Even If You're Not Playing Ultima Right Now, You're Playing Ultima Right Now
That is, in essence, the core of Rowan Kaiser’s thesis in his latest article at Joystiq, as part of a new series focusing on “‘Western’ role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity”.
Hey there. Whatcha playing? No, actually, don’t tell me. You’re playing Ultima. You don’t know you’re playing Ultima, but you are. If you’re playing an open-world game, you’re dealing with Ultima. If you’re playing a massively-multiplayer game, you’re dealing with Ultima. If you’re playing a game with a morality system, Ultima. Even something as simple as three-dimensional graphics — either in perspective or overall representation — have ties to Ultima.
The article has elicited much praise on Twitter, and incited no small amount of controversy in the comments threads at Joystiq. Be that as it may: Kaiser is essentially correct to argue that Ultima is a foundation on which much of gaming in general — Western and Japanese alike, and then beyond just the RPG genre — has been built.
Here’s just one example Kaiser gives, concerning open-world gaming (it also concerns Ultima 6, so naturally I would choose to cite it!):
From the beginning, the Ultima games took place in worlds which were as big as possible given the tech constraints. You traveled across swamps, oceans, and hills, discovering what the world had to offer. The world was rarely “gated”, letting exploration proceed in a non-linear fashion. What’s more, the developments of open-world gameplay throughout the course of the series presaged the open-world games to come.
Ultima VI (1990) may be the most important open-world game of all time. Previous games in the series had switched perspective based on your context — dungeons were first-person, combat was top-down, and exploration on the world map had a completely different scale than exploration of towns. In Ultima VI, perspective was consistent. Your party walked into a town in the same way that it walks through a dungeon. It was a seamless, consistent world, that felt lived-in, and that open-world games from Grand Theft Auto to Skyrim owe a huge debt to.
Kaiser’s essay seems almost too brief by half, although it covers most of the major points in favour of his argument. Ultima 4 and its impact on both RPG gaming in general (for breaking the hack-and-slash mold of its predecessors) and morality as a system in gaming gets a mention, as does Ultima 7, which Kaiser praises for its purely mouse-driven interface and almost-fully-interactible world.
If there’s one thing the piece lacks, it’s a discussion of Ultima 9 and how the 3D engine and open world from that game offer players certain elements that have all but vanished from modern RPGs. Building interiors on the same map as exteriors is a good example here; even something like Skyrim, for all the power its engine offers, doesn’t have this feature. And then there’s one of my personal favourite “little details” in Ultima 9: objects in chests and other containers were 3D as well.
When you opened a chest, you didn’t get an inventory pop-up; you saw the objects sitting in the chest, and could pick them up and drag them to your backpack. Yes, in your backpack, they were represented by 2D icons, but when you dragged those icons back out of your backpack, the item again became a 3D object, which you could then toss into the world. The same was true of loot drops from enemies, although gold coins couldn’t actually be discarded again once you collected them.
We haven’t seen something like that in any 3D RPG that I can think of which has been published since Ultima 9; most games opt to just show you inventory screens (or similar). The use of 3D objects to fill 3D containers in Ultima 9 was a very logical evolution of the experimentation Origin did with container capacity in Ultima 7‘s gump-driven interface, but it is something which has largely been abandoned by RPG developers since that time.
That aside, there is much to be found in modern RPGs that was pioneered by Origin Systems in Ultima 9, including things like its inventory interface and its “behind the player” camera angle.
Anyhow: Do read the whole thing, Dragons and Dragonettes, and chime in with your thoughts on the piece either here or at Joystiq proper.
Read the article this morning (it was doing the rounds on twitter), and although many of the things it mentions might be obvious to a big Ultima/Origin fan, I think the general gaming public (and even the press to a large extent) forget a lot about how ground-breaking the series was.
To be fair, having chests show up as little inventory screens is just a lot more usable, and easier to set up.
Easier to set up sure… but just not as immersive. Open a chest and actually taking things inside just feels more fun than having a menu pop up with its list and a “take all button”.
This reminds me of how things evolved in Gothic : in Gothic 1&2, cooking meat involved using a frying pan, you’d actually see your character take out the meat, put it on the pan, frying it and taking it back. It was long… but it was fun and immersive because it felt real. In Gothic 3? You used the fire, clicked on the your meat and there you had all your cooked meat. More useable perhaps… but so less fun to do.
Maybe I’m weird, but I never had any issue with the issuability of GUMPS in U7/8/O, or the way to handle items in Ultima IX. It always felt very intuitive and easy to use to me and I’d love to have modern games which still use UIs like this. I mean have gamer today became too dumb that they can’t do anything without a simple point’n click? (Don’t answer, it’s rhetorical and we know the answere)
I’d also point that in addition to the chests bits (note that was true of wardrobes too), one thing I loved in U9 is how to handle equipment : you don’t get a paperdoll screen (or a terrible inventory screen with square yay), you character IS the paperdoll and all you had to do was drag weapons and armors to and from *yourself* to equip it. That was awesome. Again it’s the sort of stuff I’d love to see back in gaming.
Not gonna happen of course (especially now with every game coming out on consoles), but I loved how Ultima handled its UIs, it was intuitive and immersive. Perhaps not the easiest way to do things, but more fun.
But don’t mind me I’m just an old fart.
That’s one fine article. I’m glad you mentioned u9’s inventory ui. I almost forgot about that. TBH neither the menu system or the taking items out of chests bother me. But it makes sense that if you have more of a dungeon crawler type game to have a take all button. It depends on what direction for the game you’re going in.
I never had a problem with u7’s UI. But fallout 2 on the other hand… even with a take all button, opening those damn lockers and basically everything in the game and not even finding much. That was a waste of my movement for mouse clicking finger.
But I would like to see items play a larger roll on rpgs today. For instance, Alagner’s notebook in u7, you had to stack up a bunch of boxes to reach the next level. It was a very simple and intuitive solution. It was very rewarding since I had never completed a quest quite like that before or since.
I want to be able to move ALL the items of the game around, suffice the items that are too heavy like tables and beds. And I want to be able to stack them up, and make a fort with them if I want to. Man, that rpg would be so sweet. Way cooler than paying to upgrade your house in fallout 3… imagine if you could build your own house out of scrap pieces?
I’ve often maintained that U9’s experiments with 3D were great, but it seemed to me that Morrowind (and every subsequent Elder Scrolls title) just out-innovated it. The separation of cells (exterior/city/dungeon/etc) in TES engines is an annoying limitation, yes, but not particularly obtrusive.
You could raise the point that U9’s 3D interface management is innovative, but I’d have to say that it’s just a perfect example of how TES has overtaken U9. Yes, you get an inventory list in TES games. That’s because textual inventory lists *work*, and you have the ability to use custom item names, so using a 3D model would be boundlessly confusing. (Yes, you can memorise what Ultima potions do, because they’re handily colour-coded. Now try that in a game with its own alchemy system and ability to create zillions of different potions. Not so easy anymore, is it?) One of the bad thing about gumps is that you can only see the name of the item when you click it. A list of item names may be plain, but it’s the most effective way to present the relevant details to the user.
And if you want to have the objects in game environment in Oblivion or Skyrim, you can actually put them there and manipulate them (albeit a bit clumsily). Skyrim made it a bit easier by having interactive weapon racks and bookshelves and whatnot. You could say that the TES had the sense to separate the *inventory management* and the *object manipulation*. They’re similar but distinctly separate ideas.
If you introduce a new user interface feature, it should somehow improve upon the older one. The reason why other games still use icons and text lists is that it has worked fine so far and people just haven’t found U9’s style compelling. *Had* it been compelling, everyone would be using it by now, no?
And that in my opinion is U9’s tragedy. Ultima series is known for the innovations, but the pace kind of faltered with U9; they *tried* to innovate, but failed to innovate hard enough to set the standard. And since there has been no new games since, the torch *had* to be passed on to the others.
(It’s obviously a very painful thing to see. I was *shocked* to see that Skyrim, to me, *felt* like a genuinely better game than Ultima VII on *all* respects imaginable, and to my horrors *I couldn’t argue myself on that point*. The other games are making *so* much progress that the precedent set by Ultimas can’t stand forever, I’m afraid. If EA is really planning a remake or something, they should get cracking at it. =)
I think a key distinction to draw here, between Ultima and TES, is that Ultima never really stepped into the more complicated crafting systems or the endless lists of loot. Part of the Ultima philosophy was to keep items and inventory fairly simple. There were a handful of potions only. There were only a few kinds of swords, axes, etc. Armour came in a handful of distinct varieties, rather than a plethora of minor variations on each type.
Which, I suppose, meant that Ultima could use gumps and keep objects inside chests in 3D, because of that simplicity. Games that went for the “endless varieties of loot” model of items and inventory don’t really have that luxury, as you point out.
If that’s a failing on Ultima 9’s part, well…maybe it is. Maybe what gamers wanted in their RPGs, as far as such things as items and inventory go, went in a different direction from Origin’s very persistent, consistent vision of same. But in all honesty, I liked Origin’s way of doing things, because it was simple and easy to manage. It let you focus on the game — the playing of the game — without sacrificing the experience of item and inventory management. These days, it seems, that middle ground is all but gone; either we have the convoluted inventory schemes of TES, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect, or we have the nerfed inventory schemes of Mass Effect 2.
Ah, it’s the famous wwwwolf. I remember reading your comments on TheDailyWTF, man.
I think you’re slightly too effusive about Skyrim. Remember, this is the game that needed modders to fix its horrible UI for PCs.
Just because something hasn’t been reused by later games, doesn’t mean it’s a poor idea to begin with. There are tons of good idea that are not being reused and ways the U7 or U9 way could be improved (you mentionned how you need to click on a item to gets its name, but it could easily work with a roll over tool tip like a NWN game for instance).
And frankly inventory list are terrible and the worst thing to ever happened to CRPGs – games aren’t using it because they’re better, they’re using it because it’s the only way to make inventory work with CONSOLE CONTROLLERS. This is far from being the most user friendly UI for a PC game, and there’s a reason it has only become the norm since they began to do Computer RPGs on consoles
Combined with the cluttered and useless loot you get nowadays in RPGs, this has made inventory management a more and a main while there was a time it was… well… fun.
Seriously with the way loot and inventory gets pointless now, except for getting cluttered useless loot which has no other point than selling it to get money, I’m starting to think Ultima IX had it right with its approach were killing monsters just gave you gold as loot you could use for whatever you want afterward. Sure it might not have been realistic, but somehow it just make more sense from a game design standpoint since loot has no now other point whatsoever than gaining money
I agree with Sergorn and Ken – I too miss the concept of the ‘lootless RPG’ that Ultima embodied. This is something that not enough people talk about.
You know what game functioned like a ‘lootless RPG’? Deus Ex. Human Revolution included. It was something I really enjoyed about the game, now that I think about it.
> Ah, it’s the famous wwwwolf. I remember reading your comments on TheDailyWTF, man.
I’m afraid I’m part of the landscape. =)
> I think you’re slightly too effusive about Skyrim. Remember, this is the game that needed modders to fix its horrible UI for PCs.
I’m not saying Skyrim’s UI is perfect. I’m just saying it appears to work for what it does. I’m just saying some other approaches might *not* have worked as well.
(I could also complain that the designers just didn’t play the game on SD televisions on consoles. I can’t see the bottom status line on my television because it’s halfway off the screen. That’s a *bit* annoying. =)
> And frankly inventory list are terrible and the worst thing to ever happened to CRPGs – games aren’t using it because they’re better, they’re using it because it’s the only way to make inventory work with CONSOLE CONTROLLERS. […] Combined with the cluttered and useless loot you get nowadays in RPGs, this has made inventory management a more and a main while there was a time it was… well… fun.
That’s funny, one of the best (again, not *perfect*, just one that had a few good ideas that I’d like to see in more games) inventory management systems I’ve seen was in Dragon Age: Origins (and DA2, I suppose). Why? Grab useless junk, and one button press marks it as sellable junk.
Skyrim has one button press that lets you mark the item as the Best Thing Ever.
…you may notice that somehow the designers failed to incorporate these things into the *same* game, so yes, the industry does have something to learn, still. =)
The proliferation of junky loot isn’t a problem. The fact that the UI doesn’t cope with it is. In my mind, ideally the games would let you categorise the items you have with orders of importance (e.g. “Favourite items I need all the time”/”Essential items that I want to keep but not put in my fav list”/”Handy items I will stick with for a while”/”This just appeared in my inventory one day”/”Junk that should be sold”).
I don’t think this is a PC vs. console issue. To me, if an UI fails to work on a less capable environment, it could be a symptom of a bigger problem. Why *should* something as basic as inventory management absolutely require a mouse? You can easily turn an item list into something that is *improved* by having mouse controls (as in console gamers have to quickly hunt for some UI element first, while PC gamers can just click an icon).
I’ve jokingly proposed in the past that games need to incorporate some kind of Google-indexed Web 2.0 inventory system. With tag clouds, commenting and Like buttons. 😉
Inventory Manager 2012
I agree mouse could be made to improve upon a list inventory… but point it, it usually isn’t. What I mean by the console VS PC issue, is that consoles ARE the sole reason all WRPGs are using lists now because that’s the most intuitive way to do is with a Controller. And the fact of the matter is that most developpers/publishers don’t want to bother with separate UIs for PC and Consoles, which is why PC often get subpar controls that aren’t as intuitive as they could be – and became near perfect if you plug a controller (and this is an issue that is not solely related to RPGs, but to pretty much every multiplatform games being released these days).
Regarding the junk, the thing is that I just don’t see the point or fun of having inventory filled with useless junk to begin with. Sure: you can make things more bearable with a better UI, and I’d agree a Dragon Age certainly felt better than a Mass Effect for instance. But why do we need junk to begin with?
Take a PC centric exemple : in The Old Republic 3/4 of the stuff you loot on bodies is junk which has *no* purpose except being sold and giving you credits. You can even send your companion to go and sell this junk while you continue playing (which is a good idea). But I ask: why bother giving junk in the first place then? Why not just having your character loot the appropriate amount of credits? The result would be the same but with… less junk.
I’ve said it before, but Diablo and the emergence of hack’n slash games are the main culprit for RPGs being cluttered with so much junk over and over. Before Diablo, that just didn’t happen, and not just in Ultima – loot seemed to have a sense and a logic. Now to be fair blaming Diablo is a tad unfair because Diablo did the loot and junk VERY well. There was a lot of loot, but the game was made so that you’d get rid of it quickly, and you’d find a lot of meaningful loot and use for the money you make.
Modern RPGs feel like they so “Heh Diablo has a loot of loot so let’s put a lot of loot!” but without giving any thought on how to make it WORK. In modern RPGs most of the time, there is so much loot you’ll end up with a inventory filled after a couple of combat… and being “true” RPG, you can’t just “town portal” back and forth to the nearest vendor you know ? And the thing is, in the end you get a lot of loot, which get you a lot of money… which amount ot nothing because there is no need to actually spend money and buy anything.
Now I guess the issue is not so much the looting itself, or the inventory system itself but the fact that they are just poorly implemented most of the time. Granted. But this is why I liked inventory before as well, it was well implemented. No it’s a bother and it’s come to a point where basically I didn’t mind Mass Effect 2 cutting inventory altogether because it was so much a pain in Mass Effect 1 that there is a point where nothing is better.
Crossposting from the ‘Codex:
I guess we can classify games into four tiers:
A) Games that have minimal inventory and by extension, minimal loot (Mass Effect 2)
B) Games that have inventory, but not much loot to find – mostly standard stuff plus a few goodies to find (Ultima, Baldur’s Gate)
C) Games that have tons of loot in the world, but you don’t really need to take it once you’ve settled on a stable character build (Morrowind)
D) Games that have tons of loot in the world, and you need to examine every bit of it and constantly change your equipment loadout, because of level scaling (Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age 2)
Another point regarding excessive loot: is how it kind renders irrelevant the fun and pleasure of getting new gear.
I’ll give a more recent example than Ultima even: Gothic. In Gothic, whenever you get to the point where you’re able to get a new more powerful weapon, or one of the few new armors – you feel the difference immediately. You’re stronger, more resistant… and it feels rewarding, you worked to get your new armor, and it’s awesome.
In loot cluttered game, you constantly get new stuff, new armors, new weapons and such with a tiny better stats and so on… so you constantly change your gear and the result is that it doesn’t feel rewarding anymore, you don’t feel special for getting a new armor and weapons, you just change it because you have and you don’t really feel a difference because the incremental increase of stats makes it that it won’t really feel like a new gear unless you compare directly to what you have 15 levels earlier.
Meh.
And geez I guess I could ramble about levels as well – Ultima worked very well with 8 Levels, now it feels like every RPG MUST have *tons* of level so that you gain at least a couple of levels every hour! Again this is a stable from hack’n slash RPG, this is just about rewarding powergaming, powerlooting, xping and so on and to me it diminishes the fun because it just makes things more shallow.
So when you’re piloting an X-Wing in space and shooting down TIE fighters until you’re an Ace, you’re playing Ultima…
I don’t buy it.
Ever play Ultima 1?
I think that’s the joke he’s trying to make, Ken.
I was up at 5:00 AM.
Give a Dragon a break!
@WtF: Your commentary in the article about Ultima IX was actually really good, and I don’t care for anything later than Ultima VII. The idea of a fluid, continuous interface from player inventory to game world is an expertly executed mechanic of IX that isn’t often well represented in more modern games.
I don’t think a game has to be 3D or FPS-perspective to achieve this as long as it represents it visually and mechanically consistently. An inventory window (additional GUI) could be another camera perspective in the current scene, providing visual consistency while managing stuff.
Ultima IX did pioneer inventory management, but it should go further without becoming unnecessarily complicated or illogical.
@MicroMagic: “I want to be able to move ALL the items of the game around, suffice the items that are too heavy like tables and beds. And I want to be able to stack them up, and make a fort with them if I want to. Man, that rpg would be so sweet. Way cooler than paying to upgrade your house in fallout 3… imagine if you could build your own house out of scrap pieces?”
Those are extremely good ideas. I want to implement them. Thanks.
@WWWWOLF: “You could say that the TES had the sense to separate the *inventory management* and the *object manipulation*. They’re similar but distinctly separate ideas.”
I think that is a mistake, that they should be the same. There should be a common point (root input) at which all gameplay can be accessed, without involving disruptive menus. Traditional unique, chain and delay characteristics are fine, but disruptive means breaking the player’s sense of continuity. Sadly games do that all the time, old and new.
“(It’s obviously a very painful thing to see. I was *shocked* to see that Skyrim, to me, *felt* like a genuinely better game than Ultima VII on *all* respects imaginable, and to my horrors *I couldn’t argue myself on that point*. The other games are making *so* much progress that the precedent set by Ultimas can’t stand forever, I’m afraid. If EA is really planning a remake or something, they should get cracking at it. =)”
What’s interesting to me isn’t the power of a particular game in a particular age, but the power of influence and its causes. If an Ultima game influenced you to do something great, then you owe your greatness to Ultima. It’s a hierarchy of appreciation, but we all have our favorites. Ultima has inspired much greatness, and continues to do so.
@WtF: “I think a key distinction to draw here, between Ultima and TES, is that Ultima never really stepped into the more complicated crafting systems or the endless lists of loot. Part of the Ultima philosophy was to keep items and inventory fairly simple. There were a handful of potions only. There were only a few kinds of swords, axes, etc. Armour came in a handful of distinct varieties, rather than a plethora of minor variations on each type.”
I think that was one of the greatest virtues of Ultima. Hitting someone in the head with a steel bar works every time, despite the bar characteristics. Even if there are many subtle variations of items, they should be visually represented with just a few types (interpolation notwithstanding). The interface should be smooth and consistent.
There was just something special about items in an Ultima as well…moving up a “grade” (e.g. from leather armour to scale or chain) meant something. The increase in protection offered was significant. (Ultima 9 added even more to the dynamic, by making the heavier & more protective armours…well…heavier, and less buoyant. If you wore the blackrock armour, you swam slower, sank faster, and took longer to resurface when submerged in water. Which was kind of a big deal when your oxygen bar was getting close to zero!)
But in Dragon Age? The difference between…say…Valen’s Hardened Leather Cuirass* and a basic chain mail shirt is typically negligible. Yeah, base gear vs. base gear makes for a bit more of a difference, but that’s just the point: there is so much magic/hardened/special/epic gear in the game that the leather/chain/plate distinction becomes…not fully meaningless, I guess, but less meaningful at least.
* not an actual item in DA:O…just an example I made up.