Ultima X: Odyssey Gameworld Video
Some (most?) of you may have already seen this, but I’ve only just stumbled across it. It’s a flythrough-style video of the gameworld from the canceled Ultima X: Odyssey that I just happened to stumble upon:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6B63lCNL2E&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Like as not, it was a gorgeous-looking gameworld.
This is apparently a development reel directly from Liquid Development, an art asset and 3D studio that has produced content for numerous high-profile games. Do check out their UXO page when you get a moment. I’m particularly fond of the Reaper model they developed.
Whoa I had never seen this video before and it sure looks amazing!
For all the bashing it was getting by some “hardcore” Ultima fans, Ultima X really was shaping to be a great and groundbreaking game.
Even now many years after the fact I still wish it had not been cancelled 🙁
-Sergorn
I remember the game had a really positive press event where they actually put the game in the hands of the journalists. Just how canned the demo was, I don’t know, but it seemed to be in good shape. I just don’t get why they canceled this thing.
The reason behind the cancellation of Ultima X is actually pretty simple.
The game had a set deadline for March 2004. EA wanted the game out at that date and had even set up the monthly fee for the game with special discount for those who would be playing both UO and UXO at the same time.
Unfortunately the deadline was a tad too unrealistic – Origin’s team did a tremondous work to have it done, but it had been in active development for merely a year at that point. So basically they wanted a fully done MMO done in a single year which is kind of crazy, altough reportedely the game was close to beta at this stage.
The main reason for this deadline really is that the close down of Origin in order to centralise EA’s studios at Redwood was already planned for April 2004 – so they had to have UXO finished by that time, at which point the live team already set up at Redwood would have taken over.
But of course the game wasn’t ready. So at that point EA intended to move the dev team to Redwoord. Unfortunately the vast majority of Origin’s people understandably refused to move to California and leave their home which left Ultima X… with no dev team. At that point EA closed down Earth & Beyond with the full intend to transfer E&B’s live team to take over UXO’s development. But since things never turned out as planned, most of E&B’s developpers left Electronic Arts after the closure of the game.
So a couple of month after Origin’s closure that left EA with an incomplete Ultima X: Odyssey and basically no development it to work on it. Continuing the development would have meant to hire a whole new dev team, which at that point would have been close to basically restart the game from scratch.
So they pulled the plug on Ultima X Odyssey, probably against their better wishes becaused everything indicated that EA Corporates really believed in the game at that time.
But it was the most economicaly viable decision. A shame but understandable.
(It must be pointed that it really is a very different situation than the Ultima Online 2 debacle, who had a full dev team which was fired after the game was cancelled from one day to next once EA became afraid UO2 would take players away from UO – which is of course why UXO took a very different and original approach to the MMO genre)
-Sergorn
Thanks, as always, for the history lesson, Sergorn.
You know, watching this video again…I’m struck by how it looks almost as good as WoW, in terms of graphical quality. WoW has the edge, of course, but not by a fantastic margin.
It also had the same kind of “cartoony” look WoW had really. In any case Unreal Warfare’s engine was pretty much the cream of the top back then so it’s no surprise UXO would have looked taht good.
Nice
Lots of stuff i’ve never seen before.
Nevertheless i’m still happy this was never released.
I mean… at the time when this was made Origin wasn’t the same anymore. Who knows what they would’ve done to the lore.
Normally you think: What could be worse than the Elves in UO? But this game would’ve had to compete with WoW, which is raping it’s background story every few patches just for a little bit of new content.
On the other hand: This game still looks pretty good for a MMORPG (then again i guess MMORPG graphics haven’t changed a lot since 2004… especially when i think of SWTOR)
The lore of Ultima X was actually pretty good. It did not have the brillance of UO2’s, mostly because it felt a bit rough around the edge (probably due to the fact that the development had been much quicker than UO2), but it was well thought out with nice ties to the main series’. Sure it had elves – but their background story was actually written in a nice way to tie it with Ultima lore.
The people doing Ultima X really were big Ultima fans actually, indeed you can’t get more Ultima-ish that UXO’s concept (which really was basically “Ultima IV Online”) so I don’t see anything that would have been wrong with the lore provided you remain open minded.
I mean it’s not Samurai Empire 😛
To be fair, there are Ultima precidents for both samurais and elves… Sort of. Exodus had all sorts of fantasy races, elves included (fuzzies and bobbits even, which when I get around to making a real RPG I vow to have them as races). And one of the early Ultimas, I think Ultima 2, had a Japan facsimile location.
As for raping Warcraft’s lore… Warcraft never had much of a lore to rape anyway. Nobody plays WoW or Warcraft for the lore, so I can easily forgive them for changing the canon whenever they want.
I think Handshakes raises an interesting point regarding what we’ve come to know and accept as being “canonically” Ultima.
Generally speaking, it would seem that most Ultima fans regard as canon anything from Ultima 4 onward. This makes sense, to some degree, due to the fact that hey, that’s when the Avatar emerged as the main character of the series. But there were three (four, if you count Akalebeth) entries in the series which predated Quest of the Avatar, which featured some pretty out there stuff in terms of enemies, characters, NPC races, settings, and even weapons.
UXO borrowed some of these elements…Elves, for example. They look strange to us now, seeing as how we mostly equate the idea of an Ultima with the setting, creatures, NPCs, and weapons we came to know and love between Ultima 4 and Ultima 7…but they aren’t actually as foreign to the Ultima series as a whole as we sometimes think of them as being.
It was much the same for Goblins and Lizardmen in Ultima Underworld 1, if you think about it. Or Dwarves, for that matter. That game also gave some excellent backstories to explain the appearance of such creatures, as I recall…
Good points, Kenneth. Even moreso the fact that people never seem to get upset at the differences to the ‘canon’ in the Underworld games.
I think it’s because they were both well designed, well accepted games!
‘Canon Passion’ can be a blessing or a curse for game developers I suppose. When players get *that* close to a storyline, sequel writers are put in a very compromising position. Do they keep everything exactly the same, and risk upsetting them, or do they put in some variety, and risk upsetting them? 🙂
The thing is the canon in Ultima has always been rather loose, which ends up with everyone kind of having their own view of the canon, even the developpers.
Just look at the Ultima Codex really – as a rule we need to consider all the game canon, and it’s really a mess to reconcile. Indeed I feel there is some stuff considered canon in there that probably wasn’t by the developpers (such as the way Britannia changed multiple times before getting its Ultima IV) but it’s complicated.
It’s kind of the same thing with race – on one hand you could consider that Sosaria had all these non humans race back in the Age of Darkness (I mean for all we know the Land of Dark Unknown could be the happy land of Elves and Bobbits :P), but on the other it would also makes sense to consider it only had humans… but it’s really a matter of preference because there is no definite canon about this.
Ultima needs a reboot.
Sergorn –
Left you a comment on your Ultima Adventures “About” page. Didn’t see any email contact or other way to reach you. Would like to speak to you offline. Thanks!
-Odkin
I noticed that aye, I’ve been meaning to get back to you about it. I’ll do it later today.
No one seems to dispute savage empire or martian dreams’ cannon either. Let alone the gameboy games.
Ultima 2 took place on Earth and you gated from planet to planet, and Ultima 1 had space flight. Even if they updated that formula, I would play a sequel Ultima Effect. As long as I can powderkeg a pub on some alien planet, and run around town with a scythe or rolling pin with different animations, it would be a killer Ultima sequel.
What keeps me from playing new rpgs is how big the worlds are. Running from city to city, or from one end of town to the other reminds me of sailing in windwaker. Games like Ultima and Gothic proved you didn’t need a big world to make it seem like a big world.
When I want to go from one building to another it shouldn’t take me more than 3 seconds. That is why Ultima series will always be the best rpg.
I have never played UO, but when I saw orcs in u9, it kinda erked me, unlike the rest of that masterpiece. I could only imagine elves. BY THE VIRTUES! I would rather get the blue tassel in pirate combat, then jump into a kilrathi space ship and become a space ace than see elves in my Ultima. Correct me if I’m wrong, but, weren’t elves and bobbits only options you could pick in the menu in ultima 1-3? I mean, you never stumbled upon bobbit town, no one refers to themselves as elves. And you’re always the stranger, even in the manuals. You’re probably not the same dude as the avatar. Bilbo Baggins found a moon gate and stumbled into Sosaria.
Actually I don’t think I’ve even seen anyone consider the Runes of Virtue games canon heh.
There is also some dispute about the World of Ultima canon – I remember it being a point of contention when Lazarus was being designed as some of the team members refused to acknoledge the Shadowlords as seen in Martian Dreams and indeed, they stuck with the Shadowlords’s gender of New Breed’s fanfic instead of the canon one.
Ultima II is also another point: some people do consider it takes place on Earth, many other prefere to consider the whole Earth thing never happened and it solely passed on Sosaria.
This is because of this stuff that canon discussion on Ultima is nonsense to me, and why I felt the reaction to Ultima IX’s decripencies were overblown. The canon of Ultima suck really, it’s never been fully consistent and was mired with contradiction from games to games. They usually did a good job of putting things together; but it often meant retcons and contradiction to fit the kind of story intended in the latest game so…
“I have never played UO, but when I saw orcs in u9, it kinda erked me, unlike the rest of that masterpiece. I could only imagine elves. BY THE VIRTUES!”
But Orcs *are* traditionnal Ultima monsters. They’ve been in every Ultima games up to Ultima V until they dissapeared for no reason in Ultima 6&7. If anything I was more puzzled at their dissapearence in Ultima VI than in their reappereance in Ultima IX.
-Sergorn
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but, weren’t elves and bobbits only options you could pick in the menu in ultima 1-3? I mean, you never stumbled upon bobbit town, no one refers to themselves as elves. And you’re always the stranger, even in the manuals. You’re probably not the same dude as the avatar.”
That’s rightin Ultima 1-2 you could be Human, Dwarf, Elf or Bobbit. In Ultima 3 you could be all that along with other odd races such as Fuzzies.
And yes the whole “The Stranger if the Avatar” bit is actually one the series’ biggest retcon that was brought forth by Ultima VI. There are some canon-nazies who try to make it seem like it was always the case but that really is BS.
Up to that point, it was clearly stated that Ultima IV was the Avatar’s first journey to Britannia, and Ultima V the second. The stranger was clearly identified a someone different, and it was even implied in Ultima IV manual that it was a different person who faced the triad of Darkness each time.
I’ve actually never been that fond of that retcon – I felt it completly diminished the point of Ultima IV if you also happened to be the hero who killed Mondain & all.
I would argue Ultima IX was the only point which gave a good reason for having the Avatar=the Stranger when they come up with that origin tied to the Gem of Immortaly. But then they cut it. Bah.
I have read in old PC magazine that Ultima 10 at first was singleplayer game based on Ultima 9 engine. Is it true ?
Definitly BS.
There never was any plan for an Ultima X back at Ultima IX’s release – Richard Garriott wanted to do his X (which mutated into Tabula Rasa) and the rest of OSI was focused on Ultima Online 2 as far as Ultima goes.
Also at the time Origin has already been turned in an Online-only company following UO’s success. This spelt the doom of many projects (notably the latest offline Wing Commander games that were in plannig stages) and ironically Ultima IX was only kept alive because EA felt it would potentially bring new players to Ultima Online. So there is no way Origin would have been planning a single player Ultima X at that point.
As for reusing the Ultima IX engine, that is even more unlikely considering what a mess it was. Richard Garriott had expressed intention of reusing the Ultima IX engine to remake the entire series and release them as episodic games over the Internet, but since the end Ultima IX’s development was a mess and he left shortly after, this never came to pass.
Ultima Online 2 did reuse some of Ultima IX’s art assets though (notably as I recall the Skeleton and Lich models), but it was a brand new engine built from scratch.
So really Ultima X was always planned as an online game. As a matter of fact, during it’s early planning stage it was actually codenamed “Ultima Online 3” which suggest it was only decided later during development to make it a direct sequel to Ultima IX.
Sad, that they never been remade 🙁 But if they do, this site wouldn`t be necessary 😉