Ultima Online is the best gaming experience I ever had. In my opinion, nothing has come close to it in regards to game dynamics, was a proper open-world sandbox.
As I never found anything close to Ultima Online, I basically stopped gaming entirely. UO raised the bar too high.
Star Wars Galaxies was another absolute gem at its prime. I never played it, but reading stories about the game makes me feel it's the one game apart from UO which truly came close to fulfilling the promise of a "virtual, persistent, shared world".
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.
Nothing has come close and nothing ever will. Mainly due to the fact that it wasn't just the game mechanics; but that all player types had no other option except to play UO. This, combined with the game mechanics, is what made UO a one-of-a-kind experiences. I feel blessed and honored to have had the opportunity to be a part of it. After so many years failing to find a UO replacement; I've accepted this conclusion as reality and as result, have stopped searching.
DAoC had some of the better PvP mechanics of that generation of MMOs. I played DAoC for years, and eventually moved to WoW for a little while. WoW always felt too easy and never really gave me the same rush that DAoC did.
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 :)
It's incredibly sad that by far the best MMO experience --- indeed one could say the only game which lived up to the promise of a shared, virtual, persistent world --- was also one of the first.
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.
EVE Online as well but that’s quite a different flavour. I played loads of UO back in the day and spent four years working on EVE. Very few games come close to touching either in terms of being so complex, almost to the point of being real spaces to navigate and live in.
Haha, in my case I literally worked at CCP making EVE rather than the second job it can become playing it. Still some of the best community moments were with that job and the awesome people that play EVE. I had several great Fanfests.
Tibia comes pretty close The older versions, anyway. Apparently it even started as a copy of Ultima. Never found anything close to it either. Every kid in my school played this game... It was like an IRC client with a fun game embedded in it.
Tibia was absolutely HUGE in my country (Poland) around 2002 and it was my first and last major experience with MMO. I remember it was the only time back then I voluntarily woke up early in the morning long before the school because the servers were usually empty at that time and the spawn locations were full of monsters which meant quick exping :-) Trying to sign in after the school usually took a looong time but once you did it, it truly felt like going to a different universe.
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 played UO on an unofficial RPG shard for about one year. The server was was only up only a few hours during the evening (and would often crash), most of the mechanics weren't implemented, and those that were were often buggy. It still was one of the best (if not the best) gaming experience I ever had as well.
I only very briefly play UO. I'm curious if you could give more details of how how it was different to make it the best experience you ever had. What are games today missing?
It was a incredible world to discover and explore (especially custom servers with custom maps and content). There was no 'point' to the game, i.e. no final destination or quest to complete... in fact there were barely any quests at all. It was all just up to you. However you wanted to play you could. I.e. you could just have a blast logging in and hanging out in a player's house which they converted into a bar and play chess chatting about w/e. I even played some great roleplaying shards which were legit, e.g. a LOTR one and it was soo epicly awesome. Good pvp dynamics. I did love the ruthlessness of losing everything when you died. I loved how custom shards could tweak so many of the variables pretty easily. I just have so many absolutely golden memories, hilarious and absurd memories. Idk... it's just really hard to convey how the game was the best. I think a lot of is just because it let you do whatever you wanted, but also provided you with fun PvE, PvP, roleplaying, etc.
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.
Not the OP and I didn't play UO, but I did play a peer game out at the same time, Asheron's Call. AC, UO, and of course EQ were the big 3 early MMOs.
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.
I played a bit of UO, but I played a lot of Star Wars Galaxies, which was in many ways the spiritual successor, as Raph Koster was the lead designer of both.
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.
I earned my college spending money arbitraging UO real estate between in game gold and Ebay prices. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but I recall earning well over minimum wage per hour.
UO was my #1 gaming experience and sadly like others have mentioned: probably won't have that exceeded by an MMO again. However, there was a brief moment when Sierra had more control over the LOTR MMO (known as Middle Earth Online) and it looked very similar to early UO.
I've always been searching for another MMO experience. Eve Online was close but not quite the same. While not exactly an MMO experience, Rust is the closet modern approximation that I've experienced.
ARK: Survival Evolved is a much better example of a game in the UO/Eve Online spirit. While also being a cutthroat PvP sandbox like Rust, it has complex politics and power games between massive inter-server tribes, making it more MMO-ish.
Yeah. Had friends who played Ragnarok. So many memories of dead games... How many are still online? I know Tibia still is, they emailed me a free week of premium last christmas.
Ragnarok Online is still alive and evolving, there's also a non-complete, but still super fun and playable mobile version, which is not the cash-grabby kind of mobile MMORPG (even though... of course you can pay to advance faster)
If you zoom up a bit from the level this article is in, as I understand it, while Ultima was on the rocks anyhow, it was Ultima Online that comprehensively killed the franchise by being too successful. Rational business logic said to pour the effort into the moneymaker UO and the single-player Ultimas couldn't compete for resources.
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.
Well, I distinctly remember there being a lot of hype a while after Ultima IX came out that Ultima X would be a reimagining of UO in 3D. I'm not sure how much of that was wishful thinking on the part of gamers that were looking for a silver lining in the steaming pile that was Ultima IX (me included) and how much of that was founding in fact, or at least the plans of Origin/EA. One would think if UO was so successful they would want to funnel people into something new with even more longevity.
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.
Due to an unstable modem connection during the UO timeline I never could play.
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.
MMORPGs have always been a mix of both. UO was definitely one of the most sandboxy, but it also demonstrated why a sandbox full of children needs a supervisor.
UO was definitely a new direction, considering for online you had MUDs or limited graphical games like The Shadow of Yserbius.
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.
UO is the only game that allowed players to completely dictate the social norms between players and didn't allow players to box themselves into their own segregated safe experiences. It's easy to understand why MMO's evolved away from this approach as they attempted to reach the masses, but there's an entire audience looking for something else that got abandoned. It's a shame, really.
Shadowbane allowed this too. Was a great experience with the natural politics emerging since resources were fairly scarce and you needed to stick together to survive and not get your things taken from you.
Just hopping in to agree about UO, one of the primary gaming experiences of my life. A fascinating culture, community, and experience. Chesapeake baby.
The thing I really loved about Ultima Online is you could have fun without caring about that. I mostly just hung out in the "town" my guild created and built furniture / organized our resources and managed our vendors. Most of my skills didn't ever get far beyond newbie level.
That's unthinkable in WoW - the game is 100% focused on progression and advancement.
>Most of my skills didn't ever get far beyond newbie level.
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.
UO was incredible. I learned ASM and how to use a debugger because of that game. Released open source tools to patch all 100+ versions of the game client. Some day I'll make a proper sequel. There's been no better balance of risk vs. reward since UO...I think a couple titles have come close, but nothing has captured the magic of T2A.
I tried to like it again and again but I just couldn't. It was always a super boring experience.
I preferred Meridian 59 and later DAOC. EQ wasn't my thing either, so much downtime. 1 minute of fighting 5 minutes of waiting.
UO endless whacking of rocks and chopping of wood. One time I did that 3 days only watching the screen and I wrote an automation script to do that. After that I never looked back.
Ultima Underworld however was awesome and when thinking back was a true gem.
I was a huge Ultima VII fan and played the game for hundreds of hours. I remember getting Ultima VIII and playing it for an hour or two and never playing it again. But until reading this article I didn't understand why Ultima VIII didn't capture my interest like VII did.
> But then, for the eighth game in the mainline Ultima series, Origin decided to try something just a little bit different. They made a game in which you played a thoughtless jerk moving on rails through a linear series of events; in which you never went to Britannia at all, but stayed instead on a miserable hellhole of a world called Pagan; in which you spent the whole game adventuring alone (after all, who would want to adventure with a jerk like you?); in which the core mechanics were jumping between pedestals like Super Mario and pounding your enemies over the head with your big old hammer.
ah, so this is where Blizzard got the idea for the travesty that is modern World of Warcraft
I loved Ultima VIII. It had a great story, cool lore. There were parts that seemed missing, but it added to the mystery of the world. I really liked how you could master the various elemental schools, yet there was never enough resources or time to cast spells in many fights and water was completely impossible to master. I ended up mostly running away from most fights and still remember the exciting side track to fetch a maze from underground. I couldn't fight any monsters there, they were too difficult, but managed to grab the mace and escape. Was a great start of the adventure.
In a similar vein, there was a chap who would appear and end your game very quickly if you stole anything from shops. However, the game let you drag items in stores 1 or 2 pixels without triggering the "crime ghost" (I forget who he was) who would end your game. Eventually we worked out you could drag an item to the door, pixel by pixel, then pick it up and run away without being caught.
I may be remembering aspects of this wrong, it was a long time ago!
In the same vein, if you kill (later in the game) the "omnipresent guard", next time you stole something you would be attacked by him regardless, but now his sprite/skin was that of a zombie :) cool easter egg (or bug!).
Ultima 6 is a great game for many reasons. e.g., epic story, seamless open-world, non-linear progression, lots of side-quests/hidden secrets, multiple solutions to problems, plot twists, groundbreaking graphics, great music, 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.
> Not everything they did worked, but when it did, they created history.
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)
Well, you should then read the entire article again, since you stopped reading, and you stopped reading in a part you read wrong, since nowhere in the article he says Ultima was more expensive to make than Wing Commander, he only mentions "cheaper" Wing Commander "spin offs", and didn't said cheaper in relation to what... it could be cheaper than the original wing commander, that notoriously is credited as being the first AAA game ever (Wing Commander was the first game that splurged millions to make, and it not even broke even, ever. Only reason it is considered a success was that the franchise as whole ended being very profitable and eventually paid off the costs of the first game).
These games all predate wing commander III (which was the first with FMV). Wing Commander I and II both had two expansions that sold well, so it was 6 games with one engine, and with the exception of the base WC 2, had little more novel animation than e.g. Ultima VII.
That was Wing Commander 3, which hadn't been made yet. Wing Commander 2 was mostly just using the Wing Commander 1 game engine, which is probably why Snell liked it so much. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams were the "Worlds of Ultima" series of CRPGs, and were based on the Ultima VI engine - very little new programming involved - just new content. That was probably pretty cheap too.
I can see why they took the risk to change with the times. Spending 4+ years to create a game targeting the (at the time) smallest audience doesn't sound like a great business venture. Though maybe they should've made it an Ultima spin-off like Underworld, instead of the official VIII.
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.
> This classic passive-aggressive apology — “I felt awful that I had let down so many people in my effort to be loyal and learn from EA” doesn’t exactly ring out with contrition — isn’t even internally consistent; if the development team loved their game so much, why was Origin’s management forced to devise stratagems to keep them from going home out of the fear that they wouldn’t come back? Nevertheless, it does contain a fair amount of truth alongside its self-serving omissions
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.
EA also killed Nox and Westwood, and we have some bits and pieces of anecdote about how that went, so I tend to believe what Garriot had to say about that.
Having been part of a company acquired by EA: It's EA.
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"
And Pandemic, and many others. I think Bobby Kotick once said something like, if you want to see your game studio shut down, sell it to EA. It's true that founders want to cash out but you can be sure that in all these places there were many people who wanted to keep making games.
Westwood was one of a kind, it still hurts to this day to think how great C&C series could be. Signed: A person who still thinks of the Red Alert expansion and not the Half-Life mod, when he hears "Counterstrike".
I know EA is the evil empire and whatever else but it doesn't seem obvious to me that Garriott threatening to resign means he would just get replaced. I'd say more likely they would give them more time.
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.
Despite a poor modern track record, EA back then is not the same company as EA today.
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.
In what world do shareholders believe that firing the principal talent, creative director, and founder of a new acquisition--within a YEAR of acquiring the company!--is "good for business"?
Only if you believe businesses are run by mustachio-twirling villains who sit around trying to ruin games for fun.
Manager or Exec A closes the deal and acquires a successful moneyfountain studio. Good for business!
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.
I think the fact the commenter here said he would work for Garriott again in a heartbeat, shows the incredible damage that mergers and acquisitions do to businesses.
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 read the part about how they regularly brought in dinner and had to work weekends. His may have been a good apology but I'd prefer to work for even a poor apologizer if it meant a better work life balance.
The video game industry probably isn't the place for you, then. All my previous colleagues with that background had horror stories.
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.
Okay I worked in games and Hollywood and I loved ultima8. :/ but on ultima8 sure the bar is sky high to follow up the greatest single player masterpiece and expansion set of all time but it’s also not utterly broken, lost and incomplete like the next game in the series Ascension.
You are one of the crazy ones. The world needs you!
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 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.
The whole game was overly ambitious all along. I think they were thinking SkyRim and Witcher when the technology was only up to par with Mine-Craft graphics if that. War-Craft3 a game that came out a few years later barely navigated through the glitch metaverse of pre-millennia realtime 3-D graphics.
After reading reactions to this over-apology and the BackBlaze over-apology a while back, I think...
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.
I think the key is to just be sincere and honest. Different people will interpret the apology one way or another, good or bad, under/over apologized. But if you're sincere and honest, you've done your job.
The apology is well-written, but I'm not sure it "it highlights all of garriott's mistakes, in detail, and places the blame squarely on his own shoulders".
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.
If they'd created burnt toast (how does one do toast with non-sliced bread?) because the managing company had declared that the pizza must be shipped before the pizza dough was ready, you'd have some sympathy, no?
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.
> Origin came up with a relativistic jumping system whereby the length of your leap would be determined by the distance the cursor was from your character when you clicked the mouse, rather than opting for the more intuitive solution whereby you simply pointed at and clicked on a would-be destination to attempt to jump there
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.
Exact same experience here. Ultima 8 came free on a CD-ROM that I think accompanied a Creative Sound Card my father had purchased? The same disc had Wing Commander 2...
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.
The only ultima games I played before seeing VIII were Underworld games I and II, and they were pretty great. (Probably, I is my second-favourite RPG from the 1990s, bested only by the great Betrayal at Krondor.)
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.
Underworld developer here. We certainly started it before we got the deal with Origin, but a lot of the design was done afterwards with the fact that it was an Ultima in mind. I'll grant that its Ultima-ness was thinner compared to many of the games with Roman numerals on them.
Ultima Underworld II, of course, was designed to be an Ultima game from the start.
Just so you know those games were badass! I had so much fun playing them. Elder Scrolls came out later and that was the first fantasy FPS game that I has as much fun with as underworld.
I've always felt that UW1 is massively underappreciated for the impact it had on computer gaming. It's been attested that John Carmack was inspired to create the engine that would eventually become Wolfenstein after seeing Underworld at a 1990 software convention and saying that he could write a faster texture mapped engine.
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 get where you are coming from, but I had a blast with Gothic 1/2 and Mass Effect 1. Running through haunted forests or driving or roaming desolate planets, under the double suns is a very special experience, evoking memories of Star Control 2. I can't quite compare those two with Krondor, that's why I have put Krondor into special 90s category.
(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 VIII was an excellent game and many friends spent hours into the game doing things completely unrelated with the quests. It was such a classic that it followed into the Ultima Online which was the first truly successful MMORPG which events went to be copied WOW. Unless you say WOW is also terrible and the end of the Warcraft franchise, no amount of revisionism can change reality.
Are you thinking of Ultima VII? It was indeed an excellent game where you could do endless things unrelated to the main quest, and was the precursor to Ultima Online (set in the same world, mostly similar game engine).
This article is about Ultima VIII, a very different experience.
I played every Ultima from IV through UO. I have such fond memories in VII of finagling a cannon into the back of a cart and driving around with my own artillery. Aiming was tough, but it was fun.
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 had a buddy who had gotten to max level poisoning and he would just go around poisoning fishsticks and leaving them innocently on the ground for people to find and innocently eat and the die instantly. The amount of crazy things you could do in UO when it first came out was awesome.
In UO, I once suckered a new player into buying a dragon that wasn't even mine, just with proper timing of pretending to give commands and its natural behaviors. Player was maaaad when realized she'd been taken. But it was kind of neat to realize a whole new dimension of player interaction had opened up with UO. And it scratched a bit of the Ultima 7 itch. At some point the game turned into a grind though, and a lot of players were grinding more than I ever would. The pattern got kind of boring. Have a friend that still plays it though.
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.
Hah, I was definitely a 1-time victim to a trapped chest in the middle of a forest. My ghost got to watch my corpse get looted.
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.
I remember really enjoying playing marbles in Ultima VIII. Also being able to climb meant the world felt much more explorable than other games. Somehow I remember the game fondly overall, despite never bothering to finish.
Ultima IV and XIII are both in my favorite games of all time. They are very different but I thought XIII was the coolest game I had ever played at the time. My first CD-ROM game as well.
I mean, Ultima Online was out there at the time and had a great playerbase. It's not hard to imagine that most of Origin's focus had shifted toward the MMO platform they helped invent.
Ultima online came out 3.5 years after Ultima VIII. I think it's unlikely that serious development effort went into UO during Ultima VIIIs development (Ultima IX and Ultima Online were definitely developed in parallel though).
Except for Ultima 9 and UO, I finished every other Ultima, starting from III. In fact, Ultima 3 was either the first game, or at least one of the first games I ever played.
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.
The only one I played was Ultima VII. Found a few easter eggs, then one day I'm walking through the woods and get attacked. Two of my people are on the ground, bleeding out. They are completely clipped behind trees and I couldn't figure out how to heal them. And that was the end of that.
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.
Monitor III for the win! I'll never forget looking at Ultima through that monitor's silk-like anti-glare texture while being serenaded by the restful tones of a Mockingboard...
Ultima music on the Mockingboard was the best. Thinking of the Ultima II-IV era IIRC. I listened to it hour after hour at my buddy's house and never got tired of it.
I think Garriot is no longer involved with Shroud of the Avatar, I'm not sure of the details but it seems he sold or left the thing in 2019 and probably stopped actively working on it earlier than that.
According to the current head of Shroud of the Avatar:
"Richard is still involved in SotA. He's never really worked on SotA except for the story stuff. So what he did for Episode 1 is same stuff he's doing here. He also does push, sometimes wacky, but usually good ideas on the project and he continues to do that stuff as well, but he is primarily a story guy."
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/fr...
It was my first role playing game.
I went into every house and stole everything I could find.
Then the kids in town started to throw rocks at me.
After that I deleted the game, because a deinstallation routine was not necessary.
Great times!
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)
For you and those that played any of the 4-7 for comparison, how was the change in map scale compared to pace of wilderness? I was reading this https://simblob.blogspot.com/2014/05/map-homunculus.html?m=1 and it shows dev reasoning for the changes, but I'm curious how gamers actually took it. Was it better before or after?
The single-scale, continuous world is undeniably better. It is arguably less realistic geographically, but it makes the world more vibrant and lifelike. For example, the player can follow the NPCs as they travel between towns or meet each other in the wilderness or the player can chase a creature from the wilderness into town to be killed by guards. Instead of the world feeling like a bunch of disconnected silos, everything is connected on one seamless map.
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.
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.
For those who look first at a project's last release, Exult could seem like abandoned software but it's really not - it's done and finished like xterm. There's (almost) nothing left (of consequence) to do. Which is not to say it's perfect, but it's stable, allows you to complete the entire game and all side quests, allows a bigger viewframe which of course breaks the game in some ways but is an extremely useful comfort addition, etc.
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.
Neat. I know the original plan was to have an editor / scripter to create your own games ala Gary's Mod too. I still have Exult installed on my old Zaurus SL-5500, lol.
There is also a project called "Ultima 5 Redux" in the works by an Ultima 5 fan. https://u5redux.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/first-dev-vlog
I stumbled across it during a nostalgia binge during "lock down" last year. It appears to be under development in the author's spare time. The latest git commit was four days ago at time of writing this comment.
> After acquiring Origin in late 1992, so the story goes, EA forced them to abandon all of the long-established principles of Ultima in order to reach the mass market of lowest-common-denominator players to which EA aspired.
/me raises hand, I'm one of those lowest-common-denominator played who discovered Ultima with VIII and loved it a lot
I agree with "Scorpia" that Ultima IV is the greatest game of all time. I
only played the occasional pirated games my brother cadged, so missed
Ultimas 5 through 7. Ultima VIII did come my way, and I remember already
being turned off by the 3dness. I believe I played it all of ten minutes and
gave up.
Many years ago I started playing Ultima VIII out of a nostalgia trip, and not having been exposed much to the legendary Ultima VII before, I thought VIII was a fun game for the most part. Can't remember much of it today, but a really bad experience would have made a more lasting impression ;)
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.
Wow. Is Pagan universally reviled? Perhaps because I was never an Ultima fan (didn't play the series) I actually liked Pagan: the graphics, the huge world, and the plot in which there was some sort of conspiracy of fake elemental "gods". I wasn't emotionally involved with Britannia, so I didn't care that the game wasn't set there.
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.
Ultima 7 utterly blew my mind as a kid. I remember one evening coming downstairs to dinner after playing it all day, and realised my whole sense of reality was somehow altered... there was an entire living world in that computer. That feeling completely changed me.
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.
Same, but I quit after Ultima 7.2. I remember trying 8, and just never getting into it. Huge disappointment, as 7.2 had improvements over Black Gate, and I just expected 8 to be an iteratively better new adventure. I wanted Ultima 7.3 and instead got Diablo 0.1.
Well, the PC was truly booming when U8 dropped and I hoped it would recapture the Garriot touch from the 1980's.
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.
I agree the article is great, as is most of the series from that website.
> 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!).
> Wow. Is Pagan universally reviled? Perhaps because I was never an Ultima fan (didn't play the series) I actually liked Pagan ….
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.
The problem that U8 had was that the rest of the Ultimas were mindblowing and pushing the frontiers of what a game could be with every release.
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.
It was the only one I ever played, I got a copy with my soundcard in the first PC my parents bought (along with Wing Commander and Syndicate). I loved it, despite it being really challenging for me.
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.
Origin reminds me of what happened to Bioware , selling out to EA that is used to reselling filler paste games like Madden XX or FIFA XX is just the death of a gaming studios.
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.
I feel like a lot of this comes from an "Ultima fan" perspective where Ultima VIII "ruined it" because it was too different. Conversely, I played it first, and enjoyed it; it did many things no game I'd played before had tried, although was not short of many flaws (which tbf the post-release patch resolves quite a few of). Playing other Ultimas later, they were in many ways good but also felt a bit trite in their morality.
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 feel like a lot of this comes from an "Ultima fan" perspective
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.
I agree. I liked Ultima 8. Don't get me wrong. 7 and 7.5 were better, but 8 was still enjoyable. I was disappointed when they didn't release an expansion pack.
Both Ultima VI and VII are divisive points for series fans. The issue comes down to what level of detail and scale is really desired.
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.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadAs I never found anything close to Ultima Online, I basically stopped gaming entirely. UO raised the bar too high.
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 :)
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!
[1] http://classictibia.com/
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.
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.
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.
It'll happen once VR takes off, even if that takes another 20 years to happen.
- legend of mir 2
- phantasy star online (dreamcast)
- lineage
- myth of soma
- ragnarok online
- many more
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.
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.
For the first year or two at least.
And Ultima Online has been running since 1997 and is still going ?!?!
https://uo.com
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
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 Underworld however was awesome and when thinking back was a true gem.
ah, so this is where Blizzard got the idea for the travesty that is modern World of Warcraft
http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/nitpicks_u7si.htm
I may be remembering aspects of this wrong, it was a long time ago!
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)
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.
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.
- 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"
I want a new RA2 :/
At this rate I'll just learn C# and join the project I think
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0]https://archive.org/details/creative-labs-ea-compilation
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.
(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)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garriott#Games
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)
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.
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.
/me raises hand, I'm one of those lowest-common-denominator played who discovered Ultima with VIII and loved it a lot
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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 Soundblaster "Edutainment Pack"? I have a feeling I got the same exact package.
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.
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.
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.