EA/Mythic Entertainment mount Ultima's corpse so they can kill it again

[Infinitron]

Yes, you could have teh butthex in U7.

http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Roberto

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Even before that, you could pay money to sleep with a male or female gypsy in Ultima 6 regardless of your own gender. I don't know if it has any effect on your virtue scores in game. I didn't particularly like Ultima 6's engine and it was the first of two Ultima games I never completed (Ultima 9 being the other).

 

[Jaesun]

Yes, you could have teh butthex in U7.

http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Roberto

I just loaded an old save and wow. I never knew this was in the game. But it's NOT that explicit.

This is pretty much the entire encounter:

No even one lulzy comment from Iolo or Shamino. For shame.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I think you would enjoy Ultima 4, Part 2: Dude, Where's My Avatar?

http://www.80sgaming.org/ultima-parody/

 

[taxalot]

Ultima Forever sucks.

 

[The Round Peg]

I find it strange that there has not been a single released/leaked gameplay footage of the game.

 

[Infinitron]

I find it strange that there has not been a single released/leaked gameplay footage of the game.

Blame taxalot for not using Fraps when he violated his NDA

 

[Ion Prothon II]

Then he would find a fucking bag full of living scorpions in his mailbox, not a drawn one.

 

[taxalot]

I actually thought of doing that, but I feared there'd be some watermarking BACK THEN WHEN I WAS HOPING NOBODY WOULD FIGURE OUT IT WAS ME.

 

[DraQ]

I actually thought of doing that, but I feared there'd be some watermarking BACK THEN WHEN I WAS HOPING NOBODY WOULD FIGURE OUT IT WAS ME.

Reduce colour depth (to 8 bit or less) and strip/replace all metadata to destroy or deobffuscate possible watermarks?
Remove sound channel too.

 

[taxalot]

Too late for that. But there is always beta.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I would love to see Bioware's take on Ultima, not this kiddy browser bullshit posted here.

You mean classic bioware stuff, like, gay Avatar? Lack of C&C? Awesome buttans?

That is generally what I described in the rest of my post, is it not? It would be the masterwork of our time.

Still .

It's a promising troll, don't get me wrong, but you have to work on delivery to make it fly.

Fair enough. It was less trolling though and more a combination of Sunday boredom combined with disgust with what's become of Ultima and Bioware inspiring me to spout some internet stupidity for awhile.

For reference, when someone mentions Ultima, I tend to think of Exodus and Quest of the Avatar more than anything else. So to go from stickmen exploring and finding clues to cartoons vomiting rainbows of death is a bit much for me. Even as colourful as The Black Gate is, there was still a lot of exploration and wandering around to do in that game.

 

[Psquit]

I would love to see Bioware's take on Ultima

 

[DraQ]

For reference, when someone mentions Ultima, I tend to think of Exodus and Quest of the Avatar more than anything else.

You surely mean "Quest for the Avatar".

Spoiler

Spoiler

Savour the time when such response is not the norm yet, ye olde ultimafags.

 

[mediocrepoet]

For reference, when someone mentions Ultima, I tend to think of Exodus and Quest of the Avatar more than anything else.

You surely mean "Quest for the Avatar".

You surely mean, "Quest for the Avatar, that piece of shit tablet action game". (... that caused EA stock to plummet so hard the company had to sell off all its IP? :wishfulthinking: )

 

[Kane]

Since I am still not quite sure how I feel about Trammel and beyond, I fought the urge to vomit and signed up for the 14 day trial on uo.com. I mean, all codexing aside, UO is probably still the best sandbox.

The first thats noticeable is that japs took a shit all over britannia. The romanticized samurai clichee invaded what was previously an asia-free dimension. If garriot eventually dies in a space accident at least he'll be able to roll over in his grave for what they've done in all eternity. Bushido? Check. Ninja? Check. As terrible as this is, it adds a rather large dimension to a game, wich previously featured rather restrictive character options. I can already imagine how the meeting about that decision went:

EA exec: We need to drum up more niche appeal! Ideas?
Drone: I LIEK ANIMES
EA exec: Brilliant! You get a rise, Smith.

Regardless of perceived choice, powergamers realize that making a character that is any less than ideal isn't really a choice. Back in the glory days of UO you had 3-4 builds to choose from and deviation would result in you getting stomped repeatedly into the ground. They improved on this by adding additional skills and alternative paths in magery. The meta-game of designing a build and divising a strategy around it is something that is missing from todays MMORPGs. No, talent trees don't count and you're a fucking asshole if you think they do.

UOs community always has been a melting pot of very awesome and very terrible people, like the Codex in many ways. That differs from the Darkfall community wich is comprised almost exclusively of the latter. After character creation I was immediadetly greeted by helpful people bombarding me with about how I was playing the game in a terrible and/or wrong way. But that's how it is in UO, because the game certainly isn't holding your hand.

Are you a pussy? Well, no problem! UO has powerful items and an insurance so you can't lose your belowed dong-shaped raging sword of fire. That's by far the worst thing they added and it literally smothers the risk/reward in pvp. Saving Grace: Players that murder you in Felucca get the money you spend on insuring your items... ergo, to profitably PvP you have to kill people who are killing high-level stuff. But why wouldn't you just kill the stuff instead? Well, it is fun to murder people...

Outside of Felucca and even in Felucca UO is still for Carebears. You have to soft consent to kill or be killed when you enter an area. But don't worry about that, the game will warn you when you get in too deep! The PvP in Felucca is active and common, mostly because the biggest rewards are therein.

If you play on Seige Perilous, the world and its players will eat you alive. It has a very high difficulty level of entry, but it's definitely worth it if you like games like DayZ and also enjoy bashing your testicles repeatedly with a morning star.

UO still is a very unique (and rewarding) experience for any type of gamer. And finally, is there any real alternative?






I thought so.

So without further ado:

graphics: isometric from the last millenium
gameplay sandbox!
Originality: UO is the original
WoW clone: came out before WoW
PvP: - regionally restricted...
PvP risk: money.
journy into childhood: - where's my UO?

 

[evdk]

You surely mean, "Quest for the Avatar, that piece of shit tablet action game". (... that caused EA stock to plummet so hard the company had to sell off all its IP to Ubisoft :dreadful premonition: )

fixed

 

[Infinitron]

Paul Barnett presentation: http://forever.ultimacodex.com/2012/11/09/video-ultima-forever-reimagining-a-classic/

 

[Jasede]

Yeah, I'm not watching that, sorry. I have better and more fun things to do, such as collecting pennies outside the apartment.

 

[Fens]

Yeah, I'm not watching that, sorry. I have better and more fun things to do, such as collecting pennies outside the apartment.

should've gone picking up pennies with you... would have spared me the sight of a bioware logo slapped on ultima IV

 

[evdk]

(the video)'s got a lot of pain and misery and it makes me feel sad.

Clever meta commentary?

 

[Infinitron]

Ultima Forever Graphical Evolution: http://forever.ultimacodex.com/2012/11/10/ultima-forever-graphical-evolution/

That's right taxalot, it originally had serious graphics!

Ultima Forever: Graphical Evolution
Posted by WtF Dragon on Nov - 10 - 2012

As revealed by Paul Barnett in his GDC Online presentation, Ultima Forever went through a number of iterations, as far as its graphics were concerned. The game began as — get this — a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel with its cells filled in with different colours:

That was Mythic’s initial toolset for the game: Microsoft productivity software. The earliest prototype of the game looked a bit better, and in fact was a very Ultima 4-like, browser-based tiled RPG framework, with a slightly higher-resolution texture set than Ultima 4 proper:

From there, the team made some excellent early progress, producing a game that looked…well, in plain point of fact, it looks kind of like what Ultima Forever looks like today, albeit not quite as nice. The engine is obviously 2D, and the characters and scenery aren’t as detailed:

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And in fact, as Paul Barnett explains in his presentation, there was a fundamental issue with the game when it was presented to BioWare in this state. Its other art looked phenomenal, and really didn’t fit the look and feel of the gameplay at all. As such, much of the work that had been done on Ultima Forever was scrapped, and the team went back to the drawing board.
Some months later, EA subjected the project to its first “death march”, which in essence is a meeting in which a project is presented in its current state along with an argument for why it should be allowed to continue, after which EA decides whether the project matches the company’s aims and either grants it permission to continue or orders its cancellation. Having essentially gone back to the drawing board with the game, Mythic didn’t have a lot to present:

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But EA gave the project one more month, after which it planned to kill it and move the team on to other work. In the course of that month, Paul and the rest of the Ultima Forever team managed to pull off nothing short of a miracle, and whipped the game into this state:

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This suitably impressed EA Labels president Frank Gibeau, who allowed the project to continue its development. Of course, further shakeups were ahead, in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic(which robbed the Ultima Forever team of many of its development team for a while) and the transition away from browser-based gaming to mobile gaming. The team doggedly threw themselves at all these challenges, however, and brought the game to the state it’s at today:

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So there you have it: a brief look at the graphical evolution of Ultima Forever, from its humble beginnings in Microsoft Excel to its current, iPad-ready form.

 

[taxalot]

It went retarded when they started aiming for the iPad? How surprising.

 

[FrancoTAU]

The art isn't.... that bad. It's just mediocre Blizzard inspired stuff that looks odd for a place like Britannia.

 

[Jaesun]

Is our NDA lifted yet?