The CRPG Addict Is Playing Ultima 5!
A few people have brought it to my attention that well-known old-school gaming blogger The CRPG Addict has started his playthrough of Ultima 5 recently.
Just for the record: yes, I have in fact heard of the Addict and his one-man mission to play through “every PC role-playing game ever released”. I’ve been following him since he did his Ultima 4 playthrough a little over a year ago. For those unfamiliar with the scope of his undertaking, see his post explaining the rules he operates by in determining which games to play, and how to play them.
Anyhow…it’s true; the Addict is playing through Ultima 5 now. He didn’t get very far into the game (I gather it’s his first playthrough); his party was mauled by pirates and then wiped out by an encounter with a band of skeletons. Still, he seems very much sold on the games, and his thoughts on both his joy at returning to the Ultima world (“It feels like coming home.”) and his praise of the fact that the core of the series was set in Britannia (“You would think that it would be boring to play a series of four games (Ultimas IV-VII) in the same game world, but instead I find it enormously rewarding.”) will resonate with every Ultima fan.
So, take a moment, check his site out, and bookmark it; he’ll be posting a lot of Ultima 5-related content over the coming days and weeks!
(You might also want to check out the Addict’s playthroughs of other great — and not so great — Origin Systems games, including: Ultima 3, Ultima 2, Ultima 1, and Times of Lore. He skipped Akalabeth, for the most part.)
Interesting someone mentioned Sierra Online and Ultima in there. Could you imagine it if Activision owned Ultima? It’d either be as neglected as the old Infocom games, or turned into some soulless parody of itself ala Blizzard’s titles. At least EA Bioware appears to give a damn about Ultima, even if it is (as it should be, really) just for the purpose of making money; at least they appear to care in doing so.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll wonder aloud yet again why the old canard concerning “making money” gets trotted out, as though it were an inherently negative thing.
Every corporation — and most people — are concerned with making money and have it as a goal. It may not be the primary goal, and it hopefully isn’t the only goal…but it is a goal, and then a necessary one. Any developer has to make money at some point, or else that developer is not going to be able to develop much more.
The correct quote is “the love of money is the root of all evil”, and that’s certainly true. But the goal of making a profit is not intrinsically evil or good, just as money is not intrinsically evil or good.
Money is a tool, useful for particular things. Used well, it enables — like any good tool — the creation of great things, including great games.
The problem with today’s market, is that inevitably some company realizes they can make more money by selling an inferior, rushed product for the same price as a good one, and the buyers will, at least for a while, lap it up.
Of course, eventually an upstart company shows up and releases a game so obviously superior, that they take over the market and sweep away the competition. And the cycle begins anew.
In retrospect, we call the periods between these two events “Gaming Dark Ages”, and wonder how people could have been so stupid.
What I was trying to get at is that it’s totally fine to make money, but large corporations tend to favour making money over quality products. Can’t say I’d blame them, as much as I dislike that, but it does tend to mean a dearth of things I’d like to buy.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was getting at, you two…the distinction between making money by milking (and ruining) a franchise, and making money as a consequence of wanting to make great games that people will go out of their way to play.
EA was arguably guilty of the former to some extent back in the day; the same can’t easily be said now. Activision has followed the opposite trajectory, it seems, and then over about the same time frame.
I just read his review of Pool of Radiance. Ironically, I had started that game again a couple of weeks ago and lost miserably while trying to get my party back to safety 🙂
I think I’ll have to try again 🙂