Ultima 9 Was Released Fifteen Years Ago Today
Fifteen years ago today, the final chapter in the Ultima series — and the game that would prove to be the swansong of Origin Systems — was released. Ultima 9 was a significantly controversial entry in the Ultima series, and remains so to this day. In fact, it’s a very polarizing title; relatively few Ultima fans seem to be lukewarm in their opinion of the game. There are those that despise it utterly, holding it up as perhaps the greatest travesty in gaming history. And there are those that can admit its flaws and yet love it and find much to enjoy in it. It had a storied and tumultuous development history, was cancelled — or nearly cancelled — more than once, and saw significant turnover in key positions within its development team. At one point, more or less the entire team was seconded to the Ultima Online group within Origin, to help get that game out the door.
And yet, at every step, Richard Garriott and others fought — fought and won — for the game’s survival, for its completion. It is by no means perfect, but it is also by no means a hollow shell of an Ultima, and to say as much demeans the very real personal and professional sacrifices that everyone associated with the project made, and in some cases made repeatedly.
While it lacked some of the RPG features that other Ultimas boasted — NPC schedules, for example, or a robust party system — Ultima 9 nevertheless featured an innovative, forward thinking 3D engine that proved to be over a decade ahead of its time. For it is only really now, with the advent of Skyrim, that we are once again seeing 3D RPGs that boast openly interactive worlds with objects that can be freely manipulated by players. And I would argue that even Skyrim doesn’t quite match what Ultima 9 delivered in this respect.
We’ll get into some depth about the strengths and weaknesses of the game, as well as some of its development history, in the days to come. For now, it is sufficient to mark the occasion of the game’s release. And what better way to do so than with the grand — and hilarious — graphic cooked up by community member AvatarAcid, which he posted to the Ultima Dragons Facebook group. Sadly, the comments thread to that post turned into a rather ugly mess of an argument about the game itself. And that’s a shame, because there’s a lot that can be said about Ultima 9 — a lot of fascinating detail to discuss — without the need to resort to negativity and the casting of aspersions.
So let’s have none of that here this week, what say? (And in observing as much, I’ll just add that any “What’s a Paladin?” comments on any of the Ultima 9-related articles that get posted this week will be deleted on sight. That’s your fair warning.)
What’s an argument that the protagonist should never speak in an RPG? In the immortal words of Christian Bale, “That’s what -that- is.” Hopefully my dancing has been deft enough to evade the ban hammer. 🙂
The sad thing is, if EA had just said, “Fuck it” and threw their last dollar at the production of Ultima IX, it would have been a game so genre-defining and groundbreaking the Roman numerals of subsequent Ultimas would be indecipherable to mortal men. Ultima IX is the lost love who forever haunts one’s dreams; there’s no escaping the eternal question of what could have been but was simply not to be.
So Happy Birthday Ultima IX. A tipped glass to those who loved you, and to those who love you still.
I look forward to the upcoming articles!
I personally enjoyed Ultima IX when I first played it. I didn’t like a lot of the inconsistencies in the plot, but it was not a bad game.
The engine itself is quite good for it’s time. It had some physics in it and a lot of nice details. Exploration was good once you can go anywhere you want, and the dungeons were actually well done, different from each one and interesting.
As said, it’s true it had lots of inconsistencies, but if you look beyond that, it was a good game
There has never been a game that I wanted to like as much as I wanted to like Ultima IX.
It was Ultima VI that got me hooked on the series, and I eagerly devoured any new bit of Ultima news from that point on. As an aside, and relating to that Facebook thread, the only Ultima game that wasn’t significantly bug-ridden on my first playthrough was Ultima VIII. In VI, Lord British vanished completely from my game about halfway through, leaving me without free healing. In the Gargoyle world, I was being chased and attacked by a piece of a gargish door frame; when I looked at it, the game said that I see Nystul and even showed his portrait. Also, Shamino turned into a bed at one point. VI rarely crashed to the desktop though, unlike VII, VII Part 2, and IX, which all crashed with irritating regularity.
One major factor in my disappointment with Ultima IX is that it was not what I expected it to be; and my expectations were high, having obsessively followed every piece of news about its development for 5 years. Many aspects of the game that were cut were revealed well in advance of its release (the party, female Avatar, NPC schedules, etc), but little was said about the plot, so I assumed that all of the plot details that Origin had talked about previously were still part of the game, such as the Guardian’s sendings to Lord British to turn him against the Avatar, Lord British appearing old and sick because his health was tied to the land, etc. I thought that the plot that we did get was less interesting and that progression through the world was unnecessarily linear. The theme of Britannia’s citizens needing to learn to solve their own problems without the Avatar was a good one, but really didn’t come through that strongly.
There were certainly some very good things about the game, and it was often quite enjoyable as an action-adventure game. As the climax of the trilogy that began with VII, it was a massive disappointment for me. Ultima games always played it a little fast and loose regarding continuity (and the consistency of the world map), tending to favor what worked best for the current game over strict adherence to what was established in previous games; while I have contributed my share of nitpicks over fairly minor inconsistencies, they didn’t really bother me that much. What did bother me was the lack of follow-through on some fairly major story elements from previous games, like what became of The Fellowship, how the Guardian actually got into Britannia (considering that in U7, a rare planetary conjunction was required for the Black Gate to work), the companions being stranded on Serpent Isle, how and why Dupre’s spirit un-merged with the Serpents, and of course the whole Titan of Ether thing.
And I know that the team delivered the best product that they could given the circumstances that they had to deal with; by the time del Castilo was let go, the game had been in development for nearly 4 years, they had lost many of their original and more experienced team members, they were still porting legacy code from the pre-3Dfx version of the engine, they had just done a significant re-write of the plot, and they had been on the verge of getting canceled for a while. Garriott had no choice but to take a more active role and come up with a new design that was achievable within the year or so that EA was willing to give them. It was only through their heroic efforts that we got anything at all and I am thankful that we did get a conclusion to the series, even if I wasn’t very satisfied with it.
“Ultima games always played it a little fast and loose regarding continuity (and the consistency of the world map), tending to favor what worked best for the current game over strict adherence to what was established in previous games; while I have contributed my share of nitpicks over fairly minor inconsistencies, they didn’t really bother me that much.”
Me either – in fact, I kind of like the fact that Ultima doesn’t play hard and fast with its canon, it makes it feel a bit more… convincing to me, paradoxically. Things getting confused and misremembered and misinterpreted as the events themselves get further and further removed from “present day.” So canonical inconsistencies never really bothered me much when it came to Ultima IX – the only thing that honestly irked me was Dupre’s revival, and that more for narrative reasons than it was “canonical inconsistency” (rather cheapens the poignancy of his sacrifice in Serpent Isle if the consequences of it just get magic-ed away later).
In fact, I rather like what Ultima IX attempted to do in terms of story – a return to the virtues, how they could be misinterpreted, how easy it was to rationalize an “incorrect” application of the virtues… a twisting of the virtues that’s a bit more subtle than Ultima V and Blackthorns Eight Laws. I think that’s what made the story so problematic, though, it was a theme and narrative that really *needed* nuance and subtlety, and the writing… was not, possibly in part due to the choice to have the thing fully voice-acted. Brevity and accessibility got favored, and I think the writing suffered from that.
For all its faults, though, I do think it made for a fitting end to the series, at least in theory – flawed execution, yes, and *very* flawed in some respects, but the ideas behind it? I like them and like them a lot.
Yeah Dupre’s ressurection was always THE thing that irked me, especially since I’m a huge Serpent Isle fan. Of course I had a very bad feeling about it all ever since I noticed the ingame Journal had no mention of Serpent Isle in the demo. While you can nitpick about a lot of things, I’d argue the story mostly works as a continuation except… that it blantantly disregards Serpent Isle.
I think the big issue about Ultima IX is the lack of any explanation for a lot of things ingame – LED made a good exemple about the Guardian, it’s ludicrous the game doesn’t even bother to explain how he entered Britannia in the first place, and how Blackthorn came to serve him (and after so much development I can’t believe they never came up with an explanation). It’s the same for background: the manuals offer a LOT of background for the game… but there is hardly any of it ingame.
Of course as I mentionned before, this is all a very ’80s mindset of telling of story… that’s teh same about the Ultima series’ loose continuity. But by the time the game was released in 1999, people expected more.
And yeah I think speech caused a lot of issues : dialogues clearly needed another pass, and there was only so much content they could put with the limitations of full voiced dialogues. Some might argue it would have been better to forego voice acting and stick with text… but honestly… I’m not sure this would have worked because it really feels like the game and the world was conceived so that you could HEAR the dialogues.
As recall they had to record the dialogues in early 1999, which means they had to lock down all writing, sooner that it was ready – at the time the game was planned for a Spring release. Ironically, since the game was delayed and only released in November, they probably could have delayed recording the speech recording and give the dialogues another pass. Oh well…
And I agree with LED that expectations played a lot in the receptions of the game too – a lot of it lies at Origin’s fault too, because really they showed way to much of the BWP version of the plot, and kept using cutscenes that weren’t relevant to the final version of the plot almost right up till release. You can’t blame people for having different expectation them.
But still I’ve always found interesting how drastically opposed reactions were from hardcore fans and the press. A majority of review felt it was a great game with a great plot… but that was ruined by its buggines and shitty performance – many felt like the opposed, they didn’t care that much about the bugs but felt the plot was shit and completly ruined the whole thing. Which is probably a good show of how different expectation can be between fans and non-fans.
That said I loved Ultima IX and I still does. It has a lot of flaws, but I still fit it was a great game and a great Ultima, and a fitting end to the series.
I am rather amazed at all of the small details included in the game world. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a piece of walkable land that doesn’t have something to find. A few weeks ago, I found something that I had never before encountered near the beach West of Yew – check out the rock pillars.
Apart from the rendering and physics engine being an unoptimized, quirky mess; U9 could be considered a diamond in the rough suffering largely from a few sections of poor plot execution, limited explanations of what/why certain events are occurring and of course story/background elements cut out of the game (mostly the Guardian/Avatar relationship getting so horribly short-changed down to a few lines of dialogue).
The issues with the museum are quite trivial along with most of the little nitpicks about the game being focused on the world looking different from previous games (200 years and a cataclysm should be enough explanation) and the BSing used to explain some of it. I’d say one of the more legitimate nitpicks would be the whole Dupre resurrection occurring with no explanation. I would really like to know the thought processes behind this story element.
Ultima IX was a marvel of world design. Anyone whining about the world being “too small” obviously never spend any time exploring it. It certainly wasn’t smaller than Ultima VII in any case – and whatever it might have lost in strict “flat” size, it obviously gained “vertically” through it’s third dimension.
I kept finding out new stuff every time I replayed Ultima IX : and trust me I replayed it a lot. There is amount of détails put into it that it mind blowing – I’d actually argue that it’s one of the best hand crafted 3D world to explore I have ever seen in gaming, only surpassed with Pyrhanna Bytes’ Gothic and Risen games which followed a similar design philosophy.
So you can find many games with a bigger game world. But you won’t find many which were craft with such obvious cares and détails.
And I second everything else you said.
It’s difficult to meaningfully compare world sizes between a full 3D in-perspective game and an overhead view 2D game. I once took an image of U9’s world up and cut it up to compare it with U7’s map, and yes, it was considerably smaller, although Britain, Buccaneer’s Den, and New Magincia were all about twice as big as on the U7 map. But a distance that feels just right in an overhead view 2D game (say, the “empty” space between towns) might feel far too long in a 3D game with a zoomed-in perspective. On the other hand, interior spaces that feel about the right size in a 2D game are going to feel extremely cramped in a 3D game with a 1st-person or over-the-shoulder perspective.
For the most part, the world in Ultima IX didn’t actually feel too small. That trek from Yew over to Dungeon Wrong took quite a while. The problem came with a huge dose of broken immersion when, wandering along the edge of those mountains, Castle Britannia suddenly popped up, towering over the mountains. Same when passing Stonegate. It wasn’t just the weird scale, it was the fact that I felt like I’d traveled a long distance and then, oh hey, now I’m just looking down on Britain.
The designers made fanastic use of limited space by making pretty much all of it interesting to walk through; it’s where those individually-designed segments were attached to one another where the world design fell apart to some degree. Likewise, if you fiddle with the fog and draw distance settings so that you can actually see Castle Britannia from most parts of Britain, you can stand on the docks and wonder if you could just whip out your bow and shoot something over on the now-visible Buccaneer’s Den.
I absolutely agree that few 3D worlds were crafted with such care and attention to detail (not plot/continuity detail, but interesting things to see and do), and that they made use of the vertical dimension in ways that many designers still don’t. For the most part, the game world felt about the right size for the section of that game that I was playing, other than Moonglow and Valoria seeming far too small. The smaller scale of the world becomes quite apparent once you get full access to Raven’s ship, especially if you’ve tweaked the fog and draw distance settings.
“The issues with the museum are quite trivial along with most of the little nitpicks about the game being focused on the world looking different from previous games (200 years and a cataclysm should be enough explanation) and the BSing used to explain some of it.”
The game seems to contradict itself on how much time has passed since the Avatar was last seen. I’m going with the 200 years figure. As far as the museum goes, it still bugs me that the runes were stolen 20 years ago, but nobody has bothered to clean up all of the broken glass off the floor. That woman is sweeping one section of Britain’s streets 24 hours per day, but she hasn’t been able to get into the museum ONCE in 20 years? Yes, it’s trivial, but it’s also a lack of attention to detail.
“I’d say one of the more legitimate nitpicks would be the whole Dupre resurrection occurring with no explanation. I would really like to know the thought processes behind this story element.”
Probably the same thought process that left out explaining how the companions returned from Serpent Isle, why Lord British has aged more than the others orignially from Earth, and the whole “Titan of Ether” bit.
I get what you mean, but funnily enough the whole “Hey look I walked for an hour and I’m right next to where I was” rather than breaking the immersion and make me feel “Hey that’s small” actually impressed me more than anything.
Sure you can break it even more by extenting the fog beyond measures… but I mean… you’re not meant to. It’s kind of like playing Ultima VII at a higher resolution – it looks prettier, but since the game was designed around its 320×200 resolution… it gives the impression of having become smaller all of a sudden. It’s the same thing when you look a big HD map of the whole UVII world : suddenly it feels like everything is all jumbled together while really while playing the game as it was too 20+ years ago : it felt huge.
What I meant is that it’s kind of irrelevant if you cna see Buccaner’s Den from Britain if you push the clipping plane : because that’s not how you’re supposed to play, and that’s ont how it feels when you actually the game as it’s supposed to. Which is why I’ve found the way some people used this as “proof” the world was ridiculously small to be rather dishonest : but bluntly there is a lot of dishonesty and exageration in term of arguments to criticize Ultima IX.
That said I’m pretty sure the game would have been bigger… if they could have. The cut Cove map is proof enough of this. I actually was fine with Moonglow in term of size, I was more irked about Cove being a single building, and Minoc a set of tents (they really just should have called the whole thing Minoc) and Valoria yeah it looked good, but the city Inside the volcano basically being one big room was a bit silly.
Ironically : these were amongst the best parts in term of plot exécutions.
I’ll give you that the world design of U9 didn’t really take into account what would happen if you tweak those settings beyond what the in-game interface allows you to do. My PC at the time certainly couldn’t handle the max settings (Pentium II with Voodoo 3 card), and I remember that I had to keep the clipping plane fairly close so as to avoid taking a huge performance hit. In fact, when it was raining outside, it would be foggy and raining inside Lord British’s castle, too — I couldn’t actually see the ceiling when I was on the main floor. The castle itself would already be streaming out by the time I got to its front gate, revealing the mountains behind it.
On a modern system, with those settings maxed out, I still see the castle fading away (leaving the mountains visible) by the time I’ve reached that wooden bridge into town. This looks really dumb and bothers me quite a bit. 🙂 To me, tweaking the settings to avoid this is less like running U7 at higher resolutions and more like running U7 with a 2xSAI scaler; it overcomes some technological limitations of the time and approximates how the game might look if it were released today. Unfortunately, doing so can definitely break certain illusions.
It’s mainly Britain where I have an issue with this, due to fact that it takes up about 1/5 of the main continent and it’s built on relatively flat terrain. The distance from the castle to the docks is about the same as the distance from the docks to Buccaneer’s Den.
It just looks terrible when buildings start streaming out after you cross the street. It looks especially bad when the base of the mountainous terrain are clearly visible through the open door of a building. If you keep the fog turned up enough to obscure this, it starts to look like a Nintendo 64 game.
Sure, there is some level of dishonesty and exaggeration in many criticisms of Ultima IX. I think that expectations were generally much higher for Ultima IX than they had been for previous games, so it’s not surprising that many fans were more critical than they had been of previous games. I thought that the world of Ultima VII felt too small compared to that of Ultima VI, but the game itself was satisfying enough that I could overlook it. Ultima IX let me down on so many levels that I feel a lot less charitable about its flaws.
“I actually was fine with Moonglow in term of size, I was more irked about Cove being a single building, and Minoc a set of tents (they really just should have called the whole thing Minoc) and Valoria yeah it looked good, but the city Inside the volcano basically being one big room was a bit silly.”
Moonglow being reduced to five buildings in a circle bothered me. Sure, Britain didn’t actually have that many buildings, but it felt like a town. Moonglow felt like a cul-de-sac. I was expecting something more like this: http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/images/6/60/Mooncast2.jpg. It’s hard to tell how many buildings are in the town, but it looks like more than 5, and there are probably a couple more that aren’t visible from where the Avatar is standing.
I think they would have been better off just saying that Cove and Minoc were destroyed and calling the collection of tents something else entirely. I guess Valoria makes a bit more sense if you think of it as a keep to replace Serpent’s Hold than as a town.
“Ironically : these were amongst the best parts in term of plot exécutions.”
Ironically : you’re setting the bar pretty low. 😉 Technical shortcomings I can forgive; the plot execution irritates me pretty much every step of the way.
In terme of size of the world in Ultima IX, I gotta say I always felt they could have maintained the illusion more… simply by having bigger water zones between landmasses. It’s not like the game needed to have all the isles and landmasses to be so close to each other, and just having more water would have made the illusion worked better. I Wonder if there was a rationale behind this (did they originally planned for more enforced “hand navigation ?” that had to be cut and felt it would be too big) or if that was some technical limiation about the world size.
‘Technical shortcomings I can forgive; the plot execution irritates me pretty much every step of the way.”
Heh fair enough, but as flawed as the plot execution is, I would argue it varies a lot from city to city, and I think some of cities definitly things better than other. And often that were those on the second half of the game. The core concept for each city was that the Avatar’s action was supposed to inspire people, leading to a central person in turn inspiring the rest of the city, leading to a true understanting of virtue. More often than not though, it tend to lead to magically fixing the Shrines and there : people are good again (not that’s inconsistent per se mind you – as I argue before the Columns are essentially world scale Shadowlords). But clearly that was not the intent and it shows in some of the cities – for instance most people aren’t aware of that, but Trinsic and Valoria both changed *before* you restore the Shrine. In Trinsic people begin to talk about Lucero’s sacrifice once he’s dead and how they feel they should get their act together. In Valoria this is even more direct, as people rejoice already of the Deamons’ death. Fixing the shrine lead to another trigger, which changes the dialogues once more, but essentially it shows that in these cases Virtues was already restored and fixing the Shrine becomes just a formality.
And obviously all of the game should have handled like this.
I recall someone on the team saying that the designers built each area separately and then they were later integrated into a single world map and spaced out so that it “felt right.” (might have been Garriott, might have been Lady MOI, I don’t remember). More water in between the landmasses would have helped, as would having a taller range of mountains separating the Britain/Paws section from Yes and the path to Wrong. Mountains that you couldn’t walk along the top of and look straight down on Britain. There may very well have been some technical limitations regarding the world size that resulted in smaller water zones, but it could also have come from a desire to have a nicer-looking world map that doesn’t have big empty spaces of just water.
Looking at the cloth maps of V, VI, and VII, you can see that the oceans take up less space with each successive game, and once you hit VII, the islands in the middle and south part of the map suddenly get significantly larger in relation to the size of the main continent. Buccaneer’s Den is actually pretty close to the mainland in U7, but since you’re not seeing the world from the Avatar’s perspective, it’s not as noticeable.
“The core concept for each city was that the Avatar’s action was supposed to inspire people, leading to a central person in turn inspiring the rest of the city, leading to a true understanding of virtue. More often than not though, it tend to lead to magically fixing the Shrines and there : people are good again (not that’s inconsistent per se mind you – as I argue before the Columns are essentially world scale Shadowlords).”
This core concept was good. I just don’t think that it came across very well in the game. A major part of this is that I don’t think the corrupted virtues were very well portrayed. Ultima V did a much, much better job and took a more thoughtful and nuanced approach in examining how the virtues might become corrupted. Having people in each town behaving completely opposite to the virtue which their town represents just didn’t work for me. It worked better for some virtues than others; one could argue that helping the poor takes away their motivation to help themselves and that in the long term, the compassionate act is to leave them be and allow them to figure things out for themselves. With most of the other virtues, the behavior tended towards extremes that felt like caricatures.
“But clearly that was not the intent and it shows in some of the cities – for instance most people aren’t aware of that, but Trinsic and Valoria both changed *before* you restore the Shrine. In Trinsic people begin to talk about Lucero’s sacrifice once he’s dead and how they feel they should get their act together. In Valoria this is even more direct, as people rejoice already of the Deamons’ death. Fixing the shrine lead to another trigger, which changes the dialogues once more, but essentially it shows that in these cases Virtues was already restored and fixing the Shrine becomes just a formality.”
Yes, I remember Trinsic being one of the cases where the core theme actually came through fairly strongly. My memories of Valoria are pretty fuzzy, so I’ll take your word for it. I remember Moonglow and Yew being particularly bad. Perhaps the story has Skara Brae being destroyed before you get to visit it so that they wouldn’t have to figure out how to portray people being unspiritual? 😉
Yeah that’s how they worked as I recall – each region of the game had its own designers, which also acted as the writers as a matter of fact. (and obviously Ultima IX liked a head writer to pull everything together properly, but I think it mostly lacked time even in that respect).
“Perhaps the story has Skara Brae being destroyed before you get to visit it so that they wouldn’t have to figure out how to portray people being unspiritual? ;-)”
I think it was more a technical limitation – the engine wouldn’t have allowed to have you visit a place in two such drastic separate states.(*) That’s actually a point I brought with Richard Garriott when I interviewed him last year, and he mentionned this sort of stuff as one of the reasons he wanted an Overland map for Shroud of the Avatar since it allowed for dynamic changes on maps.
Of course one point of note that you probably don’t recall… is that Skara Brae was actually unaffected by the Columns – which is why the Guardian destroys it to spite you. 😛
I find that funny that Skara Brae was destroyed in all the plot variations of Ultima IX. The final one was the only one where the city had been restored since Ultima VII
(*) Though all thing considered if they really had wanted too, they might have been able to put Skara Brae on a separate map like Earth and have you visit it if needed, only letting yo uaccess the ruined one on the main world map later on. Indeed the Well of Soul we can probably assume to be what Skara Brae would be in term of size.
“I think it was more a technical limitation – the engine wouldn’t have allowed to have you visit a place in two such drastic separate states.(*) That’s actually a point I brought with Richard Garriott when I interviewed him last year, and he mentionned this sort of stuff as one of the reasons he wanted an Overland map for Shroud of the Avatar since it allowed for dynamic changes on maps. I find that funny that Skara Brae was destroyed in all the plot variations of Ultima IX. The final one was the only one where the city had been restored since Ultima VII”
I know. I thought my reason was funnier. 😉
Still wish they’d given a little more explanation of the whole Sentinel thing. Did you publish that interview somewhere? I don’t remember reading it.
“Of course one point of note that you probably don’t recall… is that Skara Brae was actually unaffected by the Columns – which is why the Guardian destroys it to spite you. :P”
I didn’t remember that. I’ve only played all the way through the game once, although I’ve played through the end of Moonglow/Honesty 3 or 4 times.
On the other hand, Skara Brae is already destroyed on the cloth map that came with the game and which is also in your backpack. Maybe the Guardian had already destroyed it before you arrived and was just messing with you. 🙂 How far off is the tech for dynamic cloth maps?
Heh, you know what ? I actually never noticed that about the Cloth (and ingame) map. Good call. 😛
As I recall the Sentinel was the reason Skara Brae was unaffected by the Columns (though… I can’t recall
“Did you publish that interview somewhere? I don’t remember reading it.”
Sure, you can find it there :
First part :
http://www.ultimalegend.com/interview-richard-garriott-shroud-of-the-avatar/
Second part :
http://www.ultimalegend.com/interview-de-richard-garriott-shroud-of-the-avatar-2eme-partie/
(You can either listen to the audio on YouTube and suffer through my crappy accent or scroll down for the transcript).
I mentioned in on Horizons back then but you must have missed it. The interview was fully focused on the single player aspect of the game – which barely mentionned in other outlets – and core Ultima aspects It felt to me RG’s heart really was in the right place in term of crafting a SP experience worthy of an Ultima game, though in hindsight I Wonder if he has the right team for the job.
(And that was a really cool interview to do, Richard Garriott really feels like a down to earth guy when you talk to him, and it felt more at times like a chat between passionates RPG fans than a straight up interview. That really was of my crowning geeking moment 😛 Actually got the chance to talk to him live again during the 24 hours of the Kickstarter and that was really cool too! )
Great interview, thanks! My online presence is rather spotty, what with two young children.
And yeah, he is a cool and down to Earth guy to talk to. I got to talk to him a couple of times at E3 back in 2001, when he was starting up Destination Games and talking a bit about what would become Tabula Rasa. It was a crowning geeking moment for me too.
If you enable the speed cheat and apply the Forgotten World fixes it’s a pretty good sandbox game.
10 out of 10, it was ok.