The Exodus Project Announces “Sosaria Mod”
Voyager Dragon has announced an exciting new project: Sosaria Mod!
Sosaria Mod is a world mod to Ultima’s 2 and 3 that allow both games to be set in the “Lands of Lord British” from Ultima 1. This effectively keeps the first three games all on the same consistent world.
Why Sosaria Mod?
When I began playing the Ultima series back in 1990, I started with Ultima 6. By then the world of Britannia and its history had been firmly established. The manuals and the NPC’s in-game talked about the lore of the earlier games as if those events occurred in the same setting and all these things happened in one connected and consistent world.
I did not realize until years later when I went back to play the prequels that this history was not as stable as it was made out to be as there were some glaring continuity problems. The inter-game narrative was connected in the manuals by the Triad of Evil, but the setting was largely disconnected. The Sosaria’s of Ultima 1 and 3 barely resembled each other, and Ultima 2 took place entirely on Earth. Furthermore, Ultima 4 had no resemblance to its predecessors save for the namesakes of some cities.
What if we could take those disparate worlds and make them more consistent with each other? What would Ultima 2 feel like if it took place in Sosaria? What would Ultima 3 feel like if that Sosaria was consistent with the one in Ultima 1? And can it be slightly less difficult to imagine this world could become Britannia? That’s the driving purpose behind Sosaria Mod – make the game worlds of the first trilogy consistent with one another, and possibly later lore.
This project will, it sounds like, be realized gradually, alongside other Exodus Project efforts. For example:
Release 3.3 of the U3 Upgrade will add world modding capabilities. I also have a fair amount of the game world mapped out. So look for the U3 mod either included with or shortly after the next U3 Upgrade release!
Voyager Dragon has set himself a goal of finishing Sosaria Mod by the end of 2017. But even if he doesn’t quite achieve that goal, this will be a fun project to explore when it is finished.
