Forgotten World: How Should Ultima 9’s Stat System Be Expanded?
Over on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group, Iceblade has put up a poll to gauge community opinion as to how Ultima 9’s stat system might be modified and expanded upon.
I’m looking at expanding the U9 stat systems for FW by making it more of a point-based system.
Do you think a combination of combat-based increases and cleansing boosts should be required to learn new techniques?
The three choices in the poll are as follows:
- No dexterity boosts from shrines should be enough to learn a technique
- Yes dexterity boosts and combat “experience” should be needed for techniques
- No techniques should require weapon specific use to learn a technique
Feel free to discuss the pros and cons of each approach here, in the comments. But to cast your vote, get thee to Facebook.
I haven’t played Ultima IX, but I like the idea of having access to all techniques from the start but being really, embarrassingly shitty at them until you practice either on a dummy or in actual combat (learning more quickly from the latter). Perhaps the Lycaeum could have combat tomes you could read to acquire the basic technique, but have to practice to make it viable. I’m not really fond of stats or techniques being instantly bestowed for an unrelated accomplishment (including leveling). This can be done the wrong way, though, so to avoid someone just repeating the technique hundreds of times in succession there should be fatigue, injury, “combat dummy durability” or a real combat requirement to limit any grindiness or system abuse. In a perfect world the player would play normally and while doing so experiment occasionally with a technique with the goals of both testing its current effectiveness and improving it.
Well, if I went with option 3, there would be a 5 stats added for the 5 combat styles. After using a certain style enough in combat, you can train to learn the next technique in that style. This would mean that just having a high dexterity doesn’t mean you can learn a bunch of weapon techniques. I’d probably base the increases on weapon hits (or uses for multiple-hit techniques) with higher techniques worth more than lower ones (especially the base one). There will be less of a tendency to grind in Forgotten World since most enemies and monsters don’t respawn or have rather limited respawns like the occasional encounter with a wolf in a large (really large) forested region. Most of the time, boosting stats will require exploration especially when it comes to increasing strength which is tiered system.
I never thought I’d say this, but if that’s the sort of direction Forgotten World is going, between it and Beautiful Britannia I might actually dive in and play the crap out of it. I didn’t avoid Ultima IX because I wanted to, but because everything I knew about it was so damned disappointing (compared to IV – VII, of course). With a little love, maybe it could be one of the finer Ultimas. No disrespect to the work being done here, quite the contrary. The little Ultima that could have been may end up being the Ultima that kicks massive ass.
Forgot to mention, Shrines still give nice boosts, but relying solely on them will be to your detriment when taking on the Abyss. The more you explore and quest the easier the fight against those Titans will become. Expect the really nasty spells.
I am glad you explained this here, I was confused over the vote items but no longer am I 🙂
Can you tweak the game to have additional spawners or adjust the spawn rates?
You mean have the original maps include more spawn points? yes, but yuck
That might have been my mistake! I have no idea if they have spawn points or not 🙂 But you seemed to indicate that they did when you said “limited respawns like the occasional encounter with a wolf in a large (really large) forested region” so I was just wondering.
Respawns were just annoyingly setup in Ultima IX. Often you’d end up killing the same several rats along certain paths several dozen times. Also, humanoids shouldn’t respawn, especially not with so few npcs in the game as is. You feel like you end up wiping out half of the world’s population and there is no indication where these humanoids are popping into existence from. Rats/Spiders are not as big of an issue, but they prove quite annoying due to their placement and being extremely weak and relatively useless.
I don’t know how the game works internally or if it supports spawn probability based on pre-defined regions or something like a heightmap image (where lightness determines spawn probability), but if it only supports location/coordinate-based spawn points and you’re able to add existing ones you could create them in a regular grid but with a significantly lowered spawn probability. That would create the illusion that there weren’t specific X/Y spawn locations but that they could appear anywhere with variations in probability based on the general type of terrain in which they prefer to live. The spawn point grid could be every ten feet, for example. One side effect of having a greater spawn point density with lowered probabilities would be that occasionally multiple near spawn points would fire simultaneously and create a small group of creatures, which could increase the realism and challenge of the game.