New Gallery: Ultima Online 2 Adranath Figurine
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Courtesy of Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum, and thanks to the hard work of both him and the team at the Wing Commander CIC, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present four images — three of which are of art prints, one of which is a photograph — of box art and the action figure of a character called Adranath which was planned to be released as promotional material for Ultima Online 2…or Ultima Nexus, as it was called during this phase of its development.
Adranath
This character was the product of Todd McFarlane’s early involvement with Origin Systems, which began during the development of UO2. Ultimately, many of the concepts McFarlane came up with ended up being included in the Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge expansion to the original Ultima Online, after UO2 was canceled. Before that cancellation occurred, however, plans were hatched — and graphic assets were generated — to launch a series of action figures based on major players in the UO2 narrative.
Amusingly, as BanditLOAF from the CIC has pointed out, the figurines were actually released at some point; the game they were supposed to be from never got that far.
These figures did come out… you can pick them up for a song on eBay (presumably because no one wanted UO2 figures).
Interesting; I figured the picture of the figurine here was a one-off.
Good to know; I’ll update accordingly.
I figure they were just released a UO figures rather than UO2 ones.
As I recall Origin had strong contractual obligation with Todd McFarlane, which is why they had to use the stuff he had created even after UO2’s demise – hense that terrible Lord Blackthorn’s revenge addon.
-Sergorn
Yeah they rebranded a couple UO2 tie-ins as UO products (that just had nothing to do with UO). There was a trilogy of novels too…
Blackthorns Revenge came with an unpainted McFarlane figure too when it came out… and Origin gave those away as promos forever (I probably have ten of them…)
You’ve got to love McFarlane’s style.
Or at least I do.
Has there ever been a writeup about why UO2 was cancelled? I’d love to hear that story.
Here’s some info about the books; http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/The_Technocrat_War,_Book_1:_Machinations
I got all these toys when they first came out. They are gorgeous but whatever they are made out of droops slowly over time. Which is a problem for big things with spindly legs like the dragon.
I don’t think there has even been a detailed explanation for the cancellation of Ultima Online 2. I can tell you this cancellation came completly unexpected by most of the team. It was basically decided overnight – with team members basically answering questions on the boards about the game one day… and packing their stuff the next.
The official reason was that it was cancelled because it would compete with Ultima Online and that this would hurt UO – so they decided to focus on that one instead.
I think it was a bit more complicated than that though. While development was supposedly going well (it was close to Beta when it was cancelled as I recall), it was also very costly and taking much more time than anticipated.
UO2 on the whole was a costly project in any case because it was incredibly ambitious with plans for lots of licensed products; figurines, a McFarlane comics (both ended as stuff for LBR in the end), novels, an animated film (which was cancelled over budget reasons) – and you just have to see about all the work that was done into the background so that it could be used for multiple stuff: you usually did not do that for MMOs at the time.
But I figured this must have been costly for EA, especially with development on the game taking more and more time.
And there were more directly commercial reasons I think. The MMO bubble was already starting to collapse at that time with lots of big MMO projects being cancelled one after another and it was becoming clear that this was not the “El Dorado” or gaming that many imagined after UO and Everquest’s success (Ironically, we had conducted an interview with Starr Long a few weeks before the cancellation for the UO2 website I was running at the time… and when asked “What will set UO2 appart from the competition?” he jokingly answered “Our game is gonna be released for sure!”). So I feel EA was getting worried about this and began to feel there might not be enough room for both UO and UO2. You could see already that there was concern about the two game competing with each other when they had it renamed to “Ultima Worlds Online: Origin” in order to set it appart from UO.
To be fair, there was probably some valid concern because while it offered a very different kind of setting, UO2 was still very much a continuation/improvement of the UO desing philosophy – so it would have probablye cathered to the same kind of players and definitly not the EQ crowd.
This is really why when they ended up making “Ultima X: Odyssey” (which was codenamed UO Next and even UO3 for a while) a couple of years after that, they took very careful steps to make a kind of MMO that was *vastly* different from Ultima Online (or indeed from any kind of other MMO made, even since) with a stronger focused on plo and stories to be played alone or a small group and a more action packed style of gameplay. It was clear they did not want to suffer the same fate as UO2, and the had even planned subcription plans that offered reduced prices for players who would play both UO and Ultima X. There were even rumors about the possibility of transfering a UO character to Alucinor for a while.
Of course Ultima X did end up being cancelled to “focus on UO” – but the actually reason this time was that they couldn’t find a new team to continuthe project after Origin closed down and most of its employees refused to move to California (they had actually closed Earth & Beyond to get its team on Ultima X… but most of them left EA as a result as well, which meant no more team for Ultima X).
On a side note I gotta that the Technocrat War trilogy of novel was very much awesome. They were well written book on the whole, but most importantly they really showed the potential of New Britiannia as a fantasy setting. It was orignal, offered some thought provocking thematics and some create philosophy worthy of the Ultima name (and notably totally nailed the Eight Virtue aspect through the story of the main character’s quest to find redemption through them).
I’ve always felt actually the UO2 setting would have made a great setting to restart the Ultima series as a single player game after Ultima IX – indeed I have often considered starting a fan project based on UO2’s background… but I’m too much of a fan of Serpent Isle.
Interesting, thanks.
It sounds like a real shame that UO2 was cut. It also sounds kind of ironic that they would cut UO2 because of budget concerns and the MMO bubble starting to collapse, yet they are now producing the most expensive mmo ever made at a time when there hasn’t been a particularly successful mmo since you-know-who started dominating the market.
The funny thing is that I think UO2 would have a shot at being decently successful right about now. It has been just about proven to the point of being a physical law of nature that refried WoW doesn’t work (unless it is free2play). The quirky/different design philosophy of UO2 or UOX might have been able to really shake things up and attract a following. Maybe.
I feel both UO2 and Ultima X could have worked really. The Ultima name still carried some name back then, and Ultima X’s rather unique approach could really have brought new players to the genre I think.
Regarding the fact that EA is now producing the most expensive MMO ever made, to be fair it should be noted that The Old Republic had already been in development for years before the Bioware buyout and that LucasArts is also bringing a lot of money in this.
(Not that I kinda got to wonder how happy the highers ups at both EA and LucasArts are about that parternship with the concurrence considering this certainly was not intentional to begin with!)
To a casual Ultima fan (any franchise’s bread and butter) it just seemed… off. It had a big ‘why’ problem for me–why was it better than Ultima Online, why was it reimagining the Ultima franchise in this new direction and so on. I’m not saying I expected to be a terrible game–it was my game development heroes working on the second best video game franchise of all time, I assume it would have been amazing–but there was miscommunication in the marketing. I wanted a bolt of lightning that would crystalize my need for the game and I never got it.
The original Ultima Online, by comparison, was marketed brilliantly with so many ‘of course!’ moments during the rollout–remember the first time someone explained it as “Ultima 7, but with your friends” or when you saw that beautiful Hildebrandt painting with everything going on at once and just ‘got’ the potential of the concept. Someone UO2’s marketing forgot that that was necessary and decided to give us videos of monsters dancing instead. (Which, at least among my group of Wing fans, then became the iconic thing for UO2…)
To be fair UO2 did not sit well with many hardcore fans either – there was like a LOT of yelling when that picture of Cyber-Blackthorn first appeared. The lore of the game did show a lot of love for Ultima though. (Of course there are some fans who could never be happy with anything EA does with Ultima in any case… even the original UO was really HATED by a lot of hardcore old school Ultima fans).
Regarding the marketing of the game I can’t compare with UO (I didn’t even had the Internet at that time so….), but then I don’t think UO2’s marketing even had time to go full swing so perhaps they might have handled things better once the game would have been closer to release.
I think for the casual consumer, UO2 might have been one of those issues of being you know… “too original”. The idea of mixing a prehistoric, fantasy and steampunk was great and daring, but the result was not exactly the kind of stuff you see every day, which might have just make many people go “Huh?”
It reminds me actually of the original version of Tabula Rasa. You know the futuristic fantasy one, with its mecha unicorn, this weird techomagical world and its musical weapons. It looked awesome and very original (and in truth… it was reminiscent of UO2 in many ways – not a coincidence I guess since they shared a lot of the same team members), but while it got very positive reaction from the press when it was showcased at E3… all the players were like “What the fuck is this sh*t !????” – which lead the game to be redesigned with tha generic Halo crap because the original version was deemed “too original” (and pretty much killed all the interest I had in the game as well).
Originality is good, but I think it just doens’t resonate well with the mass of players sometimes.
Too original is exactly right. That was certainly part of my reaction at the time–wow, what a unique and artistic and likely interesting take on Ultima… that I have absolutely no interest in paying a monthly fee to explore.
Hah–and the name change towards the end was just so impossibly weird. You felt as if someone wasn’t in on a joke and you couldn’t tell if it was you, the development team or EA high command. I’ve saved this text from the UO2 website justifying the switch it forever and it still boggles the mind: “What’s that you say? Isn’t Origin the name of the company? Yes it is. Won’t that be confusing? We don’t think so. By the time this game ships, we won’t be putting the Origin (the company) logo on the box. This will be our first game going out under the new EA Games logo. We expect this to be a game with a lifecycle spanning for many, many years, so the Origin name can live on.” I’m ALREADY confused, guys!
Apparently Steampunk is the new mainstream genre trend, too–too bad they aren’t doing the game right now.
The Tabula Rasa unicorns! They were also GIANT: http://www.wcnews.com/newershots/full/tabularasa03.jpg
That whole project was such a shame, it feels like wasted time. I’ve never managed to justify the original claim that it was the game that Richard Garriott had always wanted to make with the fact that they could fire the design team and change it from a fantasy game into a sci-fi shooter. How can it be the same movie if they’ve changed my character from a convenience store clerk to a jittery eskimo firefighter? Was he never really involved with the design, did he give up on an original idea that’s still in his head or did he just decide that a FPS MMOG would be better (and honestly that *is* a good idea–I can’t defend how it turned out in TR’s case, but it’s a good concept).
What ever happened to Carly Staehlin? I got the feeling she took the blame for the unicorns… but she was always very cool to us when she was at Origin.
I have to agree that as a medium to hardcore Ultima fan, and a player of UO at the time, when the UO2 stuff started coming out, I was thinking, “WTF is this?” Cyber-Blackthorn? No. That’s not what I wanted from Ultima; I wanted more high fantasy, and a return to the virtues.
In a sense, I suppose it was a bit ahead of its time, what with the recent popularity of steampunk.
I’m pretty sure the original take on Tabula Rasa *was* the game Garriott wanted to make.
I mean it was very much the exact same concept he had envisioned for “X” when he was still at OSI, and it also had a neat Ultima vibe from its background and setting (notably the fact that the story was supposedly taking place “right now” with the player actually playing himself, pulled into this strange war to save the universe).
On a side note I also wonder if the release and success of Guild War did not push NC Soft to have Tabula Rasa move into a different direction in terme of gameplay, because fictionnal background aside – the original concept of X/Tabula Rasa was very much the same thing as Guild War: a plot intensive online game with a central hub where you’d mean hub with hundred/thousands of people that would lead to instanced quests/adventures you could either play alone or with a small party of friends… and that was very much NOT the final game.
There is some irony in all this really – Garriott was probably the first person who ever brought up the idea of instance gameplay… but by the time his game was out, everybody had already done it. Heh.
As for Carly Staehlin, yeah she took the fall for the original version AFAIK – whe was the lead designer on it and got fired along with some other people (notably lead artist Scott Jones which has been the lead arist of Ultima IX as well) when the game shifted direction. Not sure what she has been doing ever since