A Trifecta of Ultima Forever Interviews! (Also: Screenshot!)
Over at the Ultima Forever portal, three video interviews with two key members of the Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar development team have been posted. Lead designer Kate Flack and creative director Paul Barnett have been interviewed by MMOAttack, Gamespot…and Gamespot. And Kate Flack may even have inadvertently given us the first public in-game glimpse of the game…or, at least, a screenshot thereof.
First up, though, is this fifteen-minute Gamespot video interview with Barnett and Flack:
…worth watching if you have the time and are interested. Paul Barnett addresses some of the background behind it, and that they knew many Ultima fans would have reservations about it.
Gamespot also spoke briefly with Paul Barnett about some of the “schwag” that has been produced to promote the game:
It’s only about five minutes in length, but it gives a good look at the Virtue Cards and the cloth map.
The most interesting video, though, is this MMOAttack interview with Kate Flack, in which she shows off — ever so briefly, and far too distant from the camera — what appears to be an in-game screenshot of Quest for the Avatar.
What’s interesting is that she’s talking about the iPad version. Now I’m not sure if she is showing off just an image display on an iPad, or the iPad version, as screenshots of the game have (to this point) remained unseen. She mentions that a player on a PC can also play with somebody playing Ultima Forever on an iPad.
I don’t know how MMOAttack missed the fact that they were, in effect, sitting on the only known in-game image of Ultima Forever, but there it is.
My guess is that the picture is a promo screenshot rather than the game actually playing on the iPad. The two reasons I think this is that the UF logo takes too much UI space on the screen and that the image itself swaps from landscape to portrait and back again multiple times. On iPad the games tend to have a “fixed” position and are not subject to screen rotation.
My thoughts as well.
Wow I think I am sold on the art though. Colorful and not as large and obnoxiously cartoony as the website belies.
What is it, 3d characters on hand painted sprites?
Looks like…
dosnt richard garrison owns Ultima rights?
No. He sold the rights to the “Ultima” brand to Electronic Arts as part of the acquisition of Origin Systems. (I’m simplifying slightly, but the basic point is that EA is the IP holder for “Ultima”.)
Garriott retains the rights to the name “Lord British”, however.