New Gallery: Ultima Online 2 Screenshots
[singlepic id=789 w=550 h=307 float=center]
Below Logos
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 a number of screenshots — many of which have not, to the best of my knowledge, been seen or released prior to this point — from the canceled Ultima Online 2.
Most of the shots pertain to two cities — I would assume they are cities — within the game, Logos and Junction. However, a few other locales are also represented.
Way to go.
This game and Ultima X had potential. It’s a pity the story of Ultima IX spoiled a bit the end of the trilogy, but its engine and gameplay were excellent.
I must be going nuts… but the map shown there slightly reminds me of The Legend of Zelda: A link to the past.
As a sidenote, WtFD, Piclens changed its name to Cooliris quite sometime ago.
Yeah, I know about the Cooliris name change, but thus far the plugin developer hasn’t made the adjustment. And frankly, I could do it myself…but it would just get overwritten in the next plugin update.
Glad this game died. Looks Ultima-lite. I can’t imagine how it would have been any good.
swotavator: It’s difficult to say. It looks dated now, obviously, and thy might have been an issue for it after a couple years of play. Then again, maybe not…it would’ve depended on the updates they pushed, I guess.
As to what kind of game it would’ve been, there are few people who can truly speak to that from experience, the vast majority of whom are former Origin developers. That’s not to say it wouldn’t have sucked, but it is to say that we really have no way to know. It’s also possible, for example, that it would have been all sorts of revolutionary.
We just don’t know. It did LOOK interesting, at least.
They have some really wacky architecture going on there.
i remember seeing the original mcfarlane character concepts when they came out. How long ago 8-9 years? When i first saw them I almost vomitted. I think after being let down by U8 and U9 this game just represented the final last straw to me. Felt to me similar to like taking Wing commander and morphing it into a side scrolling arcade game.
Yuck. Ninjas in a post-industrial landscape. Two of my least favorite themes and two of the least Ultima-like things I can imagine.
Ultima Online 2 had a very unusual look (at least as far as the Jukaran lands goes… The Britannian areas of the game looked *very* much like traditionnal Ultima lands, with obvious cues taken from Ultima IX), but that was the point of the game.
As far as violating Ultima goes, I think all the crappy UO expansion we got before Mythic took over were far worse than anything in Ultima Online 2, which was just trying to bring Ultima into a new and more original direction.
In term of lore, background, and story – it was Ultima to the core though and brought very interesting philosophies and moral dilemas. The trilogy of books based on UO2 was actually just very very good because of this. The writers behind Ultima Online 2 were *huge* Ultima fans, and it showed in every aspect. There was such an amount of lore used and referenced that I remember a lot of fans regretting theses guys hadn’t been in charge of Ultima IX. And really one thing one can recognize about the game and that the whole context of this cataclysm pulling together the present, future and past Britannia was just very original and could have lead to very interest thematics to be explored.
My main area of skepticism about Ultima Online 2 really… was that there is no way its tremendous and overdevelopped background could have been put to good and proper use into in a MMO environment. This should have been used as the basis for an Solo RPG instead.
As far as gameplay goes the game sounded for a much improved and updated vision of the Ultima Online desing philosophy – which meant it definitly would have more interesting that the Everquest-like crap we’ve been having in the last ten years. I suspect it would have crashed and burned just like SWG in any case.
Oh well.