Hardcore Gaming Wraps Up Their Ultima Retrospective
You all may recall the massive retrospective look at the Ultima series that I linked to a while back. Well, in the last week or so, Robert “Bladed Edge” Kosarko has wrapped up the series with a look at the legacy of Ultima and an exclusive interview with Richard Garriott.
Here’s a wee excerpt:
What were those first 28 games like? Since you didn’t have the Apple II’s graphics, would they be something like text adventures or dungeon-crawlers with ASCII graphics like dnd?
Ah… they looked a lot like Ultima! Just “*” for walls, ” ” (blank spaces) for hallways, “$” for treasure and “A” for Giant Ant as examples. It was a lot like a top down tile game, but made with ASCII characters. Also you had to wait 10-30 seconds for each new “frame”… very low “framerate”. 🙂
It’s hard to even imagine what programming was like in those days, having to wait while your data went to some hulking giant elsewhere on phone lines. What were you trying to do differently with Ultima I? And how did you and Ken Arnold distribute the workload?
“Hulking” is the right word… by today’s standards, unbelievably slow. Coupled with that 300 baud accoustic modem! Ken was my connection to assembly language. Ken wrote the first tile graphic copying routine in assembly for me. While his later work in Ultima music is still great, it was that one subroutine that put Ultima on track!
Do read the whole thing, of course. And, when you have time, give the retrospective a thorough read. It is exceptionally well-researched, covers just about everything one could think to cover about the history and development of each Ultima title, and is very generous with links to numerous Ultima-related websites (this one included, yes, but only as one among many, many peers).
Caveat: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I think Bladed Edge’s look at Ultima 9 is a bit biased and a bit unfair, for reasons that I’ve brought up in various comment threads and don’t particularly feel like re-hashing here.
Biased is an understatement indeed. You’d think after a decade people who would okay to have a more objective look at Ultima IX and the things it brought (or at least tried to bring) to gaming.
Oh well…
Oh, you two.
There’s no real bias here. He lays out all the facts, including mentioning that the basic gameplay is fun, but reaches a different conclusion than you prefer.
I’m less than convinced.
His write-up includes the usual complaints about Ultima lore, and it has been demonstrated that Ultima 9’s offences against canon were not really any worse than those committed by previous entries in the series (Hacki’s page nonwithstanding). He alternates between lambasting the game as an awful, barely-playable bugfest* and calling it a fun action-RPG romp.
* I’ve never understood this criticism. Dragon Age: Origins crashed to desktop more times during my recentish playthrough of it than did Ultima 9 when I last played it through to the end. Heck, I’m following a guy on Twitter who is playing it in WINE, and even he has only suffered a few crashes. Under WINE!
It’s not strictly about retcons or the canon. It’s that the whole storyline is, well, derp. He even admits what you’ve said.
Retcons are a hallmark of Ultima, certainly, as each game tended to retcon elements of previous in order to create a larger and consistent whole. The story changes in Ascension, however, make things worse instead of richer. Massive plot holes, a near-total disrespect for continuity, exceedingly poor writing, missing details and a disregard for the core elements of Ultima are legion.
As for bugginess:
Here’s the deal. When an open world, free-roaming-type game is buggy, it’s more noticeable then when a heavily scripted game like Dragon Age has bugs.
In the former case, you think to yourself “Why is this flaky game letting me do weird, buggy things?” (not just crashes).
In the latter case, it’s more like having a scratch on the DVD of a movie. Nevermind, just restart and continue playing from where it stopped, no big deal.
You’ll note that Bethesda games also have a greater reputation for bugginess than Bioware games, for this same reason.