back in the early 90's, that Ultima was becoming "serious". Then they reneged on that.
Sergorn: That's correct. But you know what Underworld 2 and Serpent Isle had a common ?
Yup... little or no Richard Garriott in it. And Warren Spector shepherding them, who always said he put more focus on plot and settings while Garriott was more about the "virtual world" things.
And it feels to me that Garriott just stuck into this '80-ish mindset of loosely related adventure, where basically each new game wasn't so much a sequel as almost a reimagination of the series. This is how Ultima IX definitly felt as well.
But clearly by the end of the '90, people's expectations had changed.
