Ian "Tiberius" Fraizer Wants Your Input About Skills In Lazarus
Before he was the lead designer on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Ian “Tiberius” Fraizer was well-known to Ultima fans as the guy in charge of Team Lazarus, which of course produced what is arguably the best of the Ultima remakes, Ultima V: Lazarus.
And darn it all, he’s curious about something:
I’d love to see you write a critique of the way skills were handled in Lazarus. What you felt was good/bad about them, and how they helped (or hindered) the “Ultima feel” of the mod overall. The skills are something that didn’t get touched on much (either pro or con) in the various Lazarus reviews.
If you’ve recently — or not so recently, assuming you’ve a good memory — completed a Lazarus playthrough, please do chime in either here or in reply to his comment at the Digital Lycaeum. I’m sure he would welcome your feedback!
To help refresh everyone’s memory: http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Trainers_in_Ultima_V:_Lazarus
Well, in truth I think the reason skills were so rarely mentioned was because they were such an unassuming and often unimportant part of the game. Skills in Lazarus were expensive, and it was really difficult to see what appreciable difference they made to combat. Do I really need chanelling? My only character who ever cast spells was the Avatar, and he always just slept when he needed more MP. Other skills like archery, I know it probably made a difference with my characters who could train it, but when 6 characters are firing at once, and I get no feedback on how much damage each character is doing, I have no idea if archery is really helping. Unless a player KNOWS their skill is doing something useful, it’s hard to appreciate its benefit.
I think a game that did skills well was the original Fallout. You could easily appreciate each skill you learned because combat felt different with each skill you obtained. I think Ultima IX even did this well, with a different swing with each combat level gained. But in Lazarus the skills were too underwhelming.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED Lazarus, but the skill system was just underwhelming.
I concur – the skill system was nifty, but the game could easily have gone without it, with no loss of quality.
My big focus on upgrading party member skills were the non-combat/non-magic ones. I think I noticed some improvements in Julia, Iolo, and Gwenno when I upgraded them. I agree about not really seeing much improvement with combat, though Recovery was nice. I suppose battle focus and death blow helped, but I never paid really noticed the improvement.
Mainly, I just upgraded everybody’s skills just to upgrade them for the most part.
I agree that the effects of the skills should have been much more transparent. It would also have been nice to have some active skills. What I really disliked was tying the training cost to your character level since it encourages metagaming.
I just don’t get why a skill system was necessary. Ultima never had it (except uw). I don’t want to see ultima force skill trees that have things like “double backward whirl attack” just because someone perceives modern players need that.
Oh yeah, Lazarus! I just got my computer back from the shop and in the interim a distant family member gave me a whole mess of old games. One of which being dungeon siege with it’s expansion pack. This should be interesting!