Interview with Bill Randolph
To continue marking the fifteenth anniversary of the release of Ultima 9, the Ultima Codex is pleased to present a lengthy, informative, and hugely entertaining interview with Bill Randolph, who served as the lead programmer on the final version of the game.
Bill Randolph got his start in the gaming industry writing networking code for Command & Conquer at Westwood Studios, after being inspired to look for jobs in the industry thanks to some contract work he had done for Jay Patel’s Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. After a few years at Westwood, looking for a change of pace and role, he landed a job at Origin Systems as the lead programmer for Ultima 9.
Since leaving Origin Systems, he has worked for Wizards of the Coast, NCSoft, Super Happy Fun Fun, Kingisle Entertainment, Trion Worlds, Ticom Geomatics, and even returned to the employ of Electronic Arts for a time to work on Command & Conquer Generals 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. He is currently working at Blizzard Entertainment, whereat he is one of the lead software engineers for Battle.net.
Bill was kind enough to answer a plethora of questions submitted by members of the Ultima fan community, and did so with a blend of humorous good cheer and wistful recollection. The interview covers many aspects of Ultima 9’s troubled development, although its principal focus is on the technology of the game and Origin’s struggles to implement features in its 3D engine. I daresay that this has been my favourite interview to-date, and we here at the Codex are very grateful to Bill for taking the time to speak about Ultima 9.
Thanks WTF. You are doing God’s work here. Amazing interview. It is really sad, because I feel like if they had just committed to continuing the original engine, we would have gotten a good game, and two years earlier too. Every time I see the ‘original’ U9 pics, I see what looks like a pretty neat game that could have been one of the best Ultimas if it had been given resources to flesh out the content. Did you ever get a feel for how done it was? Is there a map / height map? Design docs? Or are we just limited to those 10 or 12 pics and the Bob White script?
Well, thanks.
I’ve not found much else about the original version of U9, apart from the BWP and screenshots.
Oh, and these: http://gallery.ultimacodex.com/ultima-9-dungeons-from-the-bob-white-plot/
But that’s all, so far.
As I recall Bob White said that when the team was pulled on UO, they were nearing Alpha status and 80% of Britannia had been built. That’s still a long way to go but in essence if they had spend that year on Ultima IX instead of completly UO, it’d have been released in 97.
Well, to be honest, uo probably made way more money than u9. Still, if someone ever found an early u9 soirce, I would be a happy camper
Heh…happy to know it had been safely tucked away? Because releasing that sort of thing would be a very quick and effective way to invite many different flavours of legal hell from EA upon oneself.
WTF, I was doing a little digging, and I ran across this image, which i had never seen before. Strangely, it is on your site, but not included in the original U9 pic collection.
http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/File:U9Editor.jpg
AMAZING! It shows, better than any other pic, the complexity of the buildings as well as the massive expansiveness of the map (despite being in an early design state), compared to the final U9 map which was:
-cobbled together
-incredibly compact
-unrealistic and poorly designed
You can sooooo clearly see the more ultima-like direction they were going for. Seems like the map would have been quite spread out, and similar to UO, but only in 3D.
One more comment. I took a cutout of the map from the U9Editor pic and overlayed it on a scaled up map of Britannia. I matched up Paws, the rivers, and the Fens of the Dead. If 1 pixel is one U9 ’tile’, and one U9 tile is 4 feet, then the U9 map was about 8000 feet on a side (probably 8192 :)). That compares to U6 which would clock in at 4000 feet per side.
I made some rough estimates and came up with between 3500 – 4500 for the final U9. This was based on LB’s castle being 110 feet across the front. I suspect this number is probably 4096 as well.
That means the ‘original’ U9 may have been at least 4 times as big as the final U9; we’re talking nearly elder scrolls level world size. Just look at the map… you can plainly see how huge it is.
DAMN IT!
The only potential error is the assumption of one pixel per tile. If tiles consume four pixels (2×2), then Britannia is about the same size, no?
i compared the size of the building in frame to the building in map, and it checks out.
But also, i recall hearing a quote a few years ago how they needed to compress distances in U9 V2 because RG thought they felt too far apart and weren’t fun. I remember thinking, at that time, that this guy just didn’t get one of the main reasons U4-U7 were so fun; exploration.
Heh…U7 only feels big because the viewing area is so small, the view zoomed in.
You’re not wrong about exploration; it’s an important feature of any Ultima. But equally, that’s not a strict function function of map size; there are plenty of hidden places to find in U9, after all.
Too, things are a bit different in 2D versus 3D; building vast open spaces in 3D requires a lot of additional work and detail, and it feels different to play in too. That’s not to say that this sort of thing can’t be pulled off to great effect; I can think of numerous games that managed it. But none of them were released 15 years ago, when this approach to RPG-making was a new and still very much unexplored thing.
I can see the argument for shrinking the world just looking at the Paws screenshot. The building looks great, but the surrounding terrain looks dull and empty.
of course, according to my math, U7 is also larger than U9, and U7 was 2D!! Remember that shot of U9 from the Britain, looking towards Trinsic, with the draw distance increased? it was ridiculous. I guess to summarize, here is how i viewed events transpiring:
-U9V1 was to be an expansive, exploration-heavy game that felt like a classic Ultima (“The design of Ultima IX (which is still in progress) relies heavily on this feedback and has resulted in a dramatic turnaround back toward classic role playing. Even better, it has resulted in a classic Britannian Ultima.” – RG in 1994). Unfortunately, it wasn’t using cutting edge 3D, and it wasn’t done yet (i suspect they would have filled in the world quite nicely, addressing your concern of emptiness).
-Everyone got pulled of U9V1, and the whole team changed. U9V1 technology lost ground.
-U9V2 team came in and (1) they didn’t have much time, (2) technology was aged and there was a push to advance the engine, (3) RG wanted full 3D, and didn’t like the ‘classic’ U9V1. So they reduced U9 to a much smaller size, bastardizing the map, slapped together a plot, dropped many features and the rest is history.
-There is at least 80% of a ‘classic’ Britannia in 1’s and 0’s that we will never see.
Based on Iceblade’s comment, I don’t think it’s the case that the U7 map was larger…at least not in terms of pure pixel coverage. Scale is a different consideration, and there may be something there. But in all honesty, I’m an Ultima 6 junkie, right? That game…that Britannia feels big. Britannia in Ultima 7 feels rather smaller by comparison.
“Feel” is, of course subjective. Ultima 9‘s Britannia is a bit compressed, yes, but it doesn’t feel out of place compared to Ultima 7 for me, because I’m using Ultima 6 as the baseline. And the dungeons in U9 are substantially better — and larger — than those in U9, which also adds to the sense that its world isn’t all that small. And there are still, as I noted in another comment, lots of hidden things to find; exploration is amply rewarded in U9.
As to the per-pixel comparisons you’re doing…well, my comment about asset scale may be the reason for what you’re perceiving. Because really, I rather doubt that they would have gone in and quartered the map size in the engine just for the hell of it; adjusting asset scale would be an effective way to make everything in the world feel not quite so distance without having to completely re-factor that part of the codebase.
But obviously I’m just speculating there.
I remember reading that at the time and thinking the exact same thing.
Sorry, one more point (because U9 really rubbed me raw). Your recently released u9V1 dungeon photo was nearly 640X480, so I will assume that was what resolution it was playing at. one screen appears to be about 6 avatars across, or say 36 feet. There is a quote that U9V1 was 256X256 screens. That puts U9V1 at 9216X9216 (assuming that they meant zoomed in screens). Massive.
I think you numbers so way off. Britannia would end up with an area 84 times that of U9.
Actually my main Britannian map is 1024×1024 terrain chunks with each chunk having an area of 16×16 tiles (note that the tiles are probably identical between the two game versions given the lack of art asset updating). As such, the main map is actually 16384×16384 tiles in size… including the water border.
Edit: I meant the main Britannian map.
Also the water zones aren’t dramatically larger than that shown on the U9 map.
I wonder if they might have changed the scale of some of the assets instead, then.
I suppose there’s an easy way to tell. That early screenshot of Mariah’s house in an isometric view could easily be compared to the in-game equivalent.
Oh, also: even if U9’s Britannia felt smaller, it was not devoid of places to explore and hidden things to find. Just sayin’.
Yeah, because the u9 height map image doesnt lie. Its hard to come up with math that shows it much bigger than 4000 ft per side. So does that mean 4 terrain ’tiles’ per foot? Seems kind of dense for my understanding of game height maps.
Okay, my bad. The terrain file uses number of tiles for height and width of the map not number of chunks. So Britannia is actually 1024 tiles by 1024 tiles or a little over 1 million tiles.
So apparently each chunk is actually 32×32 tiles not 16×16 like I see in our notes.
Okay, so based on the width of a door feeling about 3 feet, a single U9 tile is about 6 feet x 6 feet. So about 1.16 miles x 1.16 miles for the total map size. So about 1/12 the size of Oblivion according to BS’s marketing.
ok i guess to recap all this… WTF, is this your longest comment thread?
U9 isn’t significantly bigger or smaller than any other Ultima, and they did a pretty good job, despite its flaws, of filling in the world with interesting things to do. However, the original U9, which had a different engine, different plot, and different team, and was quite far in its development, would have been the largest single-scale Ultima (land size-wise) by nearly 4X, as multiple calculation methods point to. They probably also would have figured out a way to fill this area with interesting content, because lets face it, Morrowind was about to come out a few years later, and was in development at the time, and that is pretty frigging dense. Think of all the engine and plot re-work time that went into U9V2 (and UO) that could have been devoted solely to content in U9V1, plus enabling a year or two earlier release.
What a bummer!
– This is far from being the longest comment thread. It hasn’t even paginated yet.
– One of your premises is in error: there was no change in engine, no “different engine” to speak of. They started with the Crusader engine, converted it to software 3D, adjusted the camera position and behaviour, and then added in hardware acceleration. Bill makes this point quite clearly in the interview.
– Because “U9V2” has the same base engine (after iteration) as “U9V1”, I’m having a hard time accepting the premise that the original world was 4X larger. Britannia, as built in U9, as I understand it – Iceblade, correct me I’m wrong – basically covers the maximum possible world size possible in the engine anyway. Granted, this includes a fair bit of ocean, but the point is: Britannia and the surrounding seas basically reach the extent of what the engine supports. I’m struggling to see the sense in supposing that as part of the engine iterations, Origin would have chosen to quarter the maximum world size the engine even supports. Building something one quarter of the scale…that’s at least feasible. But actually quartering the engine limits? I just can’t see it.
just look at the U9Editor picture. It makes it quite clear that my calculations on U9V1 world size (confirmed by two different methods) are qualitatively correct.
I can see the picture. But equally, I can see that it looks like it has been resized; the text has a certain lack of clarity to it, which is a common artifact of a resize operation.
I’m not sure if/how this might affect your calculations, but…that’s something I’m noticing.
Actually it’s quite possible the size limits were adjusted down due to performance. Not that I think the sizes mark is getting make any sense.
Not sure about some of your estimations (esp. your methods) but looking at the x coordinate relative the bottom scroll bar, I estimate the size of this U9 was about 2048 somethings wide by 2048 somethings long… I would assume these are tiles, making this version of U9 about 4 times larger in total map area… With probably a fair bit of water and plenty of mountain to house all of those dungeons assuming they went the U7 route with that.
Yeah that’s what I came up with, so now that’s 3 calculation methods
I thought you came up with 80%, not 50%. 😉
More space doesn’t mean more content density. Just look at U7.
Or at Ultima 6. The continent is really quite vast relative to the size of the Avatar…but as you can see, a lot of it is just empty space. Which can be edifying to wander through, for some and at certain times…but which can also be darned empty apart from the occasional deer or wolf.
And let’s not forget, too, that this perception of emptiness tends to be exacerbated by 3D.
I never much cared about Ultima IX aside from momentary sadness and yet another facepalm, but after reading this thread and examining the editor image I am fucking pissed off. Looks like it was shaping up to be a classic Ultima until it got bitten by the “EVERYTHING MUST BE 3D, DAMN ANYTHING THAT GETS IN THE WAY” bug. I did some GIMP work on the editor image and here’s the result:
http://eightvirtues.com/misc/U9Editor.xcf
It looks like the editor was running in Windows 95 based on the color scheme. I don’t think Windows 95 had anti-aliased fonts, and it appears the image was resized from 1024×768 to 800×600 and lossily compressed with jpeg, causing blurring and artifacts. The panel/task bar or whatever I don’t think was in the original image so it may have been in “auto hide” mode. I resized the image and overlaid a Windows 95 screen cap to ensure scaling accuracy. I left the original editor image but also included a sharpened version. In any case, using the visible X coordinate and assuming one pixel is one tile is probably the best way to calculate the map size.
Interesting. Albeit we really, really need to get you in the habit of using common web image formats. 😛
Heh. Well the reason I used GIMP was because I wanted to preserve the layers for people. Otherwise I would have used png. Next time I’ll make a RealMedia or QuickTime slideshow, or maybe PCX or IFF ANIM. I think I have a copy of Deluxe Paint II somewhere…
Seriously though, seeing that editor image got me so excited for a moment. It felt a bit like the first time I saw magazine prints of Ultima VII screenshots. Then I realized it was gone, permanently, with no real successor. Infinite FUCKS and breaking stuff with a sledgehammer.
You know, I wonder what the general fan response was to U6 doing away with the dual scale world.
If I had to guess, there was more than a little scorn and derision from the community. Or at least parts of it.
There definitly was complained, I remember Garriott talking about this in the Early/mid-90s, how some vocal fans didn’t like how much they changed Ultima in Ultima VI and later Ultima VII.
One of the most common critized aspect was the use of mouse with people saying using a mouse interface was killing Ultima’s soul 😛
And cutting back the keyboard command set to a mere 8 or so keys??? Blasphemy!!!!
Heh yeah we didn’t need consoles to get dumbing down comments 😛
What do you mean I have to CLICK. A. MOUSE. BUTTON. to look at my [z]tats????
Well, Kenneth, you are one of the people who thinks the soul of Ultima was kind of lost then, albeit for different reasons.
I can understand them. In general, the shift from 8-bit-style tiled RPGs must have been traumautic for some people.
I agree that part of its soul went missing in U7, stayed missing through U8, and finally re-appeared in U9.
But control schemes…I never found these bothersome.
I always liked the old-style “every key does something” controls. It’s more intimidating at first than menu or context-based actions, but psychologically it connects you more directly with your in-game character and reduces the clutter of OSDs and menus that plague modern RPGs.
I think the industry-wide switch from 2D to 3D was the most significant, and often saddest, period in the history of video games. It was a bandwagon studios were either pushed onto or all too eager to climb and a lot of popular franchises suffered. Granted some excelled in their new perspective (Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nuk’em 3D for example).
It’s really easy in retrospect to say people complaining about the move to 3D are just old-timers resisting change, but for students of games who have been there long before and long after it was much more than a technological improvement. Compare a screenshot of Ultima VI or VII to Ultima IX, try to strip away all your preconceptions and thoughts, and tell me 1) which is more aesthetically pleasing (imagine it’s a painting, not a game), 2) which conveys more information, and 3) which conveys information more efficiently (time required to digest). Equally consider the ease and intuitiveness with which you control your characters and the differences in feature sets between the games.
Even now that the use of 3D and first- and third-person perspectives has matured, some of these issues remain and could even be considered inherent limitations. To name a few: Textures and models look like shit when the camera gets close enough. Camera algorithms, incredibly, are still shitty and look anything but cinematic. Your line of sight is heavily skewed toward what’s in front of your character. Objects are frequently occluded by other objects. The last two of these may be more realistic, but usually don’t contribute to the game being fun.
Additionally, when a franchise presents eight games from an overhead perspective and switches to third-person for the ninth, that is a drastic change to a fundamental aspect fans have come to define the franchise by. It would be like taking bullets out of a Contra game and giving them ka-bar knives instead. What’s even more disturbing is that they could have successfully used a 3D engine with an overhead perspective which would have mitigated most if not all issues caused by a switch to third-person 3D. The principle of maintaining a traditional camera perspective in a 3D engine could have been successfully applied to many other franchises (Metroid, Zelda, Contra, Castlevania, etc.) and in some cases has been (Super Mario Bros.).
Finally finding time to reply to this!
It’s more intimidating at first than menu or context-based actions, but psychologically it connects you more directly with your in-game character and reduces the clutter of OSDs and menus that plague modern RPGs.
Or it turns them off the game entirely because they want to play a game rather than manage a word processor. I have analogous turn-offs where modern MMOs are concerned; I spend enough time manipulating spreadsheets at work, and I don’t want the same experience in the games I play.
It’s really easy in retrospect to say people complaining about the move to 3D are just old-timers resisting change, but for students of games who have been there long before and long after it was much more than a technological improvement. Compare a screenshot of Ultima VI or VII to Ultima IX, try to strip away all your preconceptions and thoughts, and tell me 1) which is more aesthetically pleasing (imagine it’s a painting, not a game), 2) which conveys more information, and 3) which conveys information more efficiently (time required to digest). Equally consider the ease and intuitiveness with which you control your characters and the differences in feature sets between the games.
1) Totally subjective category. I mean, I would argue that Ultima 7 would be the least aesthetically pleasing of the three, all things considered. It’s arguable that the colours in Ultima 6 pop a bit more, and are more vibrant; I like colour that pops. But equally, that’s an artifact of the game having a very small colour palette. The textures in Ultima 9 are a bit more muted, in terms of colour saturation, but they feel a bit more realistic overall.
2) Well, since U7 has no interface to speak of, it arguably conveys very little information apart from what the shape and colour of the mouse pointer reveal…a feature that U9 also has. U6 probably has the most informative display of the three, in terms of the sheer quantity of information presented to the player at once…but U9 has the more effective interface in that it presents the important data (health and attack power, plus the inventory hotbar, compass, backpack, and spellbook) in a way that doesn’t chew up a third of the viewable area.
3) Building off of the above…U9 clearly takes the cake in this category. U6 is a close second, since it’s very easy to get your party’s health in view, but it’s just as easy to lose that view again when you go deep-diving in someone’s inventory.
Textures and models look like shit when the camera gets close enough.
Certainly a possibility, moreso with older games. But on the other hand, at least there’s a zoom feature to speak of; don’t tend to see that in 2D games, and a zoomed-in (read: blown-up) piece of 2D art looks pretty fugly as well.
Camera algorithms, incredibly, are still shitty and look anything but cinematic.
Also a possibility, though some games have more or less nailed the cinematic presentation. BioWare, in particular, tends to do well here. It’s never quite perfect; the models will never move quite as naturally as real people do. Though I’m not exactly sure the degree of near-perfection that it is even reasonable to expect here.
Your line of sight is heavily skewed toward what’s in front of your character.
This is true in U9, certainly, though it isn’t true of all 3D games I can think of. But in U9, the camera is locked into “mouse look” mode, whereas in other games the camera is able to move more independently of the character.
Objects are frequently occluded by other objects.
Remind me what happens if you’re none too careful in U7 and accidentally drop an object behind a wall…
Additionally, when a franchise presents eight games from an overhead perspective and switches to third-person for the ninth, that is a drastic change to a fundamental aspect fans have come to define the franchise by.
I suppose…but is it any more drastic than, say the shift from a top-down dual-scale tiled world to an oblique projection monoscale (but still tiled) world? Is it any more drastic than the shift from a keyboard-heavy control scheme (and an interface that was one-third status display and dialogue window) to a fully mouse-driven control scheme (and no interface to speak of)? Is it that much more drastic than the shift from oblique projection to isometric projection? Or, heck, the shift from a kill-em-all dungeon crawler to a morality play?
Ultima subjected its fans to a lot of significant shifts in the fundamental aspects the fans defined the franchise by. And I’m not entirely convinced that the jump to 3D was the most significant of these.
That’s a fairly good rebuttal, though I didn’t expect that level of disagreement. Many of the points, aside from aesthetics, are subjective especially when viewed in light of your counterpoints about other fundamental shifts in the way Ultima games were played. As such I won’t attempt a point by point reply here as I don’t think it will have a useful endgame. I don’t think you’re wrong, but I feel the “Truth” 🙂 lies somewhere in the middle.
I will say however that the industry wide shift to 3D and 1st- and 3rd-person perspective largely was not driven by good design. It was the rush to be first and the fear of being last. The film industry in many ways parallels the games industry, especially in this regard. When they get a new toy their zeal to use it often results in an inferior work. “With great power comes great responsibility” applies here.
Compare the graphics between Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. MK used video footage of actors wearing costumes, yet both still frames and the game in motion look like shit compared to the carefully crafted pixel art of SFII. SFII chose each frame of animation based on the visual impact it would carry both alone and in sequence. The best action sequences in film use similar techniques, treating the sequence more like cel animation than a long shot of two people actually fighting. This illustrates the difference between art and simply presenting reality.
You probably disagree with this, but again compare the aesthetics of non-combat sequences in Wing Commander II to Wing Commander III. WCII was hand drawn with the exception of the silhouetted pilots running, which was rotoscoped. WCIII used bluescreened video footage composited on crude pre-rendered backdrops. While III’s tech was inarguably superior, the end result, to me, was inferior. That was my opinion at the time of the game’s release, so the poorly-ageing argument doesn’t apply. Conversely the combat sequences in III were clearly superior; this was proper use of new tech. In film an example of how to properly use available tech (tech is also equated with money here) is The Blair Witch Project. They knew they didn’t have the budget nor equipment to produce a AAA film, so they didn’t try. They designed the film around what little tech they had, and to great effect. If they had tried to make a AAA film it would have utterly failed. WCIII’s cinematics were technologically incapable of reproducing a live action film, yet instead of conceding to this they tried to do it anyway to mediocre results. WCII’s cinematics recognized this limitation and embraced it with hand drawn, cartoon-like sequences. Its artwork still holds up today.
Early 3D films used the tech in immature, ridiculous and distracting ways, such as by having an axe fly at the camera. The jump to “VR” in games with the Oculus Rift will no doubt have similar problems with studios using it for the sake of it without much thought to the impact on their original vision.
Sometimes new tech is so obvious it doesn’t take much thought to incorporate it successfully into a game (mouse, keyboard, hard drive, Sound Blaster card, 256 colors). Other times the rush to have the newest and shiniest game possible backfires, or at the very least fundamentally changes the game in a way fans may not be prepared to accept. Which games fell victim to this is subjective and we could argue fruitlessly forever. I would say that the recent “retro” movement and its many successes demonstrate that the design choices in older games are not necessarily anachronistic and obsolete, that they retain value outside the scope of technological limitations. This alone suggests that at least some of the many franchises which abandoned 2D for 3D may have been in error.
You probably disagree with this, but again compare the aesthetics of non-combat sequences in Wing Commander II to Wing Commander III. WCII was hand drawn with the exception of the silhouetted pilots running, which was rotoscoped. WCIII used bluescreened video footage composited on crude pre-rendered backdrops. While III’s tech was inarguably superior, the end result, to me, was inferior.
It’s not so much that I disagree, though I do take a different view. There is something of a drop in quality to be perceived between WC2 and WC3, for sure…in the overall sense, at least. And it’s arguable that something like Bungie’s Marathon: Infinity, despite being a 2.5D game that wasn’t actually capable of true-3D environments (and which used beautifully-drawn — if slightly low-resolution — sprites for characters and enemies), looked and maybe even played better than did Quake, one of the first truly 3D shooters.
Nor can it be denied that there was a rush by many companies — Origin Systems included — to get on board the 3D bandwagon. Heck, Origin was ahead of the 3D curve in some respects, having published Ultima Underworld (which, you’ll recall, predated Wolfenstein 3D, but sadly never caught on as the go-to approach to 3D gaming. I continue to maintain that John Carmack, in creating the engine for Wolfenstein 3D, set back 3D technology a good few years.).
But: this is the shortcoming of any new technology, is it not? The first couple generations of new technology tend to be both overly expensive and of lower overall quality, especially when there are multiple competing standards vying for dominance. Think Betamax versus VHS, or HD-DVD versus BluRay, or USB versus FireWire, or AGP versus PCIe…or, you know, insert your own example. Think of CD-ROMs when they first came out: $2,000 for a 1X CD-ROM drive! These days, I can buy a CD/DVD/BluRay drive with read and write support for all those formats for under $100. But: I can only do that because enough people, at every generation of optical media technology, were willing to run with the uncertain, quirky, will-it-or-won’t-it-become-the-standard first-generation technology, in spite of its exorbitant cost.
And it’s the same with 3D technology. Star Citizen looks gorgeous; the latest Far Cry game does as well. Pick any Assassin’s Creed game; it’ll look amazing. Even Divinity: Original Sin, despite its more modest engine and level of detail, looks pretty damn nice. Whereas games like Quake (and many other early 3D titles) look so blocky that even a LEGO brick would say: “damn, watch out for those edges!” But would we have gotten to Star Citizen if Quake hadn’t been a hit, if its technology hadn’t been iterated upon, and if other developers hadn’t undertaken similar developments that went through similar rough starts and teething pains?
It’s the same in cinema: there’s a direct technological progression, played out over three decades, between the hilariously awful CGI of The Last Starfighter and the eye-poppingly gorgeous — and scientifically accurate! — CGI of Interstellar. But the latter wouldn’t have come into being without the former, and especially without the former being a success. Unfortunately for us, that does mean having to suffer through some objective drops in quality from time to time. But what’s the alternative? Just keep playing the same sorts of games in the same kinds of engines, decade after decade? That might appeal to the denizens of the RPG Codex, whose clamour for games that look like they were built in the Infinity Engine knows no ceasing. But some people want things to progress, even if that means occasional missteps or the occasional backslide in quality. This was certainly true of Origin.
Because the other aspects of design can catch up, given sufficient time. Think about this: Akalabeth came out in 1979, and Ultima 7 came out in 1992. It took Richard Garriott and Origin Systems thirteen years to iterate 2D top-down RPGs from being monster-slaying romps into open-world sandbox morality plays. Ultima 9 came out in 1999, and Skyrim came out in 2011. Ultima 9 tried to jump-start 3D RPGs by featuring an open-world design with significant amounts of sandbox-like interactivity, but these concepts largely failed to catch on. It took eleven years for 3D RPGs to recapture and exceed what Ultima 9 tried to do. And now, three years later, with games like Divinity: Original Sin and Shards Online, we are seeing developers trying to match that Ultima 7 level of sandbox gameplay…and not quite succeeding, because that sort of thing is more complicated to implement in a 3D engine.
Still…thirteen years, fourteen years…not all that different, as time scales go.
I would say that the recent “retro” movement and its many successes demonstrate that the design choices in older games are not necessarily anachronistic and obsolete, that they retain value outside the scope of technological limitations.
Maybe. I’m not so convinced. There have always been those who have stood to the side of technological development, bellowing “STOP!” at the top of their lungs. There are those who prefer Walkmans to iPods, flip phones to smartphones, MS-DOS to Windows, and the Start Menu to the Modern interface. And yeah: iPods, smartphones, Windows, and Modern have their issues and quirks, which some users see as proof positive that the new technology is markedly inferior to the old. Maybe it’s just because I have children (and lots of siblings, whom I also got to watch grow up), but I just can’t convince myself of that. When my kids were learning to walk or speak, well…they didn’t ace these things overnight. I wouldn’t say this marks them as inferior, and so I’m reluctant to say the same about technology that is obviously iterating.
Nor do I necessarily think that the transition from 2D to 3D was erroneous, even if it meant a backslide in terms of overall game quality or content richness. Obviously, I want 3D RPGs to become as content-rich and full-featured as were the best 2D RPGs of yesterdecade…but as has been noted already, this isn’t a thing that can happen overnight. It takes time. So what?
Just gonna nitpick a bit about this :
“Conversely the combat sequences in III were clearly superior; this was proper use of new tech”
I would have to strongly disagree about this. I say this as someone who loved WCIII… but I’d argue outside of the obvious graphical superiority, WCIII was very much a step down from WCII in term of gameplay and design – it became little more than a glorified shoot, essentailly removing all the improvements WCII had brought over WCI. The game is enjoyable but I’ve always felt it was a big step back from WCII, and I would take it as an exemple of how using new tech can sometime impair your game design (compare it to Ultima IX for instance which couldn’t bring some traditionnal Ultima aspects to its tech). Comparatively, Wing Commander IV which built upon WCIII’s existing engine managed to bring back all the stuff that was cut and much more.
That said I understand what you’re saying in term of art – the use CG background, while groundbreaking at the time wasn’t ‘top notch’ by any means, and WCIV’s use of real sets certainly helped the game feel better in this departement even it was closer to a TV series than the “movie” it was touted to be.