He also attempts to tie many of the innovations of the Ultima series — open world gameplay, the exploration of social issues in narrative, moral decision-making, and of course MMORPGs — to their modern incarnations. No doubt these asides will provoke both disagreement and agreement from different people. He also omits mention of Ultima 9 for some reason, which is strange. Still, his final conclusion shouldn’t be controversial to anyone well-versed in the history of RPG gaming: the Ultima series was something different, and almost every modern RPG and MMORPG draws inspiration from it in some way.

The creator left out the Bell Of Courage. I spent the last 3 days looking through the toolset, and the bell is referenced in the game via Sister Antos and Brother Antos. A guard at Serpents Hold tells you the bell is buried under Jhelom ,but in the coding it says the bell is in a well within Serpents Hold.

I have been unable to raise the virtues of Justice, Honor, and Honesty.

The blind beggar will not communicate with you.

When in Paws, the Jester causes some kind of major lag issue.

I was only able to obtain the black stone by using the cheat system built into NWN.

I did greatly enjoy this remake ,but haven’t been able to finish it. It’s very sad.

If anyone has experienced similar bugs with Avatarship and can offer helpful suggestions, or else speculate as to the cause of the issues that Cagle is having, please do contribute your thoughts below. Otherwise, I may have to update the Avatarship project entry with some bug-related notes once I migrate it to the Codex in the coming weeks.

As well, he has published several new screenshots of the game — which still uses many of Ultima 7′s tiles for its graphical look and feel — to that website. I have mirrored these to the project entry, and one can be seen (somewhat cropped) above.

These amulets have obviously become an extraordinarily rare and highly sought after collector’s item.  Until now, no known photo of the winning amulet has even been available.  It seems that has changed, as Greg Cato has decided to auction off his entire Ultima  collection, including his winning amulet and related documentation.

Check it out, you’ll likely never see one of these ever again.

Of course, REDKit was in beta for quite a while, and CD Projekt RED has already picked a favourite mod developed by those fortunate enough to be in on the beta.

We have added 4 new Developers to the team this month and so far, they have hit the ground running! Many of you have met Scott Jennings, our resident Web Guru, in the new and improved SotA IRC Chatroom, and he’s not the only new Scott! Scott Jones, former Art Director for Ultima 9, has also joined us as an Environmental Artist. Rounding out the new Devs are Bill Kirkman, Content Designer, and Michael Hutchison, who will also be working on Environmental Art as well as level design. If you want to get to know them a bit better, just watch this week’s SotA Developer Roundtable.

Scott Jennings should need no introduction to fans of online gaming; his “Lum the Mad” persona was a powerful voice of commentary and criticism in the world of MMORPGs. As Lum, he commented on a wide range of games, including Ultima Online. His unique writing style, mixing humour with white-hot anger, earned him a dedicated and massive following, which included no small number of MMORPG developers. He continued writing as Lum the Mad until 2001, during which year he was hired by Mythic Entertainment. He also started a new website at that time, Broken Toys, where he continues to blog to this day.

He left Mythic Entertainment in 2006, and went to work for NCSoft in Austin, Texas. He remained there for two years, then returned to the company again in 2010, before leaving it in late 2012.

Scott Jones worked at Origin Systems from from 1994 until 2001, and was (notably) the art director for Ultima 9 during his time there. After leaving Origin, he founded SHARD Studios, who have been working on the pen-and-paper RPG Shard — an adaptation of Dárdünah; World of the False Dawn — for a number of years now.

Another of the rather sizeable crew at Portalarium who worked at Red Fly Studios, Bill Kirkman worked as a game designer both there and at Lightbox Interactive. A relative newcomer to the gaming industry (he has been a game designer since 2008), he has nevertheless amassed a sizeable body of experience and the praise of his peers in that short time.

Michael Hutchison has worked in the game development industry for over two decades, at a variety of companies including Sierra On-Line, Pandemic Studios (where he worked on Star Wars: Battlefront), NCSoft (where he worked as a world designer on Tabula Rasa), BioWare Austin (as an environmental artist on Star Wars: The Old Republic), UTV Ignition Games, and Vigil Games (where he worked on environments for Warhammer 40k: Dark Millenium Online). He has also worked as a contract 3D artist for Somnio Solutions, maintaining and enhancing a Unity 3D-based demonstration application for them.

In other words, Portalarium has added some serious talent to its development team. The inclusion of Scott Jennings, in particular, is a keen nod to the MMORPG fans that comprise a sizeable portion of the support base for Shroud of the Avatar, and also communicates a certain fundamental seriousness in their web presence strategy going forward. The remaining three bring a very diverse range of talent and experience to the team, but all three are unimpeachably solid game developers whose presence can only serve to make Shroud of the Avatar that much better.

Naturally, we’ve added all four men to our Shroud of the Avatar developers page.

There was also an update posted to the Project Eternity Kickstarter page this week, by Obsidian Entertainment monster designer Bobby Null. Naturally, the post itself is about the process of designing a particular monster in the game, a banshee-like creature.

Thus, enjoy! Pull up the images, pore over them, and enjoy reliving a few memories along the way. The Ultima Codex is grateful and deeply indebted to Chris Launius, and everyone who worked on these books and games at Origin Systems (and elsewhere), for these glimpses into the wide and wonderful range of products that Origin produced over the years.

Check them out!

This video of one of Dishonored’s designers explaining his job to his mother is kind of amusing. Speaking of that game, the Void Walker Arsenal DLC for it, which we heard a rumour of last week, has been released. This isn’t a major update for the game by any means; it’s just an aggregation of the various disparate bits of pre-order bonus content that various outlets included with the game.

This fresh batch of screenshots for Wolfenstein: The New Order do look sweet…but they also suggest that, had the Nazis won the war, we’d have moonbases by now. And giant robot mechs.

There’s a new version of the Morrowind Rebirth mod available, which makes a bunch of changes to the third The Elder Scrolls game…most for the better. OpenMW also had a productive week.

U3.5:PB. Character generator beta released exclusively here! You will need an emulator for the ZX Spectrum +2A to use this file. I’d suggest Fuse:
http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net/#Download
Please report all bugs and typos, and feel free to ask any questions. General feedback also welcome. Plus, which character are you? I got Bard.

He also released this video of the generator in action:

At present, I won’t be updating the Pax Britannia project entry with a copy of the character generator. Once Andrew has released the final version, that will change. For now, if you want to test it out, hit up the Ultima Dragons on Facebook.

He begins thusly:

…a legend sprung up around Drash that consisted of a few known facts woven together within a tapestry of conjecture. Drash, the story went, was an attempt by Sierra to make a quick buck off the Ultima name by releasing a slapdash game to the VIC-20 market, terra incognita to Richard Garriott, without his knowledge or consent. The implication is that someone at Sierra eventually got nervous about this dubious scheme and buried the game — in some versions of the story literally, by dumping remaining copies into a landfill in a tale that echoes the (itself likely exaggerated) tale of Atari’s dumping of millions of E.T. cartridges into a New Mexico landfill that same year. It’s a glib story which seems to explain much about the game’s obscurity while also investing it with a nice dollop of the nefarious, a plus for collectors of an industry that, let’s face it, isn’t exactly rife with the sort of dark secrets and forbidden fruits that their pals who collect, say, vintage records get to enjoy. Yet it’s also a story that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, to an extent that it’s hard to understand how so many bright people could buy into it. There are two serious objections, either of which would make it highly improbable. Together they make it impossible to believe.

The truth, of course, is a little less intrigue-laden, and has a great deal to do with the friendship between Keith Zabalaoui (the game’s author) and Richard Garriott:

Zabalaoui did visit Sierra in Garriott’s company, where he was inspired to start work on a simple maze-running action game. When he eventually showed the finished product to them, they were doubtful. It wasn’t a terrible game, but it wasn’t a great one either…Sierra hemmed and hawed, and then made a suggestion: if they could maybe market it as an Ultima that might help…Garriott was perhaps not thrilled with Sierra at this point in time, but he was always good to his friends. When Zabalaoui came to him with Sierra’s request, Garriott agreed, likely more as a personal favor to someone who had helped him out with his own projects quite a bit in the past than anything else. Today, of course, when the industry is so much more mature and so much more sensitive to the power of branding, one in Garriott’s position would never risk tarnishing his trademark in such a way. But in 1983 both Garriott and his industry were still very young.

He notes that this story has been confirmed by other sources, including Origin historian Pix, who got confirmation from Richard Garriott in person that yes, Mount Drash had been authorized by him.

So…that’s that. Maher goes on to urge those who still have published versions of the erroneous Mount Drash legend to issue corrections thereto. I, for one, am happy to report that the Codex of Ultima Wisdom already has the correct history of the game in the relevant entry.

If you’re curious about the game itself, there have been several previews of it published, although not all of these have been positive. There has also been at least one interview with a developer published in the last week, as well as a couple of developer journals focusing on the game’s Foundry feature.

Also: this trailer, featuring Beholders.

BioShock Infinite was on sale at some point last week, and may still be for all I know. As well, one of the game’s villains, the mechanized Songbird, is available as a plush toy now.

The game has done remarkably well, by the way; it moved at least 3.7 million copies, significantly outselling previous entries in the series. This wasn’t enough to stop Take-Two from posting a loss, mind you, although at least their year-on-year revenue is trending upward.

Ken Levine, for his part, is already working on his next game.

If you haven’t become familiar with Dead End Thrills and its glorious collection of ultra-high-resolution game screenshots, well…you’re missing out. Head on over to check out the latest batch of BioShock Infinite screenshots the author there has put up.

Some other BioShock-related fan efforts worth checking out include these vigor bottles, an amusing take on just how much food the player consumes in the game, what happens when Elizabeth, the in-game companion, drops her polite air, a truly excellent little short film, and (naturally) more cosplay.

EDGE, meanwhile, has published a retrospective of sorts, looking at the genesis of Irrational Games.

Oh, and this guy didn’t like BioShock Infinite, apparently.

Former Big Huge Games composer Grant Kirkhope will be working on the soundtrack for the upcoming Castle of Illusion remake, apparently. He also posted the soundtracks for some of the Nintendo games he worked on to his Bandcamp account; pay what thou wilt to obtain them!

Speaking of Big Huge Games, author R.A. Salvatore discussed the now-closed studio in a recent interview, in which he expressed his hope that someone would buy up the Amalur IP and elect to make another game with it. And if you happen to be a) a PlayStation Plus member and b) European, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning should be available to you for free next month. Do consider giving it a try!

GOG released Eschalon: Book 1 and Book 2 last week.

There wasn’t much news from Eidos Montreal published in the last week, apart from this interview about Thief.

This interview with the creators of Driftmoon may also be of interest to some.

And, as noted in the teaser text for this article, Warhorse Studios’ Dan Vavra has published a lengthy list of things he hates about Skyrim. He’s a remarkably unfiltered, plainspoken person, Mr. Vavra.

A couple choice samples:

RPS: …you’ve gone from being the authority on tough guys in trench coats to their most outspoken opponent. But, I mean, are you really over that stuff?

Spector: My geek credentials are in good order, you know? I love fantasy games and I love science fiction. I love real-world near-future kinds of stuff. But I wanted a change of pace. After Ultima Underworld and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, I was so sick of fantasy. I “never wanted to do another fantasy game” at that point. So I started doing some science fiction stuff, which I liked. After a couple of Deus Ex games, I wanted to do something different again. People expect you to fit in a slot. A square peg only goes in a square hole. But I wanted to do something different.

And:

RPS: …For whatever you might end up working on next, have you given any thought to the idea of removing guns entirely?

Spector: I almost hesitate to say this, because I don’t know if it’ll actually happen, but I can’t tell you how desperately I want to impose the “no weapons” restriction on whatever I do now. Just to force myself and the team to solve a lot of tough problems. Guns and swords, they’re such crutches for us. They’re so easy for us to do. Unless we force ourselves to do the hard things, I’m not sure we ever will. I don’t know. I may not actually do that. I may end up doing a game where you get to shoot lots of people. Who knows? But I’d very much like to impose that constraint on things. We’ll see.

And, as though that weren’t enough, Spector also decided to take a shot at Metacritic, the reviews-aggregation service that has become something of a bane of game developers of late.

“Metacritic, at best, rewards games that are conventional and well understood by players and critics alike,” Spector wrote. “New and challenging things are, by their very nature, disruptive and easily misunderstood. Aggregation of opinion, at best, offers hope and guidance to people whose goal is to maximize profitability but little to people whose priorities lie elsewhere.”

Spector is hardly the first to raise questions about Metacritic, but he might be the most high-profile developer to do so publicly. Last month, Kotaku’s lengthy discussion on the review aggregator’s failings brought the issue to greater awareness. Before that, a study presented at the Games Developers Conference 2013 revealed some of the different ways that average Metacritic scores can be weighted and manipulated.

“When we put our faith in Metacritic as an impartial, scientific measure of quality, we should probably ask ourselves whether the crowd—the crowd of journalists as well as players—is really wise or just mediocre, incapable of recognizing and rewarding the new and different.”

Spector, of course, recently accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas, in which he will help oversee the creation of a new game design academy. And, you know…for all the man’s contrarian positions on certain gameplay elements, he can still argue quite powerfully for changes in the philosophy of game design that would, on the whole, make for vastly better games.

Of course, update 2.1 was slated to release today — has anyone had the chance to play with the new system yet?

By the way, it would appear that SWTOR’s monthly revenue has doubled and then some since the switch to free-to-play. If you’re curious about how the game’s free-play experience stacks up, there’s an ongoing series at Massively looking at that very topic.

Speaking of Star Wars, EA recently signed an exclusive deal with LucasArts, meaning that they alone will be able to publish new titles using that IP. Not everyone is happy about this, although not everyone is rending their garments over it either. And it has already been announced that Visceral Games, DICE, and BioWare have Star Wars games in the pipeline, all of which will make use of the Frostbite 3 engine. So at least EA is diving into the deal with its best studios. One wonders if the as-yet-unannounced sci-fi RPG idea that the former Mass Effect team at BioWare Edmotnon were working on might now be repurposed into this forthcoming Star Wars title. Producer Casey Hudson would likely jump at the chance to return to the galaxy far, far away.

At any rate, EA’s share price certainly reaped some benefit from the announcement.

There has also been some talk of Mass Effect spin-off games, featuring some of the more notable characters from the original trilogy. At present, that’s just a speculative thing, though; don’t put much stock in it.

One thing that you can put a bit more stock in is BioWare’s affirmation that they will be considering the lessons learned with Mass Effect 3 as their Montreal studio crafts the fourth game in the series (not counting the mobile titles). We still don’t know a lot about that game, although Forbes is hoping it won’t be a prequel.

A couple of different sites have also revisited the Mass Effect games in recent days, including D+PAD and Ars Technica. Do check out the Ars article, in particular; it’s a great read.

Oh, and hey…the BioWare store has a snazzy new replica Mass Effect pistol available.

There hasn’t been much news on the Dragon Age front lately, although that should change at E3:

I was unclear! Yes, there will be some DAIII at E3. Not just “stuff.” DAIII stuff.

— Mike Laidlaw (@Mike_Laidlaw) May 7, 2013

And there’s also this blog entry about the Qunari symbol that might be worth checking out. It’s by a guy I sang with in this choir, many years ago now.

Gamasutra’s ongoing look BioWare’s Q&A process also has a new entry this week.