Richard Garriott: What Went Wrong With Ultima 8
Eurogamer gets the scoop (again!) from Ultima creator and interview-giving machine Richard Garriott. This time, the discussion is about what went wrong with Tabula Rasa…and with Ultima 8:
“In the case of Ultima 8, that was the first game I did as part of Electronic Arts,” Garriott said, “and Electronic Arts, their whole success formula is based upon yearly releases of sports franchises just before the beginning of the sports season. Since their whole success and sales and marketing comes from accurately timed seasonal launches, the pressure was very heavy to accurately time a seasonal launch for Ultima 8.
“We shipped Ultima 8 more or less on time, but the only way we got there was by really cutting out huge swathes of the game all the way to the point where the cloth map was completely unrelated to the map of the real game because we threw out so many bits and pieces of it. So Ultima 8 was, frankly, unfinished — I mean dramatically unfinished. And in hindsight I look at it and go, if we’d really just finished it properly — even the movement, the jumping that was in the game — had we done it less hacked and more accurately, we would have had a Diablo-style success a year or so before Diablo.
“Too bad, spilt milk,” he rued, “I get the blame – I get the appropriate blame, I’m the top of the food chain. It was my decisions. But that’s my excuse or rationalisation.”
Now, to be fair, his criticism of EA’s marketing model is a tad dated, except of course in the case of EA sports. Although, even there, EA has recently demonstrated willingness to sit out a season of a sports franchise if the alternative is releasing a bad, buggy game. The times, as they say, are a-changin’. And as far as RPGs go, EA has long since abandoned the tight release cycle concept. But, at the time of Ultima 8’s release, yeah, that was the reality on the ground.
One interesting point that could be made here is that while Garriott notes that the game shipped “more or less on time”, its release date — March 15, 1994 — was actually three months later than Origin had originally intended; Garriott had originally wanted the game to come out in the run up to Christmas, 1993. The game was in a questionable state even with the three-month extension in its development timeline; one wonders what it would have been like with three months less work done on it?
It’s also worth noting that the jumping was, indeed, meant to be a part of the game…but it sounds as though they system was still very much a work in progress at the time the game shipped. Which is kind of understandable: it was a rather new and complicated gameplay element. By the time the Crusader series kicked off, it had been more or less smoothed out in the engine.
A point that has been made before on the site is that Richard Garriott, while seemingly either reluctant or unwilling to discuss Ultima 9 in the context of that game being a failure, is often willing to discuss the shortcomings of Ultima 8. That’s certainly the case here. And while he does apportion some blame to EA, he certainly doesn’t try and spare himself any liability either. And he recognizes another reason why people are, shall we say, sceptical about his current venture:
But as Garriott accepts, you’re only as good as your last game – Tabula Rasa.
“Unquestionably, I have the dual benefit and curse of having been in the business long enough, and having some big enough successes, that my name Richard Garriott and or Lord British still have what is called name recognition value, and fond memories at least of some things in the past.
“On the other hand,” he said, “since Ultima Online was a fair time back and Tabula Rasa had its troubles, it makes perfect sense that people would go, ‘I’m cautious as to what my expectations are.’
“I recognise that, and I’m perfectly fine if people are cautious.
That’s my official position on Ultimate Collector: cautious. As a kick-off point for other Portalarium ventures, I can see its potential and think it could be great. If, that is, it takes off.
Of course his criticism is dated. It’s dated around 1994. Why would EA’s current release schedule have anything at all to do with the success of Ultima 8?
A few observations :
1. It seems to me Richard Garriott just don’t get that the issue fans had with Ultima VIII wasn’t that it was “unfinished” – they took issue with the fact that it was an overblown action hack’n slash game rather than well… and Ultima game. A few month extra month of development wouldn’t have changed it – it’d still have been the same game, and it still would have pissed off fans just as much as the game we had. At least he seems to admit it since he likens the game to Diablo – though I would argue they did get a Diablo-style success with Ultima VIII in the end, but that *was* the issue really!
2. Now he’s getting a bit contradictory with Tabula Rasa! For the last few months he was going about how the original Tabula Rasa was the game he wanted to made but that NC Soft management felt it was too “out there” and original, hence the generic sci-fi approach. Now it sounds like the PR talk he was doing back when the game was being released.
3. It IS rather puzzling that he never brings Ultima IX when he mentions interferances from the upper chain. While we can take it as a good sign that he was more satisfied with Ultima IX on the whole, there’s no denying that it showed a more direct consequences of the whole “corporate deadline” aspect since the game had a “ship or kill” and it got released in a state of buggyness and incompletion that was much much worse than anything in Ultima VIII. Unless he really does considers that he couldn’t have done more with Ultima IX in the context, but it’s weird it’s never being brought up.
Sergorn:
Or unless his opinion of it is tempered by the fact that it was a wild experiment with some pretty hefty technology, which I would think is at least possibly the case.
Or he really has an affinity for the game as is.
If we’d been given U9 in its at-release state but powered by an isometric engine, I suspect he’d be harder on it.
It wouldn’t. I think WtF was just emphasizing the chasm between the old EA and the new EA. Many people, myself included, were reluctant to acknowledge that things changed at EA, so great and lingering was the anger. He says after that, “But, at the time of Ultima 8?s release, yeah, that was the reality on the ground,” supporting Garriott’s reasoning.
Obviously someone needs to crack the whip to get a project done in a reasonable amount of time, but releasing an unfinished, rushed work is never a good idea. I guess the staff at Origin grossly underestimated how long it would take to pull off their design goals and got burned for it.
Sanctimonia:
I’m told by a few people — and have seen it confirmed in a few articles by key xOrigin people — that this was often a problem. Origin had at best a marginal ability to set realistic deadlines.
I am willing to wager that R.G. doesn’t talk about Ultima IX because if he didn’t start UO at the same time as IX & show it off to EA Corporate, then we would have had the Ultima IX that would made up for Ultima VIII & not the Ultima IX that we have. The original iteration of IX would have been -THE- game & history would have unfolded a lot differently.
In my opinion, this especially makes sense considering UO was Origin’s demise & R.G. basically wants to make a new UO for social networking so he needs to tread carefully.
Heh, I don’t know. I’ve honestly never heard Garriott expresses dissatisfication of the Ultima IX we got, and considering UO was such a groundbreaking game he wants to create a spiritual sequel too, I seriously he would trade UO for the original U9 if he could unlike fan (not to mention that I think BW U9 would have been just as controversial but nevermind that)
What is weird about him not commenting on U9 is that he does without hesitation ramble about his evil overlords (yes he used these exact same terms!) EA and NC Soft about U8 and Tabula Rasa, so bringing U9 on the table wouldn’t change anything and it’s certainly a great exemple of corporate meddling.
But I mean he could certainly express some satisfation for the game while still expressing frustration at the state it was releaed due to the deadline – that would fit with what he says with U9.
I don’t think I’ve seen Garriott mentions Ultima IX since the very early days of Destination Games (where it amounted to “I’m aware of its shortcomings, but I’m proud of what we accomplished”) which is kinda weird since it’s ons of his most controversial releases.
I think it’s disingenuous for him to bring up EA sports at the start, implying that that well known ‘assembly line’ game development has anything to do with why EA would want “seasonal releases.” Yes, EA puts out a new Madden every year… because that’s the nature of that particular game. What sports fans want is to play with the current crop of players/teams/stadiums/rules (or… whatever changes year to year.)
But that’s a niche thing and EA recognizes that sports fans are distinct from other audiences. The reality is that EVERYONE wants a “seasonal” release for their game and it has nothing to do with the success of EA Sports. We’ve known since the dawn of time that a game which ships in time for Christmas sells many, many more units than one that ships in the first half of the year. Depending on your margins it can be the difference between a hit and a failure.
… but, as already noted, EA /didn’t force that/ on Ultima 8. EA let them miss Christmas to finish polishing the game. In fact, on the whole they were incredibly good about this during their ownership of Origin, well past Ultima 8’s release. But EA was still a business and there was clearly a kill point in their sales projections that they would hold games to. You can delay Ultima 8 three months because they still believe it will make back its budget… but any longer than that and you’re burning money you can never make back just continuing to employ the team. Because as much as we’d hate to admit it, fixing the jumping puzzles doesn’t ACTUALLY impact sales. Richard Garriott is as close to a genius as you can find in game development, so I’m absolutely sure he understands this.
(I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t a little bitterness on his part about this, since Chris Roberts’ games and their much higher sales projections were able to pull off delays with regularity. EA let him miss Christmas *three times* while he was building two of the most expensive games ever made… and they could do that because they knew Strike and Wing Commander would sell enough to make up for extreme delays. Ultima just wouldn’t.)
I might be mistaken but from the various itw Garriott gave both lately and a decade ago, I’ve always had the impression that EA didn’t force anything for U8’s release – that basically he could have delayed the game had he wanted, but did not do so because he didn’t want Origin to look bad in front of their new overlords. I could actually believe that because let’s face it, U9 kept being delayed until it got its “ship or kill”.
Also I feel there might have been another thing that went into it: Serpent Isle. SI was released in April, while originally planned for XMas, the game got delayed quite a bit and I recall Warren Spector mentionning it impacted on U8’s development, so perhaps they didn’t want to have yet another Ultima delayed at this point so soon.
I’d like to have some clarification about the comparison between U8 and Diablo. I don’t get the impression that U8 was ever designed to have Diablo’s intuitive, single mouse click based interface with pathfinding. I think Diablo would have failed if your character controlled like the Avatar in U8.
If you’re going to do an action-RPG you need to get it correctly from the beginning with an appropriate design, instead of coming from the position of an awkward compromise between U7’s controls and hack n’ slash.
Well the comparison to Diablo is obvious methinks: a game with isometric view, focused on dungeon crawling and clickfest combat. Now of course Ultima VIII has more adventures and action elements, and Diablo was more about the random dungeon/loot thing, but in truth Diablo always felt to me like some mix between Ultima VIII and Rogue. I actually remember some reviews of Diablo back then making the comparison too, saying Diablo felt like an Ultima VIII where you’d have remove all plot elements to focus solely on a better focused combat aspect.
(I think the stair bits was more of a collision issue, than a control issue… I’m probably just crazy but I like the good ol’ arrowish hold the mouse to move kind of controls over simple point’n click)
I’m probably just crazy but I like the good ol’ arrowish hold the mouse to move kind of controls over simple point’n click
It worked well in U7’s engine. In U8 it was totally incongruent with the type of gameplay they seemed to have wanted to offer.
A designer with more vision could have made U8 a worthwhile action-RPG. It still would have been a poor Ultima game, but at least it wouldn’t have been broken/borderline unplayable.
I’d argue that shipping to please EA without some demand was probably the worst possible decision… because once they smelled blood, it was just a matter of time. As long as Origin was turning out hits EA seemed willing to let them alone. I mean, we’re talking about a company that THOUGHT they were buying ready-to-ship Strike Commander in 1991 and ended up having to spend an extra 18 months of development money on it… which they forgave for its success… but everything started to go to pot after this specific embarassment, after which EA started handling Origin’s management more directly.
Origin’s next wave of projects following Ultima 8 all had EA ‘political officers’ assigned to them… including and especially Wing Commander III, which ultimately shipped EARLY (unheared of before or since) and was the best selling PC game to date for a period. So you can understand where they might be coming from wanting to better police Origin’s development cycles. Now as time went on, EA wanted MORE control over these projects and that was very harmful–but there should have been a happy medium rather than a ‘let the artists spend as much money while they create.’
I think the Diablo talk on Garriott’s part is counter-intuitive. Of course Pagan is like Diablo: that’s what EVERYONE was trying to do at the time, build a game that’s more accessible to a wide audience instead of just the roleplaying niche. That’s not the hard part–Diablo was a massive success because it did it /the right way/ and cracked the code. All Garriott’s saying here is that he started from the same obvious point… but he explicitly *didn’t* hit on the magic spark that Blizzard did. It’s like claiming you came close to inventing Facebook because you also had an idea for a website.
(I think citing Diablo is also an example of something Garriott (and Roberts) has in the past been great at: immediately recognizing a good idea and turning it into a brilliant one. Ultima’s development is very much the story of seeing lots of little pieces that already exist and putting them together in a way better than anyone else had. He’s a genius for that… unfortunately it goes against the linearity of time in this case… but the action-based Ultima released six months after Diablo would have been spectacular!)
(And yeah I know none of this action-based stuff is what Ultima fans ever wanted… but he was absolutely right at the time that it was the way to keep Ultima a big hit on the same level as Origin’s other franchises.)
As I recall from stuff said by Spector and Garriott, Origin also blown a lot of money in the first couple of years (where EA basically handled little) on project that never went anywhere, which is also why they began to take a firmer hand on things.
Well if Ultima VIII was indeed the best selling Ultima as Origin claimed in 1999, that certainly was the best decision from a commercial standpoint. There’s gotta to be a reason that the first iteration of Ultima IX was to follow a similar design philosophy.
Actually as much as I loathe the comparison that were made to Tomb Raider, perhaps there were some thing of this when they choose the new approach in late “97 – not that I consider U9 to be a Tomb Raider like of course – but the idea to use a similar viewpoint and such might have seem commercially appealing
I REALLY don’t think Ultima VIII was the best selling game–I think it was an erroneous claim or at best some incredibly awkward technicality.
In fact, while I don’t know who gave that 1999 interview I’m pretty sure I know what that technicality is. I can bring up the circa-2000 binder of sales data that Hilleman (I think) donated to the University of Texas… and yes, Ultima 8 has better sales than any individual Ultima VII SKU (not by a lot, and certainly not by any combination) and massively better sales than any of the other Ultimas.
… and why is that? It’s because Origin’s “lifetime sales” numbers were measured by EA (who had their own sales tracking system, unlike Origin)… and as such don’t include anything prior to Q1 1993. Of COURSE Ultima 8, the one new Ultima, is the best selling game. What’s more interesting is how little it sold /compared/ to Ultima VII with that limitation.
(The funny thing about this data is all the outliers. Like according to the chart the lifetime sales of Moebius are six copies. I wonder who the six guys who bought Moebius well into the 90s were… and really why EA’s system even covers them.)
As for Tomb Raider, I would give them the benefit of the doubt there. I don’t know if the idea was so much to ape Tomb Raider because they thought it would be more profitable directly to sell it as TR-like… it was probably more because the guys at Origin were BLOWN AWAY by that game when it came out. All over the industry really, but I remember Origin in particular–everyone was so impressed by the tech that Tomb Raider represented.
Well as I mentionned before it came through a Q/A with Lady MOI, eitehr in late ’99 or early 2000. It certainly didn’t felt to me they were trying to lie about this, but perhaps the technicality you mention explains it.
That being I don’t buy into the whole “Ultima VIII sold poorly” argument (even less so now that we have the Lost Vale dev doc that says “TLV should sell well because U8 sold 8”), because it screams of fans rationalization (ie. “Fans hated the game so of course it sold poorly” we know how untrue these kind of statement was).
The reasons I’m somewhat inclined to believe it though is because really back in the official U9 forums and Horizons day… there were like a LOT of people who seemed to have discovered Ultima through Ultima VIII (and afterward went on to play the earlier games) – so it always felt to me the whole “We want U8 to bring new people to the series” angle worked.
One question though, does the UVII SKU includes Serpent Isle too, or just Ultima VII? It’d be interesting to compare U8 to SI, since unlike U7, Serpent Isle was solely sold by EA so the comparison would be easier.
… and why is that? It’s because Origin’s “lifetime sales” numbers were measured by EA (who had their own sales tracking system, unlike Origin)… and as such don’t include anything prior to Q1 1993.
Hahahaha. I can’t believe we’ve just learned of this now. You should hang around here more often, BL.
there were like a LOT of people who seemed to have discovered Ultima through Ultima VIII
This is to be expected. The entire PC gaming community was growing steadily in the 90’s. Each new game could be expected to attract a larger audience almost regardless of quality, because there were just more people out there buying games.
Too bad it could never last!
Bingo! In 90-93 there were far fewers pcs being sold than in 94-97.
What’s there to be cautious of? As long as he releases his games for free I got nothing to lose.
And sure, better jumping wouldn’t make u8 a real rpg experience. But a better ui would’ve nade the game fun.
I don’t really recall the U8 UI being significantly different from the U7 UI, to be honest.
Yeah the U7&U8 UI was pretty much the same with a few minor adjustments such as adding jumping.
I don’t think they ever aimed at a different UI nor that a few extra months would have changed anything in that matter. I would argue OSI probably felt it was the epytome UI-wise at the time – the fact they still kept the U7/8 UI for UO is telling really. Eck I’d argue even the U9 felt a lot like the U7/8/O UI translated to 3D to me.
I don’t even thing extra time would have changed anything as far as jumping goes because the thing the basic concept of Jumping in U8 is that they were puzzles – with a fixed jump distance you basically had one solution to each one and the point was to figure it out. They probably didnt consider how annoying it would be in parts to the many reloads and such. A few more month might have lead to better collision detectiom and better balanced combat system but I doubt they would have changed jumping.
That being said perhaps a better UI would have turned U8 into a better hackn slash game… But it would still have pissed off fans because geez… Thats not what they wanted and especially not in a core Ultima. And well the newcomers who discovered Ultima with Pagan and loved it didnt seem to have issues with the UI.
That’s the whole point.
I want Mr. WTF Dragon to interview Garriott. I bet you anything he would. Its not like the aiera is a small ultima site!
I’m contemplating asking him for an interview. He does seem to be handing them out like candy these days.
Also: it’s easy in retrospect to say U8’s UI wasn’t that good for an action RPG, and how the point’n click interface for Diablo is so much better – but keep in mind that Diablo was a ’97 game, almost three years after Ultima VIII, and it had time to learn from mistakes of previouses games of its kind.
I mean if you look at point’n click interface in RPGs before Diablo, they weren’t often that good to begin with – Dark Sun for instance felt cumbersome compared to Ultima VII. And if you look at action hack’n slash RPGs, there weren’t that many – there was Al Quadim I guess and it took pretty much a mouse free interface where yo uused the keyboard to move and attack, somewhat like you’d do in a console Zelda-ish game.
So I don’t think the U8 UI was that bad back in 1994.
An interview made of questions from fans :O
Sergorn: If he said “yes”, I’d consider asking folks for questions and picking the best of the lot. I’m pretty sure the folks who frequent Aiera could think up a few doozies!
But I’d also want to kind of set an overall topic for the interview, with a bit of a framework.
Or…I could see about doing it as a livestream event, with questions taken via Twitter and…er…comments on the site, I guess. That would probably be more fun, although somewhat more difficult to pull off. It might appeal to him on the social media/crowd engagement front, though.
Hmmn…food for thought.
@Sergorn – You are very right about the jumping puzzles being integral to the game design. I find it interesting that in the post-release patch they essentially took all of the jumping puzzles out by removing all of the moving platforms and having the Avatar jump to exactly wherever you held your mouse, meaning the response was so bad that they actually removed one of the core pieces of the game.
I’d say that the UI was fine, and even the jumping was probably about as good as anybody could make it. In the final analysis, though, putting jumping into a 2D isometric game is just not a good idea, period. And yes, I played and loved the Crusader series, but there wasn’t very much jumping in those* (rolling yes, jumping no), indicating that they probably came to the same conclusion that I did about jumping in 2D isometric games.
*:That said, it has been years since I’ve played a Crusader game. I might have just blocked out the painful jumping memories.
The ui is similar to u7. My main issue was how finnicky it was to get items off shelves and even be perfectly positioned in front of objects. In u7 you didn’t need to be close to an item to pick it up. U8 you would need to get perfectly positioned. Most times it was hard to simply get through doorways.
It looks like if nothing else he’s addressing the fact movement and positioning were the main problem with u8.
That is a good point I can’t think of an isometric game with jumping beyond u8.
As far as u9 goes. I also found the red, yellow, green targetting tedius. It was difficult to tell when it was going to be yellow or green. You should have a 6 foot reach atleast! Avatar had a 20 foot reach atleast in u7
This is the first time I’ve heard any real explanation for that joke of a map in Ultima 8. I could never make head or tail of it, now I know why.
Has anyone ever questioned this? Anyone got a link to anything that tries to understand it?
@Handshakes – I think from a game design standpoint, jumping in vanilla Ultima VIII was fine really. The issue was more that a. Ultima fans didn’t want jumping puzzle to begin and b. technical issues due to ho slow the ame could be. I mean if you’d replay vanilla U8 now with DOSBox and near instant reload, the whole jumping bit would go much smoother than back in 94 when it took 10-20 minutes to reload a game. As a matter of fact the UWs had a few jumping puzzles and there weren’t that many complains because it was less frustrating.
@Micro Magic – You know I actually liked that you had to be close to take an item or used something in Ultima VIII. It’s one of the rare things that made the game feel more realistic than UVII. Ijust never had troubles with the UVIII I really… sure you need to take things more slowly than in Ultim VII, but I thought it worke with the POV adopted by the game.
Good observation about frame rates. UW while choppy on some systems allowed you to smoothly control your speed and direction to perform nice jumps if so inclined. Digital/isometric style systems were held back by traditional up/down/left/right type controls that made jumping more of a strategic move than a natural reflex.
If the physics of jumping had been done better (no blame, just saying), it would have been easier to play. Lateral movement and transfer of momentum between bodies of varying masses and vectors (direction and speed) would have spiced it up, like Doom controls and physics but overhead with all Ultima gameplay features.
One question though, does the UVII SKU includes Serpent Isle too, or just Ultima VII? It’d be interesting to compare U8 to SI, since unlike U7, Serpent Isle was solely sold by EA so the comparison would be easier.
Each different type of media or release is a different SKU, so it’s pretty broad — so you see how many copies of the CD-to-hard-drive version compared to the 3.5″ high density version compared to the 3.5″ low density version (it’s some incredibly tiny number there, I don’t think they shipped to stores.)
Serpent Isle is roughly 75% of Ultima VIII, all things considered. (The EA Classics publish of Ultima VII Complete was far and away the best selling Ultima, though.)
Hahahaha. I can’t believe we’ve just learned of this now. You should hang around here more often, BL.
Heh, EA still guards these numbers… to the point that I probably shouldn’t have said as much as I just did, given my agreements with them for WCNews. I… uh… was never here. 🙂
(But if you’re NOT me, they are in a research library in Texas where anyone can go and look at them…!)
LOAF raises a good point: EA gives site runners like him (and, to a lesser degree, me) a fair bit of leeway when it comes to what we can discuss and what we can release.
Like, for example, old game design documents, concept art, and some assets.
But there are two rules which we’d be loathe to violate: no numbers (budgets, expense reports, etc.) and no code are to be posted. LOAF can post a note on the CIC saying “hey, we just found the Wing Commander 2 source in the Mythic archival data!”, but he can’t post actual code snippets.
(This is ultimately why I didn’t post the Ultima 1 code when Odkin passed it to me.)
To be fair, LOAF, I don’t think you’ve even violated the spirit of that arrangement; saying “X sold best” tells us nothing about the number of copies sold OR the dollars brought in. And it certainly isn’t going to tell us how much who spent on what during the game’s development.
Still, this is a good reminder that even if I had the numbers for each and every Ultima game and could say with certainty which one sold best, about the most I could do is say which sold best, and maybe how the others did relative thereto. You all wouldn’t get to see the figures proper.
Thanks for precisions LOAF, at least even it lays to rest the “best selling Ultima claim”, it DOES show that Ultima VIII didn’t had “poor sales” which makes sense.
(The EA Classics publish of Ultima VII Complete was far and away the best selling Ultima, though.)
I’m assuming this is excluding Ultima Online.
BTW, I’ve met some people on the forums of a certain prestigious magazine who claim to among the six guys who bought Moebius. 😉
Heh – that’s six people who bought Moebius after 1992. I’m sure it sold dozens of copies before that 😉
Thanks for precisions LOAF, at least even it lays to rest the “best selling Ultima claim”, it DOES show that Ultima VIII didn’t had “poor sales” which makes sense.
I guess it depends on what the expectation is and we don’t know that. I’m thinking Serpent Isle was much, much cheaper to develop. And even then, a year of development budget to sell {some number} of copies of Ultima 8 versus a year of money to sell {many times that number} of copies of Wing Commander III is the sort of comparison EA was likely looking at…
I can’t say regarding to Ultima VIII, but apparently Serpent Isle was much more costly to develop that one would expect. The subject came up at RPGWatch a while back and someone posted a link to Desslock’s old Gamespot RPG site where he interviewed Garriott prior to U9’s release… and Garriott was saying that while the idea with Serpent Isle was to have a quick sequel done at a fraction of the cost of a fullblown numbered Ultima game, it ended costing more than Ultima VII.
Of course it’s possible and even likely U8 cost more but…
Also, Wing Commander 3 came 10 month *after* Ultima VIII so WC3 sales would not yet have been the reference yet.
I dunno it just doesn’t screams poor sales to me.
For the record, I actually enjoyed Ultima VIII as a non-Ultima game. The inclusion of jumping puzzles, the lack of a party or Ultima VII style interaction & a small, zoned off world were what agitated me as an Ultima game. I actually loved the ability to climb fences & buildings & I liked that I could actually jump. It gave some world interaction.
I would love to remake Ultima VIII with an Ultima VII style engine. I would try it with Exult if climbing & jumping could be added.
I wish either of the NWN-based remakes of U8 had been finished.
U8 ought to have been remade in a proper action-RPG engine. There’s Dungeon Siege, but that doesn’t have jumping.
I cannot think of an engine with available editor that is open world (absolutely no zones, including entering houses)plus fully interactive that also has action elements & would allow for scripted events such as the beheading at the beginning of the game.
I really wish that there was a Gothic construction set considering that it had everything that I wanted from Ultima IX. That would be a great game engine to use if the editors were available.