Hand of Fate: The Card Dealer Character Was Inspired by Ultima

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Hand of Fate is a curious game; it is part card-collecting game, part RPG, and part third-person brawler. A Kickstarter-funded game developed by Morgan Jaffit’s Defiant Development — Jaffit himself has worked at the likes of Irrational Games, Ubisoft and Relic Entertainment — Hand of Fate is currently available for PC via both GOG (where it’s available for PC, OS X, and Linux) and Steam. Console versions are also available. It seems to earn high praise from players on both sites; might be one to check out.

And as icing on the cake, Jaffit himself readily admits that Ultima helped inspire at least part of the game:

ABC: The game’s obviously got a bit of inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s rare to have that kind of dungeon master role embodied with a voice and an appearance and that omnipotent sort of opponent. There are games like Left 4 Dead that have an AI Director, but again, it’s not so in your face. What was involved in creating the fortune-teller and was it as central a force or as prominent a character in bringing all of the game’s different parts together?

Jaffit: So the very very first build didn’t have [the fortuneteller] there, and the dealer’s kind of inspired by the fortune teller inUltima, that tarot-style fortuneteller, but it’s also inspired by my [experience]. You know I started in the industry as a designer, I worked at Irrational on Freedom Force, I then went on to do level design at Relic, I worked at Ubisoft on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory where I wrote almost all of the AI remarks, so the things the AI said when they spot Sam Fischer. And there comes a point where you’re doing your 900th variation of seeing something in the shadows, where you think, “There’s gotta be a better way.”

Proving once again that the Ultima games are among the most influential in the world, I suppose. And among the most inspirational. Indeed, as the screenshot above ably demonstrates, the connection to Ultima is easy to spot with this one.

Hat tip: Sir Gil

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