Anybody want to help create Eriadain 2.0?

Sergorn Dragon made the comment to me once that he rather expected someone would pick up and attempt to do another “Bob White Plot” remake of Ultima 9 in the wake of the release of the Mr. White’s design documents. I can’t say I disagree; I figured it was just a matter of time before something like this took place.

Well…just today, Moa Dragon — the man behind the now-defunct Eriadain project (one of the first — if not the first — attempts to remake Ultima 9 using a 3D engine) — left a cryptic comment on his old project’s entry, which teases a desire to see a new Ultima 9 remake start up:

Like, if a team, I don?t know, was to build a remake of Ultima IX using the original plot (hell, the dungeon design docs are available now), would you be up for it?

Wouldn?t that be, like, cool?

Would you join?

I think it?d be cool.

For some reason.

Oh, and I?m serious.

-Moa Dragon

Now, to clarify, Moa isn’t exactly looking to take the lead role in this project, although he’d be eager to contribute. He’s adamant — and correct — that for such a project to succeed, a team has to be assembled, at which point he’d be on board.

So, are there any Dragons and/or Dragonettes out there who’d be interested in something like this?

For the record: I, for one, would recommend him (and anyone else) to use the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, especially with all the work that Team Return have been putting in to generating Ultima-like systems and mechanics for that game.

Just saying.

77 Responses

  1. I’ve read your other article, WtFD, and I disagree that NWN2 would be a good option.

    I’m aware modding is something extremely difficult in other games, however, thinking in a Machiavellian way, gameplay is what really matters… and, in my humble opinion, NWN2 gameplay is weak compared to something like The Elder Scrolls.

    In addition, the orginal Ultima IX was based on real time action. So, if you wanted to recreate the “original” plot without deviating much from what the released game represented, contributing to the Forgotten World team or using Beautiful Britannia mod would be good options. Another option (actual remake) would be to use game creation engines and not mods to released games.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Kobra,

      Granted, I’d love to see someone attempt a remake using Unity or Unreal (both of which are powerful, mature 3D engines supported by large communities and portable to a variety of platforms). The problem with that is that you’d need a really — and I mean really — solid, talented team, because you’d have to build the majority of the games 3D assets, systems, sound, art, textures, and…well…damn NSA everything from scratch.

      A solid, mature team could do it. But…try and find one of those. It’s not that easy.

      That’s also a point against using Morrowind or Oblivion, mind you, until and unless the Titans of Ether make their various systems and assets public. Indeed, I’d almost argue that any team intending to use either TES game would be better served to use Unreal Engine 3; the level of work involved wouldn’t be all that much more.

      I would also agree that people would do well to sign on to Forgotten World and pitch in there. I’d encourage that. But they aren’t really remaking Ultima 9 as much as they’re improving the existing product. That’s a…somewhat different goal.

      I will agree that the vanilla NWN2 play experience isn’t very Ultima-esque, but I would also contend that this can be partly mitigated with good design. Team Return is certainly doing their level best to prove this to be true, and then at a pretty solid pace. (At least as far as systems development is concerned.)

  2. Ender Dragon says:

    If there is any discussion of using a TES engine, it should be noted that the Gamebryo engine used in Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas has since been retired. It was also incredibly buggy.

    Part of the argument for using a game like NWN2, is that in using a newer game, you ensure that future players will be able to easily purchase a copy.

    There is a brand new TES engine that will be released with Skyrim. A team could focus on writing dialog, planning, designing quests, textures, models, soundtrack, etc. and then start placing those in-game in November when that game and engine are released.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      I suspect that Skyrim will suffer the same issue — complexity, basically — that its predecessors do, and so the same basic observation will be valid: it’d almost be better to try do the remake in a standalone, mature engine like Unity or Unreal.

      Not that it isn’t a gorgeous-looking game, mind you. I just…well, I mean, look at the Redemption project. Granted, they are also slowed by the fact that the world they are building is frakking huge…but also, they are basically having to develop almost every system and asset they are using in that mod from scratch. It’s already been a significant investment of time and effort, and will continue to be for probably a couple more years. They could have put a similar amount of effort into a Unity-based game, an they’d probably be as far along with it.

  3. swotavator says:

    well i don’t have the chops to lead this. I disagree with NWN engine. Needs to be open world. Also, wouldn’t it be great to do this in a zero perspective orthagonal 3d like the original?

    what about using dS3 engine? is it going to have an editor? maybe a script to edit the camera so it isn’t three point perspective?

  4. Ender Dragon says:

    If you start with something like Unity or Unreal, you develop EVERY system from scratch. Magic, economy, dialog, AI, etc. etc.

    There are reasons that people start with existing RPG games with toolkits.

    Having followed Redemption for years and years, it seems they have gone back to the design phase over and over again. And their goals were extremely lofty to begin with.

    ThePal has done amazing work single-handedly in a very short time in the same engine. I don’t think it is fair to suggest the TES engine holds anyone back, when there are TONS of large mods with that engine and toolkit.

    Games like NWN, NWN2 and Dragon Age have toolkits, but they aren’t open world. I don’t know how others feel, but having a large, seamless, open world is a big part of the Ultima experience.

  5. Sergorn says:

    Well keep in mind the original Ultima IX – ie the one that followed the Bob White plot, was not to have a fully seamless open world but rather a dual scale map like the pre-U6 Ultima. Which makes a point for NWN2 I guess 😛

    Personally I feel the dual scale approach is just as much Ultima-ish as the seamless world one.

    We also have no idea how combat was supposed to be handled there, but I’m not sure it was meant to be “real time *action*” considering how controversial Ultima VIII was, and this iteration of U9 was very much conceived in light of Ultima VIII’s dissapointment.

    Now in theory I would agree a fully seamless engine for an Ultima game would be the best. Point here there aren’t any engine that allows this. Indeed even amongst professionnal commercial games there are very few games which offer a true seamless – even the elder scrolls games do not since every dungeons or house interior is on a different separate map.

    The only ones I would think of would be the engines of the Gothic series, or rather Risen since it’s the most recent game in this series. However except for Gothic 1, there’s never been any toolset for released for any of these engines – so that pretty much makes it a moot point.

    In other word, the sad truth is to create an Ultima game with another engine: compromises have to be made and we have to accept. We can usually push things farther in the engine that it seems possible (Dungeon Siege proved this, NWN2 as well truly), but the fact of the matter is that we’ll never be able to create a fully Ultima experience as we’d want it without a dedicated engine.

    And using a dedicated engine would require time et manpower beyond what the community has to offer.

  6. Gulluoglu says:

    For any of the games in the later half of the series, I agree that having an open world feels pretty important to capture the original flavor. It’s a boon to establishing and maintaining immersion overall.

  7. Moa Dragon says:

    I am not a huge fan of Gamebryo myself. For some reason, I do not see this as a first person game as a first. I know there could be a way to do it third person, but I’m not certain it would work well. Yes, I know, Gothic 3 was perfect in third person, but we don’t have access to the Gothic SDK 🙂

    The reason I like NWN1&2 is because it has that over head point of view. It’s easy to build maps. It’s easy to build cutscenes. It has lots of scripts available already and it’s easily tweakable. It would be MUCH MUCH easier to do in one of those two engines. There is also Dungeon Siege, but I’ve always been partial to how it feels.

    Of course, there is the open world problem then, and I admit it’s an issue. However, I believe it’d be much easier to create a living world within closed maps (and with all the scripts already available to do so). Also an open world would cause some problems : The U9 Bob White is, in some regards, fairly linear and would bring some issues with an open world : how do you prevent the player going to Terfin? How do you script the two armies gathering near Yew ?

    On the other hand, I would love a U8 remake with the Morrowind engine. It already has the giant mushrooms 🙂

    Anyway, those were just my two cents.

  8. Moa Dragon says:

    And what about Exult?

  9. Sergorn says:

    That’s a good point about linearity – the Bob White plot doesn’t feel like an open world at hole, and the leaked design docs certainly seems to indicate this as well, with obviously a lot of “chokepoint” preventing the player to go to certain areas.

    As I said it does feel to be it was planned to use a dual scale map, especially when you consider you would have needed a Balloon to get to cove, and there were supposedely plan for Dragon Riding – and remember how Britannia’s mainland was supposed to be all broken up as well (albeit in a somewhat different way than the Final game was) ?

    Personally I’d just cross my finger that somehow we have the rest of the design docs leaks someday – if we’d somehow could have the Cities’ design docs and other things like that in addition to the dungeon, it would make building a fanmade game much easier.

    On a side note there is also a good argument for NWN2: it has a strong built-in party support, allows to have Companions talks in interverne with dialogues to simple scripting as well and so on… This is much more problematic with the kind of open world engine like TES or even Gothic (where it works in term of having some NPCs follow you, but don’t exactly feel like an actual party). Though from what I understand the Bob White plot only planed for the PC to have two companions at a time so… perhaps it would work.

    But somehow I must say if I were to play a “original U9 remake” I’d like to have something closer to what the developpers envisioned back then: so overhead perspective, dual scale map and so on…

  10. Dominus says:

    I’d rather see a remake of u9 done with the Ultima 7/Exult engine, than with any of the 3d engines…

  11. Sergorn says:

    I honestly can’t say the idea of an Ultima IX vith the U7 engine would excite me at all. I like the U7 engine well enough, but a new Ultima made with it would still mostly suffer from the same limitations the engine had 20 years ago and we’d be stuck with a Britannia no bigger than U7’s is. So meh.

    However I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before, but one engine which is way too overlook and could work perfectly for Ultima games… is the Ultima Online one.

    In many this is very much like an improved version of what Ultima VII offered: it looks good in spite of its age, it’s huge, completly seamless, offers the same UI as U7/U8, day/night cycles, a freaking LOT of interactivity, and verticality for terrain. It would be perfect for an Ultima if someone would not want to bother with an actual 3D engine.

    Now some aspects would need to be coded in – but it’s doable. The UO engine is more flexible that what I think most people believe it to be and it COULD be used for a single player module if one wanted to. In terme of a U9 remake ther would also be something that would “fit” with it – I mean if you’d play U7, U8 and U9Remake in a row, the engine would even feel consistent with the previous episodes.

    I’m actually rather puzzled no fans ever looked more into the UO engine – I would suspect it would be well received by most fans more than any 3D engine could ever be. I guess it was never embraced by the community simply because of the bias against UO, and that’s a shame.

    I’d love an SP Ultima made with UO.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      I should look at UOX3, the current revision of the “Ultima Offline eXperiment”…it might just fit that bill. The needed UO client is free to download, after all.

      And really, the UO engine is…well…related to the originally-planned Ultima 9 engine, and many of the same developers worked on both. (That’s part of the reason the original U9 engine got canned.)

      Plus, for the 3D-needy, there’s the Iris2 client, which I would imagine a SP-remake using the UO engine could be made to support as well.

      There are some merits to this, in other words.

  12. Sergorn says:

    Heh, in truth had I been aware of the SP possibilities of UO back when I annouced I honestly might have been using this engine instead of wasting time with Dungeon Siege.

    “And really, the UO engine is…well…related to the originally-planned Ultima 9 engine, and many of the same developers worked on both. (That’s part of the reason the original U9 engine got canned.)”

    Huh, was it?

    While the UO has a look which is certainly reminiscent of U8, I was under the impression that it was a new engine made from scratch while the original U9 vas merely used an improved Crusader engine.

    Also it’s logical so many U9 devs were seen on UO, they did shelve U9 on a year to have its team complete the game. Meh.

  13. Moa Dragon says:

    I am not a huge fan of the UO engine, especially over the Exult one. At best, you could get a very clunky party system, cutscenes wouldn’t work right too. Although it does have that overhead feel, and the interactivity would be great… I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I just don’t see it happening.

  14. Sergorn says:

    Heh I wouldn’t underestimate what a talented coder might be able to do. When I see the kind of stuff our lead coder has been able to do with NWN2 I tend to feel one can often do more with these engine that you might expect at first glance.

    Now this is obviously not my area of expertise, but it wouldn’t surprise me if an actual party systeme could be implemented to UO and likewise I see no reasons why scripted events of the kind seen in SI and U8 wouldn’t be possible.

  15. I remember the Exile team had a difficult time with NWN (imagine Ultima VIII without jumping… hehe). And I agree that TES engine is buggy. Like Sergorn said, mod a game, enjoy all the benefits and live and die with its problems and limitations.

    Exult is simple and nice… however, it would feel as if you were playing Ultima VII 20 years ago. Games have evolved (I do not mean they are better now) and remaking something similar to itself or even in a more obsolete way seems to go against the spirit of remaking a game.

    About Ultima Online (which, as WtFD mentioned, was the original engine of the original-pre-Bob-White-Ultima-IX), a guy was using it (about 2 years ago) to create a mod for Ultima VIII. Apparently, he gave up.

    http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/3204/u84gk6.jpg
    http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/7882/u83mm3.jpg

    Someday, I will try doing something in UDK.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      To be fair, I never said that UO and the original U9 engine were one and the same, only that they were related. A quick perusal of the screenshots that Hacki Dragon maintains will show this.

      • WtF Dragon says:

        On the Ultima Facebook page, there’s two votes for the Infinity Engine (!!), one for Unreal Engine 3, one for the Hero Engine (currently being used for The Old Republic), and one for Skyrim.

        And on Twitter, someone suggested Two Worlds as a possibility.

  16. Sergorn says:

    Heh ?

    I actually don’t see much relation between the UO engine and the screenshots at Hacki’s site, since they are all from the Bob White version of the game. This is obviously a full 3D engine there (albeit with an overhead perspective) and it shows, in opposition to UO’s engine (and U9’s original engine, though I don’t think there never were any screen of this one) which was a 2D engine.

  17. Sergorn says:

    There are some weird suggestions.

    I mean the Infinity Engine is nice, but IMO it would pretty terrible for any Ultima game.

    I’m sure Skyrim would work for an Ultima module, but I can’t even begin to image the kind of ressources it would require to have a team to create a game for it.

    Two Worlds would most definitly work in term of crafting a seamless world – it wouldn’t in term of adding a party or anything of the like though and the combat gameplay is a tad too arcadish for an Ultima IMO.

  18. Moa Dragon says:

    Actually, wasn’t U9’s orignal engine just a variation of the Ultima VIII one ?

    The one from Hacki’s screenshots and the one from the final games are, actually, one and the same if I remember correctly. What messed it up was the change of view points, enhancing the need for “real 3D interaction” which messed up pathfinding and removed the possibility of schedules and party members.

    “On the Ultima Facebook page, there’s two votes for the Infinity Engine (!!), one for Unreal Engine 3, one for the Hero Engine (currently being used for The Old Republic), and one for Skyrim.”

    what is this I don’t even

  19. Sergorn says:

    Yeah the original Ultima IX (the one that was to take place in the Guardian’s world with the Avatar gaining followers to become the Titan of Ether in order to fight against the guardian face to face and that was reportedly even more arcadish than Ultima VIII), used a variation of the Ultima VIII engine. To be more precise it used an enhanced version of the Crusader engine… which was already an improved SVGA version of the Ultima VIII engine so…

    The engine of the Bob White version and the engine of the final game aren’t exactly the same, but the final engine was built UPON the 3D overhead engine. As the story goes IIRC, Mike McShaffry after already having converted the engine to 3DFX, tried to zoom in and put the camera behind the Avatar and everyone was so blown away by the result they decided to totally rebuilt the game into a true 3D world. In essence I guess it was a different engine, except it was built over the renmants of the old one (much like say the KOTOR engine was built over the NWN engine, but ended as a different engine) and on a lot of legacy code.

    My understanding though it that it actually was a terrible decision to do that, and I recall Lead Programmer Bill “CapnBill” Randolph saying a lot of issues could have been avoided had they actually built the new engine from scratch since all the legacy created more problems and conflict that what it was worth.

  20. Ender Dragon says:

    If you’re leaning to a NWN2-type engine, I’d also consider Dragon Age. Both are evolutions of the NWN engine. The NWN2 engine may never get used again, and may disappear. EA and Bioware have said the intend to use the Dragon Age engine for some time. Dragon Age 2 ships (with the same engine) next month.

    Just because the original U9 plot called for a linear, closed world, that doesn’t mean you have to do that unless your entire plan is to be as faithful to that design as possible. People were very critical of the linear, closed nature of the shipped U9 to the point that people are working to reverse that.

    And if you’re looking at a basic engine, as opposed to an RPG, you can also look an open source engines like Ogre 3D, Crystal Space, etc. Then you have full control of the engine and the source code to it. You can do whatever you want. And you can easily release on Windows, Mac and Linux since the engine is already ported to all three.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Ender: Dragon Age has a pretty powerful engine…and a craptastic, obtuse toolkit. Though I’m given to understand that its cutscene scripting is pretty solid.

  21. Sergorn says:

    Personally a U9 remake of the Bob White plot would only trully interest me if it tries to stick as much as possible to Origin’s initial design. If people wants something different from what Origin was thinking well… we have Redemption upcoming 😛

    En term of engine, I’ve actually considered Dragon Age before deciding for NWN2 to return – I’ve decided for NWN2 over DA, because in essence the DA engine feels like a step back in everyway except in stricly graphical sense.

    It is missing a lot of feature that Ultima would take for granted. It lacks night&day cycle and time passing by, it doesn’t allows sleeping either, it has a rather crappy unified inventory system and other problems like that. Also it solely relies on cinematic dialogues, which I feel just wouldn’t work very fine without speech (and I don’t picture an amateur project with hundreds of NPCs with quality full speech).

    And on a more personal preference, it also doesn’t offer the kind of explorable overworld map that NWN2 has with Storm of Zehir, and this is a pretty awesome feature (not to mention we actually have boat travel in it thanks to the wonderful effort of the NWN2 community). I think actually if there is one thing that can sell a non seamless engine to fans: this is this.

    Also I have no idea to what extent the DAO engine would be flexible in term of game systems and gameplay. With careful coding you can basically circumvent and change pretty much everything in NWN2 (we’ve implemented our own skill systems, modified the stats so that it only uses STR, DEX and INT, modified the inventory systems, the way experience points are distributed and much more) – with DAO well… perhaps it is possible, but there is no way to be sure at that point.

    So personally I would definitly consider NWN2’s engine to be more interesting that DAO’s. Altough I would definitly recommend DAO’s over NWN1 – in such case it is a no brainer.

  22. Moa Dragon says:

    Speaking of linearity and non linearity, I think during the development of Eriadain we at least had one thing right :

    The game was designed to have two parallel storylines, not counting sidequest.
    -The storyline developped by Bob White, with as much branching out and choices as possible.
    -The eight columns storyline. This one would have been quite similar to U9, with quests in the overworld and dungeons, except of course we would not have stuff about virtues corrupted. The stories would still have been tales about the eight virtues though. And also, contrary to U9 : they would have entirely non linear. You could do any of these 8 quests in any order. Those quests could also end differently while still being marked as “completed”.

    The game would only give you a good ending if you completed both storylines. Basically, you could switch to “linear” and “non linear” parts as you felt. Want the plot to advance ? Focus on the civil war ! Want to explore and get a more second trilogy Ultima feel? Do the columns story! That was our idea, at least. The main plot would take you from town, sometimes remind you that it is important that you adress the eight columns but it wouldn’t force you to do them for the plot to advance.

    Now, about the engines, I have no idea about the DAO one (never played the game). Has there been succesful large scale mods released for it? Could Night&Day and other issues being scripted in ?

    I won’t lie to you : the neverwinter nights engines (1 or 2) have my preferences. But as it was mentioned in the introductory post, I’m merely just a voice here so far.

  23. Sergorn says:

    The plot approach you took for Eriadain seems sensible, altough I’m not sure how the Bob White plot would have worked “as is” since some of the Columns only got deactivated in relation to the plot as I recall.

    On the other, there probably must have been other less linear parts of the game: I mean many locations are not even mentionned in the summary, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been more branching that the plot summary let it sounds.

    @WTF Dragon – are they even planning to release a toolkit for DA2 anyway ?

  24. Sergorn says:

    Oh and I don’t think linearity is as much of an issue as some make it sound – Serpent Isle was pretty much akin to Ultima IX in term of linearity and it still ranks amongst the favorite Ultima games of many fans.

  25. Moa Dragon says:

    Keep in mind that when we worked on Eriadain, we didn’t have the Dungeon design docs, which bring a lot more detail as to how everything works.

    But the thing is, even though the main plot brings you to dungeon, it doesn’t mean you have to do the complete dungeon or complete quest a there.

    But that’s enough for now for the plot derail 🙂

    So, you say you have a coder that’d be available ? I was thinking, what are the Lazarus and U6Project teams up to these days ? Are some of those guys available?

  26. Sergorn says:

    Well I’d be willing to lend Krom I guess 😛 But actually if you (or whoever who would begin such an edeavour) would somehow decide to use NWN2 this would certainly help things up since we have a lot of Ultima-ish systems (like mana, magic, food, character creation, camping and so on) already created that could be used as is. We’ve released them on the Vault for this very purpose indeed – our “Ultima Game System” was very created for this reason, allowing other people to create Ultima modules in NWN2 more easily.

    The Lazarus team has moved on for the most part (altough I did manage to get Nytefall to do our character portraits and intro stills :P) – for instance Tiberius is now the Lead Designer on Big Huges Game’s RPG Reckoning which is pretty awesome. I’m not sure if other team members (providing they can be tracked down) would be interest, especially since I recall many of them weren’t exactly fonds of the Bob White Plot either.

    The U6P Team AFAIK is still working on the 1.1 release of the game which is supposed to fix/improve quite a bit of things.

    And of course anyone interest working on an Ultima fan project, should really come and join Team Return, we need you! (Yeah sorry for the shameless plugging :P)

  27. Thepal says:

    Wow. Considering the length this thread got to in less than a day I’d say that people are definately interested in the subject.

    Unfortunately, I can’t think of any modding engine that would really lend itself to a project attempting to recreate the “original design” of the game.

    NWN2 – Not open enough, and I don’t know if I’d call the combat “Ultima-ish”
    Oblivion – Only decent perspective is first-person, and that is not an Ultima viewpoint (besides UW). Combat is not really like Ultima either.
    Skyrim – Same as Oblivion
    Dragon Age – Same as NWN2 (and isn’t made to be modded on this scale)

    Basically, there is no game engine that allows for modding (that I can think of) that could be used to create an actual Ultima-like game.

    With that said, for me, Ultima was always about the story and characters. So does it really matter what engine it uses? I have literally forgotten whether I was using Exult or Oblivion when playing through my Serpent Isle mod. I always have both open so I can compare what I am doing, and occasionally I’ll do something silly like press “F3” in Oblivion to teleport somewhere else.

    Ultima is not about the engine. Never was. UW2 felt as much like an Ultima as U7. In my opinion, U9’s perspective was also fine. It never made me think “This isn’t like Ultima”.

    So, don’t choose an engine based on which is more Ultima-like. Work out which one lets you do what you need to, and is more likely to result in a finished product.

    For me, that was the Oblivion engine. I’m as close to an expert with it as you get, and it has inbuilt schedules and all sorts of things I can make use of. For a solo project, Oblivion just works for me.

    NWN2 works for others. There are a lot of resources already made that could be used, and for a team project it is probably the best idea. The less the team has to do the more likely it will be completed. With NWN2 you can almost just focus on the story at this stage.

    I wouldn’t recommend Morrowind. Even if the Redemption team opened up their scripts and such to the public, the engine is still too much work to deal with. For a schedule script to work, it needs to be ridiculously complicated. I’m not sure if NWN2 is better, I s’pose, but I know that Morrowind would be enough work that it would bog down development a lot.

    And we don’t know what Skyrim will be like. I got lucky with Oblivion, but who knows if Skyrim’s development kit (if there even is one) will be good for making an Ultima (though if you plan on doing design and dialogue and such first, then I suppose 9 months isn’t too long to wait to make the most Beautiful Britannia yet)

    Anyway, choose an engine that works for your team. If you want a true Ultima-like engine, then you’d need to make an actual game, not a mod (Unity/UDK/whatever)

  28. Sergorn says:

    “I don’t know if I’d call the combat “Ultima-ish””

    This is a question as a whole but… what makes an “Ultima-ish combat” really?

    Ultima I to VI used turned based combat. It got improved at each instalment, but it’s basically a kind of combat system that isn’t used anymore.

    Ultima VII and Serpent Isle used what is basically auto combat, which pretty much sucked. In essence though I’d say this was very much in a way a (crappy) ancestor to the kind of semi real time combat seen since Baldur’s Gate – so I would argue NWN2’s combat fit well in comparison (now balancing it is another matter altogether)

    Ultima VIII was a clickfest: not too bad, but nothing to write home about.

    Underworld I&II used a simple but effective hold button to attack, which made things more actionish, but also fun.

    Ultima IX was somewhere between U8 and UW I would say – except it is rather slow paced. It used an interesting concept of skills and attack opening ups, and monsters being more suceptible to one kind of weapons and/or attacks which was definitly interesting but unfortunately umbalanced. It also had parrying but it never seemed to work properly (one thing to improve Forgotten Worlds guys :D)

    Buy I guess what I’m trying to say basically: is that there isn’t really such a thing a “Ultima-ish combat”. The series has been too different from episode to the next in that expect to decide a rule.

    “So, don’t choose an engine based on which is more Ultima-like. Work out which one lets you do what you need to, and is more likely to result in a finished product.”

    Yup, that would be my advice as well. Chose the engine depending on the story you want to tell, how you want to tell it, and what you want to accomplish in term of design. There are compromise to be made, there will always be with a toolkit, but I’d argue any engine could create a proper Ultima as long as it gets the feel, the universe and the story right.

    Personally I was tempted for a time to use Oblivion… I didn’t because the party was too important in my vision for Return – I wanted to have companions with a story to tell and role to play in the story, like the original Serpent Isle. This wouldn’t have worked in Oblivion, or at least not in the way I wanted.

    So I choose NWN2, I had to drop the seamless but I gained the overland which I think is a wonderful Ultima feature. It’s not perfect but nothing is. And it’ll do.

    ” For a schedule script to work, it needs to be ridiculously complicated. I’m not sure if NWN2 is better, I s’pose”

    I believe it is – there is a waypoint system that has existed for years on the NWN2Vault and it works very well in allowing NCPs to do a lot of different things and move arround depending on the time of day. I don’t know the specific of its coding but our lead programmer told me it’s very easy to use and implement.

    -Sergorn

    • WtF Dragon says:

      I toyed around with that same waypoint system; it was first built for the original NWN. It’s pretty darn slick, actually, and works well “out of the box”.

      That’s one other advantage of the NWN games (1 and 2 alike): the community that exists around them. It’s quieter now than it once was, of course, but there’s still a TON of stuff left online that will be useful to aspiring modders, and new developments are still ongoing. I mean, someone figured out how to implement Crysis-style shaders in Neverwinter Nights, and published that mod recently. I don’t know why, but there it is.

  29. Maybe a cross-platform engine and toolset should be created from scratch (or using an open source existing engine) that could be used for any Ultima remake/spinoff. It could be made flexible enough to accommodate different perspectives (overhead, over the shoulder and first person) and include all the features and interactivity from the various Ultima games.

    Eriadain 2.0 (or whatever) could be the initial force that drives its creation, but the secondary goal would be to produce an engine that can be used by others. That would drive more people to help produce it and save future teams from endlessly reinventing the wheel. The engine could also be made component-driven so that various features could easily be added in the future without having to modify one giant code base.

    While this would entail more work for everyone initially, in the long run it’s the best use of limited resources and should result in many more Ultima projects being finished instead of dying as most do. It would also be cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows) and not require that the end user buy some ancient, proprietary game just to play it.

  30. Dominus says:

    sorry, but creating an engine is the one plan that will fail 100%. You need really experienced programers for that, people willing to sacrifice a lot of their time (and from time to time a baby goat or so). And while programing the engine you’d need to create free content for the engine (art…) or no one would look at it at all.
    I bet for every failed Ultima project you will find about 50-100 failed game engines.
    Prime example is Exult Studio, not exactly failed but in development for years now and not much happened there as well, except “just” some mods (excuse the just, I know it is hard work)…

  31. Sanctimonia says:

    I find your lack of faith disturbing.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      There might be some merit to going with a homebrew engine; certainly, I could see how crafting an engine from scratch would, at least, let you implement everything — combat, scripting, etc. — in ways that you felt were authentically Ultima-like. You could, basically, tailor the engine to address most or all of the various concerns expressed in this discussion about all the other engines that have been proposed.

      The drawback, of course, is that it would take a person (or a team) of monumental talent — and then a person (team) of monumental talent who would be willing to release the product of his hard labours for free (since ultimately, nobody but EA can actually sell anything under the Ultima label — to actually craft the engine.

      Monumental talent? That’s certainly true of Sanctimonia and its developer; Kevin is a very talented guy who is achieving some pretty amazing results in a relatively short span of time. And it was true of Peroxide’s ERA engine as well. But that bit about releasing it for free…well, we know that’s why ERA was ultimately canceled. Sanctimonia will be free, at least if I correctly interpret its “about” page, although its “about” page does talk about a donationware-type monetization scheme. subscription-based.

      So basically…in the strictest technical sense, yes, a team could build and use a 3D engine to craft an epic Ultima 9 remake. But man, that team would have to be one helluva talented group with a lot of technical prowess. That’s…not an expectation you can place on the average project team.

      And in a sense, it’s might also be like reinventing the wheel. There are mature 2D and 3D engines out there which can publish across multiple platforms, for which development kits are freely available. Some of these, as has been mentioned, are open source — Irrlicht and Ogre, for example. Some of these are not open source — Torque, Unity, Unreal — but still make their development environments freely available, and permit any created games to be released without a license fee so long as the releasing person or team makes no money from either directly charging for the game, or indirectly through means like website advertising. The nice thing about some of these engines (Unity especially, it seems) is that they have established communities of people creating new content and systems all the time, many of which can be obtained either for free or for a pittance. (See here, for example.)

      Granted, even going this route would still take a really talented team, though at least they’d be starting with an engine already in place. I would generally agree that it would be better if remake projects (or any Ultima-themed projects) avoided the use of published games and their associated toolkits, since obviously those games get old and, as we’ve seen with Dungeon Siege, fade into relative obscurity as they become harder and harder to procure. Some games — both Neverwinter titles, for example — aren’t in the same boat as far as availability goes since they’re available via digital distribution, but are still vulnerable to becoming incompatible with newer operating systems. (Try and get Neverwinter Nights running under Windows 7 and you’ll see what I mean.)

      Which brings us back to a point that’s been made before: there’s no perfect solution; there is only the solution that is best in a particular circumstance given the team and the resources it can bring to bear.

  32. Dominus says:

    btw, is Sanctimonia and Kevin Fishburne the same user?

  33. Thepal says:

    “Personally I was tempted for a time to use Oblivion… I didn’t because the party was too important in my vision for Return – I wanted to have companions with a story to tell and role to play in the story, like the original Serpent Isle. This wouldn’t have worked in Oblivion, or at least not in the way I wanted.”

    It is possible in Oblivion. My main issue was having them join in with conversations, but I solved that by creating a system that allows conversations to take place outside of the normal Oblivion conversation system. If you take a look at the demo of my Serpent Isle remake you will see that often a conversation will involve several people, and they even walk around and do things while talking depending on the situation.

    As for this game engine idea, I honestly think it is a bad idea unless the person/team planning on making it plans to use it commercially. It’s hard to be making something that takes so much work and not get anything out of it. The Ultima 1 project from years ago is an example of what happens then. They had created an engine and realised they could use it for a commercial game instead and Ultima 1 was no more.

    I battled with that myself with Infinity Eternal. I s’pose even to a lesser extent with my current Serpent Isle mod. With all the time that has gone into remaking Ultima games, I could have made my own game by now (maybe several). Currently, I have actually finally started making my own game (using the UDK) with the plans of selling it.

    Considering I’m a full-time teacher, it is interesting juggling my Serpent Isle mod and that game (and a couple of other just as large undertakings I’m… undertaking). They are all kinda working together though, which is helpful. My modelling skills for example have been increasing rapidly due to me creating objects for a number of different projects. Some can even be used cross-project. I’m at the point in my life that I can’t just use excessive amounts of time and effort on a free project without it making me feel like I’m holding myself back.

    I think a lot of remakes die because people don’t realise their life will change before the remake is completed, and it ends up getting abandoned. I’ve gone off-topic a bit, but to sum it up, *too* much effort into a remake is a bad idea. If you’re going to put in excessive effort, then give us a new game to play instead of a remake of an old game.

  34. Sanctimonia says:

    DOMINUS: “btw, is Sanctimonia and Kevin Fishburne the same user?”

    Yes. I forget to sign in a lot and post things as me before I had an account on WordPress. Sanctimonia is my project and is both an engine and game similar to what I suggested we (the community of crazy Ultima fans) create. Mine’s 2D, so it doesn’t really fit the bill I was describing. Currently my team includes myself and my friend who is doing the music, so I must choose my battles carefully.

    @THEPAL:

    A lot of what you said is very insightful. I’ve experienced it myself over the years, as my vision often outweighs my abilities and time (u5tes3 mod, for example). The solution I discovered was to take this into account when planning the project, particularly with regard to asset creation since it’s the biggest time sink. It’s been discussed a lot in the indie circle and usually comes to using procedurally generated content and otherwise setting the bar to something realistically attainable given the resources at hand.

    There is a fine line between skilled fans screwing around with a fun idea and fans who are so technically adept and driven that by the fruit of their efforts conclude they should be doing this professionally. I bet a lot of the creators of projects indexed at Aiera have fallen on both sides of that sword. Some of us here desperately want to make games, and would abandon our principles and projects because it seems more practical to enter the gaming industry with the skills learned messing around with Ultima projects. I don’t blame anyone for it, as it’s a dog-eat-dog world and we must survive.

    I do think however that as far as Ultima projects are concerned an incredible amount of talent and labor has been wasted on failed projects. Were but a fraction of that time and work put toward an “Ultimate Engine” it would have been finished by now and we’d probably have more completed and enjoyable fan projects than the current lot. Yes, it’s ambitious, but as a labor of love and if started as an open source project it should deliver a higher payoff than any other project started thus far.

    To put some perspective on what I’m saying, my project is open source, and will always be, yet the content I’m generating will be copyrighted traditionally. Sanctimonia is a for-profit project that will require a monthly subscription. The source code for the client and server will be available under the GPL (not sure about v2 or v3 yet), so people will be able to use it as they please for their own projects. To play -my- project, however, they’ll need to subscribe. That way I can avoid starvation, continue to create games for people to enjoy and simultaneously contribute to the gaming community and whatever projects they endeavor to create themselves.

    I guess what it comes down to is our community’s collective skill, drive, and willingness to stand by our principles. Now please commence in ripping my argument a new one. Humility is never overrated. 😉

  35. Thepal says:

    “Now please commence in ripping my argument a new one.”

    I don’t really see anything in there I don’t agree with. So, sorry 😛

    A lot of energy has *definately* been wasted in the Ultima remake community. The time/effort I myself have put into my various remakes could have been used finishing off a project the size of Redemption. The time/effort the entire community has put in (that has never come into fruition) is more than the entire Ultima series combined.

    So, yeah, we *could have* put that time into creating an open-source Ultima-like engine. But – apart from the fact we have very poor organisational skills – we all tend to have very different ideas as to what makes an Ultima and an Ultima engine.

    Now that it has been mentioned I’m getting the itch, which I really don’t want. I want to finish off Serpent Isle so I can finally say “I finished one of my Ultima remakes”. It would be nice though, getting some talented individuals from the community and creating an engine (though I think I’d want to create a completely new game, not an Ultima, in that case). But I’m not switching projects again, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it). I’m finishing everything I’m currently working on before I consider another project.

  36. Sanctimonia says:

    Well said WtF.

    As far as using an existing engine as a starting point, OGRE is an open source rendering engine, not a game engine. As such it would probably be the best choice for creating an original Ultima engine. You could literally incorporate OGRE into your own code base, adding all the programming logic and open source input/audio/networking libraries as necessary to create a fully free skeleton for an Ultima game. OGRE would be your “camera” and everything else would be pure Ultima as you saw fit.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Okay, that’s it. Come Monday, I’m re-opening the idea that Sergorn and I have been discussing: adding to Aiera a library — a Digital Lycaeum, if you will — of assets that would-be Ultima project teams can use in their projects. 3D assets, tunes, GUI elements…whatever. I want it to be available here.

  37. Sanctimonia says:

    @THEPAL:

    Not used to people agreeing with me…awesome. 🙂

    THEPAL: “But – apart from the fact we have very poor organisational skills – we all tend to have very different ideas as to what makes an Ultima and an Ultima engine.”

    That’s a really good point. Everyone here started with Ultima x (not X, of course) and ended with Ultima y, which produces a wide range of expectations, favorite Ultimas, and ideas about what an “Ultima” is really about. Some like story, some interactivity, some pure nostalgia for whatever version they first played, etc. The conversation about what “Ultima-like combat” is is a testament to that.

    The itch is always good, but what’s better is (as you stated) finishing what you started. Anything else is to admit defeat, or to say that you were on the wrong path to begin with. If it’s within reach, I say finish it!

  38. Thepal says:

    That is an awesome idea. It’s about time we all stopped reinventing the wheel. I’ll add what I can, as I can.

  39. Iceblade says:

    Something that has made the Thief Fan Missions as common and awesome as they have been are the repositories of combined assets, tutorials, and readily available help.

  40. Moa Dragon says:

    So, if I were to get back to the main topic, it appears that Neverwinter Nights 2 would be the most sensible and favorited choice?

  41. Sslaxx says:

    For now. Maybe. One thing against using commercial games is that not everyone who’d be your potential audience has them, even moreso for any expansion packs that are required.

    Equally, creating an engine from scratch might well be madness, for well-stated reasons. It took, for example, The Silver Lining’s team 10 years to get to this point (albeit they had a couple of major setbacks during that time); they used Torque to build their engine with.

    I dunno how much effort would be needed to use this to create an Ultima (other than a lot), but http://sauerbraten.org/ Cube 2 could be worth looking at. There is (was?) the beginnings of an RPG mod for it that you might want to check out.

  42. Sergorn says:

    I’m biased but I would say NWN2 is the best compromise at that point – especially if you want and overhead game with a party.

    Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much incoming in terme of RPGs will Toolsets. Dungeon Siege III is coming, but it doesn’t look like Obsidian intent to release a toolset for it. Most of the other RPGs that have just been or are gonna be released (Two Worlds 2, Arcania, Risen 2, Reckoning….) will most likely don’t have toolset either. So that just leave Skyrim – which should be pretty great in terme of capabilities, but in essence it’ll basically be an improved Oblivion so…

    Also while it’s more a personal I don’t feel cinematic 3D dialogues work very well without full speech nad no games nowadays offer good ol text dialogue. (Note this is also one thing I like about NWN2: it had BOTH and used both ingame: cinematic cutscene dialogue for important dialogue and quest and text for secondary characters and secondary quest and it allowed the game to a depth rarely seen in RPGs nowadays).

    -Sergorn

  43. Severian says:

    I played Sauerbraten RPG aka Eisenstern and it is very uncomplicated. The same FPS with rudimentary dialog and XP system. Doom 3 have better RPG mods than that.

  44. Moa Dragon says:

    Okay, let us start with the NWN2 hypothesis. I will be “planting” the idea on various RPG related game forums in the next weeks and will be sure to return to you to tell you the results 🙂

    If we can enough people interested, there is no reason not to get the ball rolling.

  45. Thepal says:

    Yeah, good luck.

    I gotta say, it’s gonna be weird to see Britannia exploded and Skara Brae floating off into space… Personally, I think there were some improvements in the final U9 story :p (hence why Infinity Eternal was drawing from a variety of different things)

  46. Iceblade says:

    Sounds like it, unless you want to wait a few years for Forgotten World to finish Ultima IX toolkits and upgrades.

  47. Fearyourself says:

    WTF: probably also a page on little things that would be cool to have. Sub-projects or side things the main projects have no time to do or undertake.

    That way, on a whim one could code in a part of it or something. And those sub parts could see the light of day 🙂

    A ultima code base a la nethack would be fun too.

    Jc

  48. Moa Dragon says:

    Let’s keep this thread alive.

    http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12730
    http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=56142

    Those are two threads I’ve been using to poll for ideas. So far NWN2 (and even NWN1, which has its points, I must admit) seem to be the leading idea along with… Dungeon Siege, which also makes for a compelling case.

    What are the disadvantages of NWN2 (I’m not too familiar with it) over NWN 1 ? Do we have a nice variety of tilesets ? You have to keep in mind that if we do this, we’ll do 10+ towns and dungeons, and we can’t afford to have them all look the same (even if looks aren’t all that count).

    I’ll look some more in other places. Maybe if we can reach a decision in the next couple of weeks, I can set up a call for people.

  49. Ender Dragon says:

    NWN1 will look dated. NWN1 isn’t officially supported on Windows 7. And NWN1 is already hard to find and purchase. If the project takes a few years to reach completion, it may be even harder to purchase then.

    Dungeon Siege suffers the same issues.

  50. Sergorn says:

    I can’t think of a single reason to use NWN1 over NWN2. NWN2 is basically a much much improved version of the NWN1 engine, with a lot more capabilities and versatility. It has built in party support, bigger zones, external that can actually offer 3D design rather that just being tilesets and much much more.

    The only “advantage” I could see to NWN1 is taht it includes some creatures than don’t exist in NWN2 and since it is lower poly it *might* be easier to get 3D artist, but even that is a long shot.

    Regarding Dungeon Siege – I would argue its only advantage compared to NWN2 is its seamless nature. Not admitedly, it IS a pretty big advantage… but I would say not enough.

    For starter Dungeon Siege really is a crappy engine to work mean. I mean really. The toolset suck and building anything is cumbersome at best while NWN2’s well… it’s very user friendly: wether for creating tileset interiors or exteriors areas (where if feels like playing Populous almost :P). The way DS works it also annoying for a support stand point: any slight change to the module require an entire new version of it and kills any compatbility wiht previouses saves – this is basically a QA nightmare.

    And yes it’s very dated: not just from a graphical standpoint – I mean even the UI seems a pain to use now. Also some versions of Dungeon Siege – notably the Legend of Aranna ones – tend NOT to work under Windows Vista and 7 at *all* unless using an illegal crack. This does not bodes well for future compatibility and let’s face it: a DS game will take years to make.

    Also on a personal level: I’m not sure I could stand another Ultima game with Dungeon Siege. There is only so many tiles and placeables available and it was already somewhat tiring at time to see the exact same buildings everywhere in U6P after already seen them all in Lazarus.

    While Dungeon Siege III appears to be seamless, I don’t expect Obsidian to release a toolset for it it’s using their own Onyx engine which AFAIK they’ll want to use to a variety of different kinds of RPGs.

    So personally I would basically sums up a possible Ultima module to three choices:

    – Neverwinter Nights 2. It has drawbacks, the most important being the lack of a seamless world, but it’s versatile.
    – Oblivion. It has a seamless world, but would probably be more difficult in scope to handle
    – Skyrim. I mean if you’re considering a Oblivion project – I would instead suggeest waiting for teh next TES since it should offer much more stuff and versatility.

    One thing to keep in mind for anyone planning to do an Ultima project, is that whatever engine you will choose: there will be compromises to be made because in the end there is no perfect engine that would allow to recreate a “modern Ultima experience” like everyone would want it. The important thing is to decide in what way you want to compromise basically.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      One other thing about NWN2 is that the need to add dozens of hak paks in order to get the terrain and content you want is…lessened. It’s not gone completely, especially if you want variety in your caves and dungeons, but it is lessened.

      Terrain in NWN2 basically requires no additional custom content, unless you want specialized 3D assets. Building and painting terrain are now brush-based functions, rather than tile-based, and the included palette of textures allows for the creation of basically every kind of terrain type and area imaginable. That is one major improvement over NWN1, which offered some pretty lackluster default options for outdoor terrain. You shouldn’t need much in the way of exterior-focused hak paks for NWN2, except (as I say) if you want custom buildings or placeables.