Ultima The Ultima Series Discussion Thread

[Melan]

Both U8 and U9 have something that looks like the germ of a good game,

Ultima 8, I'll give you, but I have a hard time seeing anything creditable in U9. Maybe if the original plot had been implemented in the early isometric engine, with turn based combat, but nothing in the final release says anything but we've given up, here's some shit for you to eat.

The world was fairly fun to explore, and looked/sounded properly Britannian, like a corrupted but beautiful fantasy world. I liked how every town and every dungeon had its own characteristic building style, and there were some good locations to find in the wilderness. The basic theme of corruption was fine, a return to the more high fantasy Ultimas. Of course, all that was ruined by the retarded writing, the plot-tied character advancement which made both exploration and combat unnecessary, the bugs, the poor writing and the way Britannia was divided into linearly encountered plot zones.

To sum up Ultima IX, the most fun and most frustrated thing I experienced in the game was exploring the first chunk of Britannia, and trying to get over the mountain range, then ultimately succeeding and discovering that

• I was in a "monsters are too tough for you" zone with no hope of advancement;
• I was also on trial in Yew, for obscure reasons, involving a young woman I had not even met yet (fortunately, because she was a terrible forced love interest character).

But the time I climbed up those mountain trails near Paws, and found some waterfalls and giants and stuff, or when I got lost along the coast, that was an Ultima experience, proper sense of wonder included. That's what I mean by the germ of a good game. If it was 100% shit, it would be easier to accept. But it was only 90% shit, and that 10% hurt, because someone obviously cared about some parts of the game.

 

[Keldryn]

The world was fairly fun to explore, and looked/sounded properly Britannian, like a corrupted but beautiful fantasy world. I liked how every town and every dungeon had its own characteristic building style, and there were some good locations to find in the wilderness.

I did like how every town had its own distinct architectural style -- that was a nice touch, even if some of the styles weren't terribly practical. Despite its conventional architecture, Britain was the best-designed of the towns. It had more than five buildings, for example. Also, it is the only town in the game where all of the houses actually have beds inside. Apparently the people who live in Yew, Minoc, and Moonglow don't need to sleep. Yeah, I know that the planned NPC daily schedules never made it into the game, but at least they could have made some attempt to make those towns look like places where people actually lived.

Despite the missing world interactivity and NPC schedules, at least Britain more or less resembled a town where people live and work. The rest of the towns looked like they were designed without any regard for the "world simulation" aspects of the previous games.

Also: three bulidings inside a volcano do not constitute a city, much less a town or even a village.

Honestly, if I hadn't followed the development of Ultima IX so closely, I would have been marginally less disappointed with it. What actually bothered me the most about the game was that they had previously talked about this idea of the Guardian sending visions to Lord British about the things that you did while trapped on Pagan (nicely out of context) to try to turn him against you. At the same time, Lord British's health was tied to that of the land and thus he was aging rapidly and becoming weaker as the Guardian's influence spread. It seemed to me that the whole point of Ultima VIII was that you did what you had to do, but you would have to face the consequences of your actions when you returned to Britannia. They talked about these plot elements several times from 1996 through 1998 and I'm pretty sure that they were still part of the "del Castillo version" of the game. When he was fired and they essentially re-designed the game from scratch, they re-used a number of elements from the previous designs (often in a totally different context). But they kept using those images from the sendings in the promotional material, so I thought it was still part of the story.

So it was a tremendous let-down to me when I realized that the relevance of Ultima VIII could be entirely summed up as "you were away from Britannia for a long time."

Ultima IX didn't even re-appropriate the old art assets in a clever way. Instead of Lord British witnessing you summon a gigantic flaming demon-like titan, you summon him just so that he can pull you underground -- and then he's gone. If you look closely, you can still see the walls of Castle Britain in the background in parts of that video sequence. Never mind the fact that a) it makes no sense that Pyros should be able to enter Britannia and b) you stole his fucking powers.

Without a doubt, the biggest disappointment of my 30-odd years of gaming. No contest.

 

[Infinitron]

Keldryn What makes me LOL is how Kenneth and Sergorn try to spin that last year plot change as "auteur Richard Garriott taking control of development and delivering his TRUE VISION". As if it wasn't an obvious last minute hackjob as they threw away everything they couldn't get working.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

It was a sad, sad time for a lot of us. Hopes that the mistakes of U8 would be forgotten and that U9 would fill in several lore and plot gaps. At least UO was good. In the early years it was fucking great in fact.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Rambling about how bad U9 is

"I have no fist, and I must Bro."

(Expect this a LOT in the future.)

 

[Keldryn]

Keldryn What makes me LOL is how Kenneth and Sergorn try to spin that last year plot change as "auteur Richard Garriott taking control of development and delivering his TRUE VISION". As if it wasn't an obvious last minute hackjob as they threw away everything they couldn't get working.

Yeah, I think it is blindingly obvious that after a series of major engine changes, most of the design team quitting, and the departure of del Castillo, they basically threw out the entire design and came up with something less ambitious that would make maximum use of the art and technology that they had available and which they had a chance of completing within about a year as they were already on borrowed time. It was a truly unfortunate set of circumstances, and perhaps some of it could have been avoided if Garriott had taken a more active role earlier on -- or perhaps not. He did hire del Castillo, and it was clear right from the start that his vision for the game was a radical departure from what the designers had been working on up until that point.

 

[k0syak]

It was a sad, sad time for a lot of us. Hopes that the mistakes of U8 would be forgotten and that U9 would fill in several lore and plot gaps. At least UO was good. In the early years it was fucking great in fact.

I remember a huge article on the upcoming U9 (~1998) with massive promises of greatness and inhuman system requirements. Was butthurt for years after it came out.

 

[V_K]

massive promises of greatness and inhuman system requirements

Well, at least they delivered on the second part of the promise.

 

[Daemongar]

Now I'm going to ask something sincerely that has bothered me since U9 was released. Essentially, U9 may seem like it was tangentially linked to 3DFX and such, but I believe the overall crappiness of U9 came about through EA signing an agreement to not only distribute 3DFX cards to retailers through their channels, but also to push more games out optimized to 3DFX cards.

What my theory is that this decision by EA not only boned Origin and U9, but Bullfrog as well with the incredibly buggy release of Dungeon Keeper 2 - the transformation of DK2 into a 3D game at the expense of game-play.

Just some links I was thinking of as I typed this:
3DFX working with EA to distribute cards in 1997
EA and 3DFX sign strategic partnership in 1997
A co-marketing agreement between EA and 3DFX in 1997

Not saying that U9 was screwed by EA, but I think that some of the initial bugginess and piss-poor performance of U9 can be attributed to pushing the game into the 3DFX world. Not sure if U9 would be any different if EA hadn't signed an agreement with 3DFX, but I don't know.

A note to those under 30: I bought the Collectors Edition of U9 retail and was part of the initial rollout, and purchased DK2 retail. The current incarnations and DK2 and U9 are light years more stable than their initial releases.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

I remember a huge article on the upcoming U9 (~1998) with massive promises of greatness and inhuman system requirements. Was butthurt for years after it came out.

U9 was a real harbinger of decline.

 

[Keldryn]

Not saying that U9 was screwed by EA, but I think that some of the initial bugginess and piss-poor performance of U9 can be attributed to pushing the game into the 3DFX world. Not sure if U9 would be any different if EA hadn't signed an agreement with 3DFX, but I don't know.

I think it had more to do with 3Dfx cards being dominant during most of U9's development cycle. I believe it was Mike McShaffry who took the U9 source code home and switched it from the software renderer to Glide in late 1997. They hadn't been able to get the software renderer running at a decent frame rate and a significant number of U9 developers never came back to the project after being "temporarily" reassigned to UO. Seeing the game running smoothly under 3D acceleration got people excited about the game again. The state of Direct3D accelerators was pretty dire back in 1997. It wasn't really until nVidia's Riva TNT came out in mid-1998 that there was any serious challenge to 3Dfx.

And mid-1998 was right about when those designers quit, followed quickly by the departure of del Castillo and the subsequent re-design of the game.
It wouldn't have been until early 1999 when it became apparent that the Riva TNT was really taking a bit out of 3Dfx's market share. I don't think that the development team could afford to prioritize getting the game running better on Direct3D hardware, given the situation they were in.

I had a Voodoo 3 card when Ultima IX came out. It was buggy as all get-out and didn't perform spectacularly well on that setup either (I had a Celeron-266 overclocked to 400 MHz). I don't think U9's technical issues had anything to do with EA pushing 3Dfx cards. There really wasn't anything close to the 3Dfx Voodoo for most of the game's development cycle, and on top of that, developing for 3D hardware acceleration was an entirely new endeavor.

 

[Daemongar]

I had a Voodoo 3 card when Ultima IX came out. It was buggy as all get-out and didn't perform spectacularly well on that setup either (I had a Celeron-266 overclocked to 400 MHz). I don't think U9's technical issues had anything to do with EA pushing 3Dfx cards. There really wasn't anything close to the 3Dfx Voodoo for most of the game's development cycle, and on top of that, developing for 3D hardware acceleration was an entirely new endeavor.

As someone who didn't have a 3DFX at the release (I think I had a AMD K6 with a Riva TNT card at the time) I remember thinking either EA screwed things up by making them rework the game to support 3DFX, or that resources were taken away from the final product because of this late addition. Seems like neither were the prime culprit for the low quality, it was specific to the project management and the design of the game. That's too bad, all these years I had kinda hoped that Origin wasn't to blame.

 

[Keldryn]

I'm pretty sure that it was Direct3D that was the late addition; through most of its development, Ultima IX was coded for Glide only.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Yes, they had post-release fixes so people with Nvidia, Matrox or ATI cards could play (at all or without horrid judder and frame rate issues).

 

[Keldryn]

Seems like neither were the prime culprit for the low quality, it was specific to the project management and the design of the game. That's too bad, all these years I had kinda hoped that Origin wasn't to blame.

Ultima IX is a textbook example of poor project management.

 

[Ladonna]

Yes indeed. It needed a day one patch to play. I had my new shiny Nvidia Geforce 256 and when Ultima 9 played like arse, I was like 'what tha...'

Ha, and then I got to play the game after patching...what was I stressing for...

 

[Infinitron]

http://gallery.ultimacodex.com/richard-garriotts-dnd29-notes/

Richard Garriott’s DND29 Notes
WtF Dragon November 26, 2015 Gallery

DND #1, Richard Garriott’s first game, was written in 1975. Between then and the release of Akalabeth (in 1979), he wrote DND #2 through DND #28, all for teletype. Not all of these were completed; many were, per Garriott’s own explanation, abandoned in mid-development. And Akalabeth itself is DND #28b; essentially an Apple II port of #28, with actual graphics. All of this is (fairly) well-known to those familiar with the history of Garriott’s emergence as a game designer.

But, in November of 2015, Richard Garriott himself happened upon a set of notes for another game — DND #29 — which, as he quipped when passing along these scans to the Ultima Codex:

I have no memory of this.
I will have research what this is myself!

Here, then, are the pages of his notes for DND #29 — the original successor to Akalabeth, I suppose — that he has scanned and set to the Codex thus far:



It would seem that Garriott was very meticulous about appending “Please Return” notices to the cover pages of his project notes.

What we see in these scans is mostly code (the cover page notes that Fortran is the language in use); there are no maps of dungeons or anything. Still, we get some idea of the monster types that would have been included in the game, how the game would have tracked player stats (and the player’s position in the game), and what equipment would have been available to players (including what I assume was the ultimate weapon in the game, a +20 dagger).

The Ultima Codex is, as always, grateful to Richard Garriott for sharing these; it’s interesting to see the next thing that he had been planning as a follow-up to what became Akalabeth. It would be reasonable to assume that work on DND #29 was suspended in the wake of its predecessor’s success, and it would be interesting to hear from those more familiar with Ultima 1 at a low level if anything captured in these notes made it into that game. And hopefully, he will be able to unearth additional notes pertaining to DND #29, to give us still yet more of an idea of just what his plans for the game had been.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh wow: http://gallery.ultimacodex.com/origin-systems-1990-product-development-plan/

Origin Systems 1990 Product Development Plan
WtF Dragon December 10, 2015 Gallery



Ben Lesnick, formerly of the Wing Commander CIC and currently the community manager for Star Citizen, shared this image on his Twitter timelinein December of 2015.



To call the development plan ambitious would be a bit of an understatement; although the release windows for Ultima 6, Bad Blood, Savage Empire(Dinosaur Valley), and Martian Dreams (Time Travel) were met, Squadron became Wing Commander (although the follow-up car racing game using its engine was not, that I’m aware, ever developed), and Ultima 7 slipped into 1992. And Ultima 8 wouldn’t see the light of day until 1994!

Other interesting highlights:

• There were a few additional Worlds of Ultima titles planned, including one called The Underground (this could have fallen by the wayside with the release of Ultima Underworld). The planned Ultima 7 spinoffs likely included both Serpent Isle and the never-released Arthurian Legends.
• There were at least two animated graphical adventure games planned, and possibly in some stage of development; at least one of these would have been a part of the Ultima series.
• Origin Systems was considering developing a Star Wars RPG using the Ultima 6 engine. How awesome would that have been?

As always, the Ultima Codex is grateful to Ben Lesnick for unearthing and sharing this piece of Origin Systems history. The company is long gone now, but it’s fun to look back on its legacy, note its ambition, and think what might have been had it realized a few more of its plans.

 

[Viata]

That's one hell of development plan. Gotta aim high to keep flying.

 

[Jaesun]

"Animated Graphic Adventure"?

 

[RK47]

Tell Tales Presents... Ultima X

 

[Infinitron]

Ultima spinoffs, Ultima adventure games. That was Origin back when Ultima was its top brand and Chris Roberts was still a relative nobody. Then the spinoffs were commercial failures while Wing Commander was a smash hit. That must have changed everything.

 

[Comte]

Really interesting. So there were plans for an Ultima VII world of Ultima Arthurian Legends game. Always thought it would be for Ultima VI. Really intrigued by the Star War's RPG for Ultima VI that would have been interesting.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Been playing Ultima VII: The Black Gate recently, for pretty much the first time (other than some really short forays in the past). This time completed Trinsic and Paws, but now feel like stopping. I have a lot of respect for this game for what it accomplished back in 1992, which is just mindblowing. Full day-night cycles, complex NPC behavior, highly interactive world, well written dialogue, very pretty graphics, I can fully understand how people who played it back then hold it in high regard, and it definitely belongs on any historically important list.

But with that said, it just doesn't grab me at all these days. The combat is shit obviously, but while dialogues are well written, the mundane nature of them and of the story in general just fails to attract interest in the same way that an older game like Betrayal at Krondor might. The obsolete interface and the small screen without a map also make exploration less fun than it might be otherwise. So, a great game in its time, but in my opinion, just doesn't hold up as well these days. Very few games before 1997 or so do.

 

[Infinitron]

If you think U7 has a small screen than stay far away from U6