Spoony Reviews Ultima 9. You’ve Been Warned.
Uuuuuuuuugh:
This is more of a disaster than the game ever could have been.
Where to begin? I really only kept summary notes as this disaster of a video was rolling, but here’s some of my takeaways.
- So…the whole “Spoony Experiment” thing has really just been build-up to venting about Spoony’s butthurt over Ultima 9?
- Spoony is, like far too many others, anxious to use Electronic Arts as a scapegoat for everything that he disagrees with about the later Ultima games. Why this myth persists to this day baffles me, given the ample debunking it has received from various sources (including discussions at Old Aiera), I will never understand. Then again, perhaps Spoony’s introduction offers an explanation: these games were, per his own words, essentially his childhood, and he feels some sort of emotional letdown with Ultima 9 and its failure to live up to his expectation. Maybe that’s how a lot of people feel. And you know what? That’s fine…but it’s not a rational thing. Emotion, especially childhood emotion, almost never is.
- While he’s right to call out the retcon at the beginning of the game, Spoony incorrectly assumes that the devastated land at the end of Ultima 8 is meant to be Britannia. It isn’t; that was meant to be the Guardian’s world, which the Avatar would presumably have had to battle his way thorough in the original plan for the ninth game.
- Moreover, the decision to retcon the end of Ultima 8 and move Ultima 9 first to Earth and then back to Britannia, was made by Origin Systems in response to fan outcry over the end of Ultima 8, as was revealed in the famous “fans.txt” file included with the Ultima 8 patch. I don’t know if Spoony just forgot about this (I assume so, charitably) or deliberately omitted mention of it, but either way…he should have known the retcon was coming. Origin told us it was coming!
- Okay, some of his criticisms of the encounters surrounding the Avatar’s house on Earth are legitimate.
- Does anyone remember if Spoony complained about the fact that hey, the Avatar’s stats had reset to novice levels at the start of Ultima 7? Anyone?
- In fact, did he complain about the changes to Castle Britannia and its grounds in his review of Ultima 7?
- Why is he griping about the fact that you have to steal to get ahead in the game? Isn’t this almost a hallmark of every Ultima? Has Spoony never even played Ultima 6? Oh, wait, he has…has he never robbed the Royal Mint?
- Yes, the Avatar asks a lot of what are arguably dumb questions. But this is true of Ultima 6 and Ultima 7 as well; the Avatar was always able to inquire about basic concepts in the games, in the assumption that some people might not have played the previous games. It’s almost never necessary to actually select those lines of dialogue, but they’re there for those who need the information.
- Seriously, did he crib this together from stock footage whilst reading from Hacki’s page?
Well…that was surprisingly un-funny. I usually chuckle at least once in the course of a Spoony review, but here? Nothing.
I’m honestly not looking forward to the second part of his review and the verbal abuse he is likely going to heap on the whole Guardian/Avatar oneness plot point, despite the fact that it’s since been shown that this was something that was planned for the game even before much of the design team was transferred to Ultima Online.
Oh, and for the record: the 3D engine used in the final game was actually an evolution of the original engine, not a complete from-scratch rebuild.
That’s right Aiera, never miss an opportunity to heap praise on the worst game in the series, which finally put Origin out of its misery, while also rushing to white knight EA. Ultima 9 wasn’t just a terrible game (and a worse Ultima) when it was kicked out the door half-baked. It’s remained a bad game for more than 12 years.
Now that you’re just blogging, it’s probably long past time for you to relinquish the Ultima facebook page. Maybe there’s a Mass Effect or Dragon Age or some other EA/Mythic facebook page you can curate and/or cheerlead instead?
I don’t think that’s really a fair comment, Hambone. WtF has done incredible amounts of hard work over the last 3 or 4 years to the Ultima community, and he has always been honest.
Heh…if you’d really been paying attention, you’ll know that I’ve no problem conceding that EA bears a share of the blame for Origin’s demise, and indeed for some of the issues with the last three Ultima games. I’ve never actually denied this point.
But I have long since grown tired of the opposite mentality, and those fans who never pass up an opportunity to shit all over EA whilst turning a blind eye to Origin’s well-documented role in their own untimely demise.
Ultima 9 was not without its flaws, but it’s still an eminently playable game that, while not the strongest Ultima title in existence, nevertheless has some redeeming virtues about it. Indeed, it actually FEATURES the Virtues to some extent, unlike Ultima 7.
Besides…if I was going to start a new Facebook page for anything, it would probably be for that upcoming Larian Studios game.
Just for the record – Origin’s demise had nothing to do whatsoever with Ultima IX.
Nevermind the fact that Origin’s closure came five year after Ultima IX’s release – what killed the Origin of old was Ultima Online’s unexpected success which led EA’s and OSI’s management to think it would be a great idea to put all their eggs in the same baskets and turn Origin into an online game company.
This has nothing to do with Ultima IX, and if anything it’s nothing short of miracle that Ultima IX actually got released instead of being cancelled like say… the sequels to Wing Commander and Privateer, and that was in a large part because Garriott and the U9 dev team thought bit and nails to be able to continue the game.
Also for Ultima IX to have put out “Origin of its misery” in 1999, that would assume Origin was in a misery at that point, while they’ve kept releasing quality single player games all during the ’90s (but god forbid anyone would mention Origin release done of quality game after its buyout from EA… alas that’s just fact).
Indeed the Studio in itself was healthy enough up until its closure, and worked upon a lot of different projects even if managemetn issues and the first collapose of the MMO bubble lead to many of those cancellation. And ironically the only reason the studio completly died is because EA mistakingly belived most Origin employees would move from Austin to Redshore as they planned… but that didn’t work as planned obviously.
So yeah… nothing to do with Ultima IX.
If there was a way to “Like” replies, I would be liking yours. People forget that Origin worked on other titles after IX.
People also forget that Ultima IX was being worked on at a time before Wing Commander IV and UO had been released. Origin was certainly not in a miserable state at that point in time.
Well…..
I found Spoony’s review to be entertaining, and never took it too seriously. As for Ultima IX, I think it gets picked on far too much. I actually enjoy it, and even occasionally play it to this day.
I’ll reserve judgement till I’ve watched the review, but I will just say that Spoony really should never be taken seriously… The whole point is watching him get disproportionately worked up about games and movies from his (our?) childhood. It’s just entertainment, not a serious review.
I agree these sorts of reviews aren’t meant to be taken seriously, but personally I just can’t enjoy them because they’re often based on sillyness and false argument just to get some laughs. Which is okay I guess, except in some case they help propagate some misconceptions that should be long gone.
The only Spoony review I watched in its entirety was the Privateer 2 one years ago, , and it was so facepalm inducing, I decided these weren’t worth wasting more of my time really.
I did enjoy his review of the Wing Commander movie. Not quite Red Letter Media levels of outrage and dissection, but pretty close.
1. Spoony said in his U8 review that the whole reason he’d reviewed the entire series was so he could review U9 while providing viewers who hadn’t lpayed the game a context of the series. Some of the stuff he says isn’t always correct, but it’s a *given* he hated U9. It’s totally expected that this review is going to blast Ascension.
3. Spoony is not a lore buff. I’ve picked up quite a few errors across the reviews, but it generally wasn’t worth bringing up. In terms of Britannia supposedly being destroyed, the Guardian says several times in the course of U8: Pagan that Britannia is burning. Ergo you kinda expect a devastated Britannia.
4. He’s probably not a news buff either.
I’m not, and if not for UDIC I wouldn’t have known that.
6. He did in some of them, yes. I think you can find some reference to it in UW2 and SI, the former of which you’ve apparently gotten out of shape after only a year and the latter in which he’s happy you finally start a game armed to the teeth instead of wearing a burlap sack. After Forge of Virtue your stats are insane anyway. :p
9. Actually, I think you had to ask some inane questions in U9 or you screwed flags up/missed important dialogue branches. Been a while, but I’m pretty sure I remember it being an issue in some places.
10. I suppose I should watch it.
But Hacki’s site is an excellent reference.
1. Fair enough. But honestly, I couldn’t get through his Ultima 8 review, even though I regard it to be one of the worst two games in the series. So I must have missed that bit.
Even so, the sheer irrationality of his hatred came as a total surprise.
3. Fair point again. Still, that’s not a point in Spoony’s favour; if you’re going to bash a game on lore, it’s probably a good idea to actually study the relevant lore.
4. It is true that not everyone pokes around game directories for…you know, no good reason.
6. That’s true…he did say as much for those two. I should probably re-watch some of the others to see if he had the stat-reset complaint for e.g. Ultima 6.
9. Hmmn…I’m pretty sure I was able to skip most of those on my last playthrough. Not that I took meticulous notes, so you may be the more correct. But it seems to me that I recall being able to skip…at least a goodly number of the boneheaded questions.
10. I enjoyed Hacki’s site more when I was still in the camp of rabid EA haters. I enjoy it less now, though there are nitpicks on it that elicit a laugh from me.
Thanks WTF! I don’t have much to add after that, though just a couple of point SoL :O
Nah you didn’t. First time I played U9 (and that was without ANY patches), I didn’t ask any of the “inane” questions because I felt there was no point since I was an “Ultima Veteran” and never came with any flag issue.
The only major flag issue I came up with was the Katrina/Goat one and it wasn’t tied to a specific dialogue choice.
On a side note I’ve always felt the reaction to these question was geez…. completly overblown. Sure the Avatar asking “What are the Gargoyles ?” is a bit silly… but these are questions that were obviously meant for the newcomers to the series and could be skippable if you felt there was no point in them, (And I felt the reactions to these were okay most of the time – Vasagralem’s outrage if you ask “What are the Gargoyles ?” is very appropriate for instance).
Now I’ll grant that it could have been formulated better (ie. “Tell me about the Gargoyles/Paladins/whatever” instead of “What are…?”), but I don’t think there was that much to be outraged about.
I’d sorta contest that. Hacki’s site is fun, but a lot of his nitpicks about Ultima IX are made in bad faith, or are just downright wrong. Many a exagerated as well, and quite a lot also have answeres in either the game itself or the manual.
Which is not to say U9 doesn’t have quite a bit of lore issues (but then… so did U6 and many other Ultima games for instances), but nowhere as much as Hacki makes it out to be.
I’ll bow to your knowledge on 9, Sergy.
FWIW I don’t recall being outraged about those questions, but I did think they were inane. I *know* there had to be something there for new players considering they’re jumping in to a series with a number of other games behind it, but it could have been handled in a way that didn’t make the main character sound like a blank slate/amnesiac/idiot. Considering they went with a set PC and full VO, maybe it would have been a good time for the paraphrase wheel to be born so the Avatar could have been, instead of questioning what the Codex was, displaying his knowledge of it and thereby informing the Player and looking competent.
But that’s all in retrospect.
10. I didn’t say it was a *perfect* reference.
@WTF – Oh, yes, I agree the hate is overboard. It’s…his project though, y’know? And not entirely unexpected from him, though it does go on a bit longer than usual.
3. Again I agree. But it’s not the kind of reviewer he is. :p Not that that means a free pass, but it means you should go into his reviews expecting such errors, whether or not you deem them unprofessional.
4. I vaguely remember looking for a quotes file, but that was it. TBH I wasn’t that interested in rooting around the U9 folder after playing it. :/
Anyway, I watched the review, and while there was more vitriol than I was expecting I confess it made me laugh more than some of the previous reviews. Deep in my soul I guess I still enjoy poking fun at Ascension’s holes. Probably not very Virtuous of me, but eh. Spoony’s reviews have always been more about the entertainment factor than well-researched veracity or being balanced in its critique/praise anyway.
3. Yeah, that’s true. I suppose for me the issue is ultimately one of both sheer quantity and quality. When Spoony is on, he’s…he’s on, y’know? Even when he’s off on a wild tangent of incorrectitude, if he’s locked into a particularly comedic error, it can be hilarious. Here, he’s got the sheer quantity of error, but there’s just not the funny underpinning to it.
There’s no “there” there, as someone once said.
4. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was referring to the “fans.txt” file that was part of the Ultima 8 patch, and which appeared in the U8 folder when the patch had been applied.
3. Yeah, I getcha.
4. Ahh. Thanks for the clarification. *ponder* I got U8 when it was already patched, and again in the UC. If you only see that file with the separate patch itself, then yeah, I missed it completely.
Just for the record :
8.Why is he griping about the fact that you have to steal to get ahead in the game? Isn’t this almost a hallmark of every Ultima?
The first time I played Ultima IX, I never stole anything in the whole game. Just because NPCs doesn’t react to it, doesn’t mean I’m no longer the Avatar and I should take everything I want
It’s not *exactly* a hallmark of previous games. His complaint was that if you wanted half-decent armour, as in better than leather, you couldn’t buy it in Britain. You had to steal it. It wasn’t a case of it being available via merchants but simply unaffordable. Spoony remarked that it seemed strange that Britain, the largest city in Britannia, didn’t have a smith worth a damn. I’m inclined to agree with that, if not the stealing bit.
Even though Britain is technically the starting area, previous games have gotten around the availability of high-tier common armour and weapons by making them expensive as opposed to non-existent. I suspect with Britain being the beginner area it was simply a tactic to not overload new players with extensive merchant inventories rather than encouraging theft, but who knows?
Wasn’t S for steal in Ultima 1? Hallmark? Maybe not, but definitely a core gameplay mechanic.
Hah, the ability to steal is separate from the apparent *necessity* to do so, which is what I think Spoony is trying to argue. Theft exists in all the Ultima games. He was never complaining that you *can* steal, but that to him it felt like the game was poking you to do so if you wanted equipment you should have been able to buy from the local merchant in the first place.
Speaking of U1 though, I have fond memories of stealing vacuum suits and lasers from LB’s Castle at the very start of the game. Made it very easy to advace.
Quite right!
If anythinng I felt u9 had a lack of consequences for stealing. I remember jumping a pit in a dungeon and the karma bar would go down. I don’t recall it going down much for theivery.
To me, it felt like it wasn’t stealing if no one was mad, you didn’t lose karma, and the guards didn’t come after me. It was like, they were cool with me walking into their house and borrowing their stuff to never be returned again for the good of the community.
I don’t remember buying much in Ultima games; I was a little dissapointed when I couldn’t break the glass case to steal from the blacksmith though.
Ultima 6 didn’t impose much of a penalty for stealing, or indeed for anything. It did track your karma, but even casting Armageddon was only good for a -20 hit. Breaking mirrors was worth a fair bit, though…you could lose more karma by breaking all the mirrors in Britannia than by wiping out its people.
Was tthere no penalty for karma? I’m accustomed to u6o’s heavy handed pemanent character karma kill. There was a guy who got locked into the amulet of submission for months because Galleon had put a single karma check at the shrine of singularity. But I don’t remember much about the original u6′s karma.
I do remember planning the mute shipwright wouldn’t be able to yell out to the guards. ‘Why wait til night? He can’t talk! And I needs me that sextan, NOWt!’ Was my face red when he yelled out to the guards.
There was no significant penalty for karma. I mean, if you fell below 80 or 85, the guardians of the Codex would reject you, but since you lost so little karma per infraction and gained tons of karma per good deed, you almost never encountered that situation. Unless you cast Armageddon…or went on a mirror-breaking spree.
Was there a death penalty that aligned with karma in U6? I can’t recall. I know it was there in U4 and U5, but those two Ultimas had other things that took karma into account, such as dialogue.
I’m not sure. I kinda doubt it.
And really, you’d have to murder half of Britannia by hand if you wanted to get your karma anywhere near zero. I doubt this has been attempted.
“Execrable”? “Uuuuuuuuugh”? Seriously, you care that much about this game? This makes you look really bad, Ken. It’s so out of sync with the opinion of the fandom that the assumption that somebody is paying you off now seems fairly reasonable.
It’s okay to think that U9 was not that bad, but you really need to express that in a less butthurt way if you want to remain a credible voice of the fan community.
Let me remind you that when Spoony gave a bad review to your self-proclaimed favorite game in the series, Ultima VI, you reacted to that rather passively and even conceded that he made some good points.
http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/spoonys-review-of-ultima-6-not-entirely-fair/
Why the wildly different attitude? Again, I humbly suggest that you rethink your approach here and amend this post.
Yes. And?
Because as wrong as Spoony was on some points, and for as much as I disagreed with him on other points, he was actually still somewhat on the side of reason in his Ultima 6 review, not in an over-the-top froth about “BETRAAAAAAYAL!”
Also? I laughed during his Ultima 6 review. Not so, here.
If we ever get married, Infinitron, you can ask me to do that.
Of course, if you’d like to offer a differing opinion of the review and/or the game on the site here, I’ll happily set you up with authoring privileges. I’m always glad to add new writers!
You’re being silly. Ken has always been a UIX defender long before Aiera was even a blip on the internet.
There are also plenty of fans who enjoyed Ultima IX even if they are less vocal than the haters.
As for Spoony’s review I personally think they kind pf reviews suck ass. They’re supposed to be funny but they tend to be patheric most often than not… And Im not just talking about UIX and Spoony there so I cant blame WtF for his choice of word. He’s just being honest about what he thinks of it – is he supposed to go «ooh uix sucks and all» just to,please the haters?
Come on…
Ken has always been a UIX defender long before Aiera was even a blip on the internet.
Is that so? He once said that his opinion on EA had changed over the years. But I’ll let him speak for himself.
As for Spoony’s review I personally think they kind pf reviews suck ass.
That’s a legitimate opinion. Spoony’s definitely kind of a dork. But that didn’t stop this blog from gushing over his Ultima reviews when they were still positive.
He’s just being honest about what he thinks of it – is he supposed to go «ooh uix sucks and all» just to,please the haters?
No, but he should recognize that pulling out the butthurt language (“disaster of a video!!”) for this review and only this review is weird and out of character, and it arouses suspicions.
You’re both correct!
Sergorn is right: I’ve never really hated Ultima 9…in fact, I’ve always rather liked it. That’s not to say I can’t admit its issues or concede that it could have been even better…but I’ve still always liked it.
And Infinitron is right: my opinion on EA has shifted over the years, principally in response to evidence, but also because I can’t stay truly pissed off at anyone (certain family members excepted) or anything for years and years on end.
Note the distinction! There was a time when I simultaneously liked Ultima 9 and hated (or at least strongly disliked) EA. Which is reasonable; they’re different things, not even in the same categories, and one can form an opinion on one independent of one’s opinion on the other. And indeed, we should take care not to conflate the two!
Finally! Someone finally finds what I do here arousing!
…oh, wait.
Honestly, though, I don’t know how to respond to that seriously.
As WtF just said, I don’t really see the link between hating EA and liking Ultima IX.
I was a EA basher for quite a long time (and like Ken I’ve eventually and gradually changed my view when looking at the facts, and because geez… it’s been a long time and they been doing some damned good games since then), and yet I’ve always been a strong UIX defender, anyone who’s known me on the U9 Horizons and Official boards since the late ’90s can attent to that.
I don’t think there’s much of a correlation between the two – I’ve seen people who hated both EA and U9, who liked U9 and like EA, who like EA and hate U9 and what else
That’s not say EA has no blame whatsoever of course, but honestly I think some Ultime fans are a bit in denial in term of how much responsibilty EA *directly* had over “ruining Ultima” as opposed to all the mistakes OSI themselves did (This is specially true regarding U8 where Ea had no role whatsoever – at least with U9 they certainly had a much more direct blame since they put a ship or kill).
What I find ridiculous really is how some people goes “OMG HE’S BEING PAID BY [INSERT NAME]” whenever someone don’t agrees with their negative view. I’m not aiming this at you Infinitrion because I think you know better, but frankly anyone who thinks like this needs their heads checked, and I’m okay if they don’t come here – I like having sensible people in my community rather than nutscases, thanks you very much.
I like the game…no point in remaining closeted about that. Heck, I like it a bit more that I like Ultima 7.
But the reason this sort of thing elicits such a visceral response from me is because so much of the hatred that gets poured out on Ultima 9 — and, for that matter, EA — is unwarranted when you actually look at it objectively and in light of what we now know about the history of the game’s development and the internal workings of Origin Systems.
That isn’t to say the game was flawless (it wasn’t), or that EA is blameless (they aren’t), or that the emotional reaction that the game elicited in a portion of the fandom isn’t in some way justified (it is, to a certain degree).
But to assert that EA was solely responsible for ruining Ultima 9 and that Origin was essentially just a passive victim that was ultimately killed by the final game of the Avatar saga is…a lie, plain and simple. A disturbingly and depressingly common lie, at least on the Internet, but there it is.
Come now, Infinitron. Surely you’ve been following the site long enough to know that I don’t care about optics?
Or to put it another way: I am occasionally interested in looking good for my wife. Not so much anywhere else.
Someone is paying me: my employer, who (being a global control systems, aerospace, and cyber security firm) has nothing at all to do with the gaming industry.
No, the truth is far more terrifying: nobody has to pay me to like Ultima 9 or think that EA isn’t the physical manifestation of pure evil that some make it out to be. Why? Because I like Ultima, and want more of it. And I’m not afraid to admit what’s true anyway in pursuit of that end.
I’m credible?
I kid, but only slightly.
Look, I’m not going to conform my opinions on any subject to those of any social group just to curry favour therewith. That’s true for politics, religion, gaming, and even Star Trek. Why would I? Wouldn’t that be doing exactly the same thing — albeit in the opposite direction — that some suspect and accuse me of doing for EA?
Fine. I’ve made my opinion known. Just remember what sort of crowd your blog gets its hits from. Defending Ultima IX is a waste of time. Defending it so vehemently is a fool’s errand.
I’ve just watched the video myself now and it’s fine – typical Spoony fare. Which means that it’s not particularly cerebral, but it hammers home very effectively just how derptastic (I honestly can’t think of a better word) the game was.
Complaints about the humor are irrelevant – it’s not supposed to be funny, except in the sense that watching this angry unemployed manchild go ballistic for 45 minutes is funny.
Quite!
Come now…there’s no need for that sort of talk.
I realize that not everyone agrees with me. And if someone else throws together a competing site that better caters to allegedly popular sentiment, I may lose traffic thereto.
But I’m not going to be “not me” just to win a higher hit count.
I’ve never denied being a fool.
Maybe so, but there’s usually something more than just his antics to laugh at. And frankly, even the antics didn’t elicit laughter from me this time around.
By the way, last year I posted these Bob White comments on the RPGCodex. Were they deleted from the original posts? I can’t seem to find them.
I don’t see why they would have been.
That was a very lengthy comment thread, though…and Old Aiera paginates comments in blocks of 50. Perhaps your remarks are on a different page?
Oh, there they are. I thought maybe he’d thought they were too revealing and asked them to be removed.
Nope. It was just a loooooong discussion. Might even be the most commented post on the site…I’d have to check. It’d certainly be a contender.
As a fan of all 9 Ultima games, 9 is definitely and truly a betrayal to the plot and setting beforehands, by defending it you show your transparent lacking fandom of the series. Just keep on sucking EA’s %*^#, you’re post and comments are completely invalid, Ken.
I beat you to the punch with the fellatio jokes.
See, I just don’t get this mentality: one can’t be a True Ultima FanTM(C)(R) if one doesn’t utterly despise EA and Ultima 9?
Sorry, I don’t buy it.
I just watched Spoony’s review. Almost 45 minutes of constant bitching and screaming, as if Hacki’s Ultima Page came to life and forgot to take its pills. I don’t like U9, but I didn’t find the review entertaining at all. Seriously, that guy needs to get a hobby. As viewers we may or may not be taking him seriously, but evidently he himself is taking it way too seriously.
I liked the review. I never noticed the variety of accents on the npcs in U9. I guess that’s one way to build character for the npcs without a portrait. That’s pretty interesting.
I usually just watch spoony for entertainment, than a gufffaw. But I did chuckle at ‘Betrayed Me’. I took it satirically. Like the Mass Effect gamers felling ‘betrayed’ about the ending to their little trilogy.
Personally I liked u9 more than u8. I played it unpatched and patched, and felt the excitement up to the release. It was a logical next step to the series considering u8′s platforming. You have to admit, the platforming was greatly improved. And the engine was pretty cool.
I’ve stacked bottles and staves for hours in different locations, let me tell you.
I think, a large part, was the pacing. I felt like there was more to do in a shorter period of time in u1-u7, even u8. I could run for 30 seconds 1 minute and be in a city, a field, a mountain range, and a forest. And within that I’d likely find some weird cool random spot with some loot and something that makes me think what’s happend here?
But hey, a 2d rpg is going to have fundemental differences than a 3d one.
The Avatar in u9 probably had the most personality than in any other Ultima. In all the Ultima’s you had atleast the gender option. Even u8 gave you a helmet to hide your race and, to a certain extent sex.
Name, job, bye and one word questioning on the surface looks like silly generic uninnspired questions. The beauty of it is, it’s enough of a question to imagine your own. When the Avatar asks a gargoyle in u7 “Gargoyle” and the gargoyle explains what they were, you had more freedom to draw inferences “Oh he misinterpret my question, must not know who I am, must not know what the Gargoyle kingdom is doing presently.”
Rather than, “What’s a gargoyle?” Giving it a sort of, dissonant character building quality to the question. Yeah, I guess it’s my choice to roll with the dialogue, pretend like it’s not there, pretend like I never clicked the dialogue option because I’ve been conditioned to click all dialogue options in rpgs. Cuz ya never know, it’s always that damn beggar that has the answer to the next puzzle.
They could have phrazed the dialogue better at that. Instead of “What’s a Gargoyle?” why not, “How are the Gargoyles?” “How are the Paladins?” Then the dialogue could have fueled the atmosphere and story in a more meaningful way. And that’s just me freestylin’ off the top of my d.
Ultimately what turned me off, when it was patched, was the graphics. I couldn’t go through another empty landscape with the same grass, mountain, and cave textures. And my journey stopped at Minoc.
I dunno, it just didn’t lend to my imagination like the other games did. And I don’t think it’s target -was- to lend to the imagination in a way the previous games had. I agree it’s a good game, just tough to believe it’s an Ultima. Or the final Ultima.
For the fine folks who really liked Ultima 9. What was it about the game that captured you as a gamer or lent to your imagination?
U9 had some really good points. It still had the exploration qualities of previous Ultimas (not as much as U6/U7, but at least as much as Serpent Isle), and that was in 3D. I mean, you could swim to the bottom of the ocean (in some parts) or climb to the highest mountain, and find things there. That was pretty cool.
The virtues were back. Some things were a little different, but it was still nice. The overall storyline regarding them was pretty good as well. Virtues corrupted, Avatar needs to fix. We all know that the populace can be affected by that sort of thing (ala Ultima 5).
I like the main plot too. The Guardian being the evil twin. I liked it so much I wanted to flesh it out more in my Infinity Eternal remake (though time unfortunately made that impossible to finish). I did think that more background was needed there… Bringing in some of the worlds that the Guardian had conquered on his way to Britannia (building power in my opinion). I think people had to play Underworld 2 to truly grasp the Guardian, and not many had when they played U9.
The companions were back. Iolo and Dupre were butchered (my major grievance with the game), but hey, Shamino was kinda back to his old Ultima 6 self. Those that played Ultima 6, then Ultima 7, would have noticed a very weird change in Shamino’s personality.
The towns were a bit iffy. Minoc/Cove wasn’t even a town. Yew was in trees (?). But Britain, Moonglow, Trinsic, Paws, Bucc Den…. They were all very well done (Britain was a little small though). Visiting Serpent’s Hold, Empath Abbey and the Lycaeum was even kinda cool. People say they hate the Lycaeum ’cause it wasn’t canon (wrong)… but I think that added to Moonglow. The old Lycaeum was “destroyed”, and they hid the knowledge where no one could find it (hiding the Truth, as it was). It was one of the more subtle awesome parts of the game.
After Ultima 7 the Ultima fans just started picking everything apart. Ultima 8 had an even worse reception, but the reason we talk more about Ultima 9 is because it was the last. When it came out people suddenly liked U8 (at least, didn’t hate it as much), because U9 was the devil. I enjoyed U9. Some things could have been better, but the same goes for all Ultima games. U9 was a good game.
What Thepal said, basically.
Hmmm…it was a number of factors, for me.
My first Ultima was of course Ultima 6, and i more or less played the series in order from there, looping back to play some of the earlier games during the wait for Ultima 9. I hadn’t given 3D gaming much thought prior to then, despite the affinity of my high school cohort for all things Quake and Half Life. That was more a function of my distaste for shooters, though…I periodically looked at screenshots of the games and wondered to myself what Ultima could do with that sort of thing. I’d played the Underworld games, of course, but there was just something different about the newer 3D engines…
Anyhow, the answer I got with Ultima 9 was…that they could do quite a lot! Oh, sure, Britannia was arguably smaller than in some of the other games, and the odd scale of some objects was a tad surreal…but I was never really offended by this. There was lots of Britannia to explore, right from the get-go…and I got pretty good a finding my way into some areas I probably shouldn’t have at the point in the game I was at. Those mountain slopes…a lot of them just needed to be approached at the right angle.
Better still, there was lots to discover in Britannia. That’s one thing I wish Ultima 6 had, and it’s something Ultima 7 has a fair bit of: Easter eggs. Pirate forts, wiyard towers…whatever. And Ultima 9 has lots of those, too. I loved that.
And…well…I enjoyed the gameplay. Oh, the occasional crash spoiled the odd session here and there, but most of the time I played without issue. I had a TNT2 card rather than anything Voodoo-flavored, but that didn’t cause me issues in most cases. If I played for more than 90 minutes, sure, there was a bug in how the game cached graphics data that would start to slow it down to a crawl…but I rarely played for more than an hour at a time anyhow. I was, after all, still living at home then, being in my last year of high school…and I had four siblings to share the computer with.
And just…seeing Britannia like that, rolling out ahead of me, fading into the distance. It had always been tangible to me, but now it had depth! Now its trees and buildings towered over me; I wasn’t beholding them from on high anymore.
Also, I greatly appreciated the return of the Virtues and the shrines. After their utter absence in Ultima 7/Serpent Isle and Ultima 8, it was the best thing in the world to be prompted for the mantra of Compassion again.
The game engine was pretty sweet, too. Oh, the textures aren’t all that, and triangle counts are way higher these days, but there aren’t that many 3D RPGs even now that’ll let you stack up (or, heck, move around) such a wide variety of objects. Yeah, the object physics were a tad wonky, but it was always fun to build a stairway out of various items in an attempt to reach some off-limits spot.
Eh. The two big things that sank the game for me were the dialog and script (atrocious) and the overall… dead feel of the world. I could have forgiven quite a bit else and actually adored the music with it’s dark and light themes. But the dialog was just drek and everything else just seemed so… empty and sterile.
And yeah. I was with him right up until he started the “betrayal” counter. Then it just got really annoying.
That’s my main complaint…about Ultima 7. Britannia devoid of the Virtues, of shrines I can talk to and meditate at, just feels dead to me, no matter how much damn bread I bake.
That’s a different kind of sterility than what Bedwyr is talking about.
Does your dislike for U7 stem in part from it being a sometimes unsubtle promoter of (now rather quaint) early 90′s liberalism?
The 1990s? Liberalism? Do you read my stuff? Clearly you’ve got me pegged 40 years too late and several political categories too far to the left!
(I kid, but only slightly. I am — or aim to be — a promoter of Catholicism, not any political ideology, when I deign to meander off the topic of gaming.)
Anyhow, and more seriously, no, my dislike of Ultima 7 doesn’t stem from politics or religion…it stems from Ultima 6. The Virtues were exceptionally well-handled in that game, and well-integrated into the fabric of Britannia. I loved having to seek out a shrine to level up…especially if I’d been out exploring and had lot of leveling up to do. Mu…mu…mu… Ra…ra…ra…
And that was all gone in Ultima 7. The shrines, the voices of Britannia and its spirit, had fallen silent. I almost wanted to let the Fellowship have the place.
That was kind of the point, Ken.
Ultima VII – both parts – was a game in which you explored societies that had lost their moral compass and their social solidarity. That’s what the Virtues represented in those games. One might claim they were a stand-in for Ibn Khaldun’s concept of asabiyyah.
In U7, you came back to a once familiar land, that had somehow changed, become alien, lost its way. Serpent Isle served as a kind of thematic companion piece, a “what if” story about a society that had formed without moral guidance from the very beginning.
In that sense, Ultima VII can in fact be seen as subversive – the expressions of modern-style liberalism in Britannia (drugs! feminism! anti-racism!) are all symptoms of a society that has “lost its religion”.
“The central subtext of the story to Ultima VII is that, when the fabric of society becomes weak, it’s very easy to have evil inflict itself on you” – Richard Garriott
That’s true, but the same was arguably the case in Ultima 5, with a different (though not entirely so) cause. And yet, the shrines and the Virtues had a place in the narrative. But in Ultima 7, you couldn’t even talk to the shrines…they were utterly lifeless.
That’s not just a loss of moral compass. And I’d argue that such a theme could have been strengthened had the shrines been able to tell their tales to the Avatar.
But they were silent. And that wasn’t just a loss of moral compass…it was a loss of the land’s own soul.
Both themes are quite good, to be sure, and I quite liked Serpent Isle; it’s my #2 favorite. And it’s not that the theme flopped in Ultima 7…it’s just seems like they went too far with it.
He’s not wrong there.
And again, I get the theme they were going for…but I maintain that they went too far with it, and what should have felt like a merely alien Britannia came off feeling like a husk instead.
I wish comments wouldn’t go into moderation just because I put two links in them…
That’s why Ken has helpers. We approve posts.
I love having an actual site team. It’s awesome…they’re awesome.
It’s hard for me to understand your point of view, that U7′s Britannia was a “husk”. Surely the loss of talking shrines was more than made up for by…everything else?
BTW, how was Serpent Isle better in that regard? All of those Ophidian ruins?
What Sergorn said: Serpent Isle wasn’t Britannia, so it worked being all ruined like that. It was new, strange…and its brokenness worked because of that. And besides, you never expect an alien place to operate by the same rules.
But Serpent Isle was a brand new worlds we’ve never seen before. Not Britannia
My issue with Ultima VII’s world personally, is that it didn’t felt like Britannia anymore really.
I’ve grown with Ultima IV~VI, and Ultima VII just felt wrong. Indeed part of the reason I love Ultima IX so much, is that it felt so much more like the Britannia of old I’ve grown to love during the “Age of Enlightenment” rather than this semi renaissance thing with its boring social mumbo jumbo from Ultima VII.
And frankly the portrayal of Britannia was far from being UVII’s only issues. There was little PLOT content per se and it felt like the whole Guardian storyline wasn’t tied with the rest of the world. This would be okay is the content of the towns as they are was interesting, but while there were good NPCs, you mostly did uninteresting things : how many “quests” consisted how telling Y than X loved him/her ? Way too many… And the lack of Virtues (yes yes I know it’s a plot point, so what ? I’m supposed to love it just because it is a plot point ?) just added insult to injury?
The dungeons were simply BAD as well (that is you can call it a dungeon) and nevermind about the terrible combat.
Before you go and say “all those aspects were better than in Ultima IX!”… no they weren’t. Ultima IX had a much better gameplay, combat was okay if unbalanced, and the dungeons were awesome – définitly the best the series has to offer as far as I’m concernet. And regardless of whether one likes UIX’s plot or not, the fact is that at least the game DID focus on it.
That’s not to say U7 has no qualities of course : it’s virtual world aspect and interactivity is unparalled, it has some very atmospheric areas, wonderful explorations to do. But from a plot and setting standpoints this is one of my least favorite episodes in the series, and it really dissapointed me when I first played it.
So it has flaws, U9 has flaws too. All Ultima have really; THat’s okay.
What was your problem with U7′s dungeons? Teleportation puzzles? Were they just not big enough? I don’t think they were that different from U9′s dungeons, in concept (focused a bit more on puzzles than on maze exploration).
There was little PLOT content per se
Some would call this a feature, not a bug.
Different strokes.
That’s a double-edged sword. To wit, apart from the busted block feature, I’d call Ultima 9′s different approach to combat a feature.
Oh, and U9′s combat was more than “unbalanced”, it was broken and unfinished. (Let’s hack at this random pirate 100 times until he dies!)
It was just as broken as U8′s combat, although at least it was easier to control.
I agree that U7′s dungeon are not that different from U9 in concept. But they’re just not very fun in execution and ridiculously small. It felt like an incredible step back from Ultima VI. The only dungeon I’d argue was worthy of the name, was the Fellowship/Hythloth one at the end.
Now of course I understand that was largely due to technical limitations of the engines (they could only put dungeon content in the areas contained within the moutains), but this was really dissapointing when I first played. (That’s also why I was okay with SI sacrificing seas to get bigger undergrounds).
On a side note, and that is an issue with SI too, U7 showcased an issue in having the whole thing in real time – having so many explodings traps and fireballs in real time when you can’t avoir it because the engine is not really apparopriate for is silly. Ironically these aspects got better in U8 simply because the game was arcadish.
Regarding combat un U9, frankly : I never had to hack at pirate 100 times till he dies
…
As a matter of fact combat in U9 if anything was incredibly easy with pretty much all humans adversaries dying in a couple of hits (there’s a reason Grandor and Maigo pulled a “Monster patch”), and when you DID come to a creature that didn’t die in a few hits… all it usually took was switching to a different/more effective weapon and/or attack to kill it rapidely.
So it really wasn’t that broken was it ?
(Now if some people never bothered to do anything in combat beyond click-festing, that’s not juste the game’s fault).
Now there were some parts of the combats that WERE broken (ie. Shield Parrying) but the underlying core was working as it should except the hit points of monsters and damages was people was definitly unbalanced.
@Segorn
“My issue with Ultima VII’s world personally, is that it didn’t felt like Britannia anymore really.
I’ve grown with Ultima IV~VI, and Ultima VII just felt wrong.”
I’m willing to bet that for players who grew up with U1-3, U4′s Britannia and its emphasis on the virtue system felt just wrong. I suppose U4 turning Sosaria into Britannia was a bad thing, then? I suppose the series should never have introduced Britannia and should have taken place entirely in Sosaria instead, then?
“And the lack of Virtues (yes yes I know it’s a plot point, so what ? I’m supposed to love it just because it is a plot point ?) just added insult to injury?”
I fail to see how no longer tying the player down with virtues is a step back. I liked having the freedom of doing whatever I wanted without caring about losing karma. U4 already made you play the game by the virtues and it was interesting. Now can we move on and try new stuff instead, PLEASE? Garriot claimed that the reason why the virtues were no longer enforced was that he had enough to them and wanted to try something different, and I couldn’t agree with him more.
And if you counter that following the virtues is an essential element of the series – no, it isn’t. It’s a central element of the Age of Enlightenment. Just like the Age of Darkness, the Age of Armageddon was supposed to be different from the AoE. One of the aspects it was different in was that virtues were no longer the central focus. That’s why I HATED U9 bringing back the virtue system. It felt really out of place for a game that’s part of the AoA.
“I agree that U7′s dungeon are not that different from U9 in concept. But they’re just not very fun in execution and ridiculously small. It felt like an incredible step back from Ultima VI. The only dungeon I’d argue was worthy of the name, was the Fellowship/Hythloth one at the end.”
Funny, I liked U7′s dungeons much better than U6′s, and while they were indeed smaller, they felt like they were more tightly designed. Most of U6′s dungeons have huge floors that are for the most part empty, and you have to mindlessly roam through them looking for ladders taking you to another floor. In contrast, U7′s dungeons were far more diverse (ie: they had more enemy diversity) and had more puzzles and less empty space.
I honestly can’t see how you can say that U7 felt sterile when U6 offers almost NOTHING to do outside of the plot. After completing the story, there’s nothing to do. There aren’t any sidequests, and you already explored about every dungeon during the story.
To elaborate on my previous comment, U6′s Britannia felt truly empty and sterile to me, as there was no content outside of the story. After finishing the game, I went back to re-exploring the world and talking to all NPCs to see if there was anything I had missed, and didn’t find anything new. That’s why U6′s Britannia felt like a truly empty and sterile world that only had that content required for the story.
In contrast, every time I re-explore U7′s Britannia, I find new stuff. That Britannia is huge and filled with content and secrets. That made it feel like a rich world. In contrast, U6′s Britannia that felt more like an area that existed only for the plot and had the minimal content necessary, rather than a world.
That’s why I think it’s very shallow of you to call U7′s Britannia “empty and sterile” just because you can’t meditate at the shrines.
Whereas I’d argue that it’s shallow to confuse an abundance of surface (in the “external” sense of the word, not the “not in a dungeon” sense…though, granted, Ultima 7′s were a on the surface anyway…) veneer with deep meaning. Yeah, the U7 map offers lots of neat places to explore and find, like the little pirate forts and wizard towers. And yeah, U6 lacks for some such details.
But I know the U6 game map better than most, know the mechanics and plot of the game exceedingly well…and I still discover things about it every time I play.
And c’mon…you thought the dungeons in U6 were sterile, empty rooms? Okay, granted, they all use the same tiles — castle or red rock — but each has a wildly different design, and each has its own interesting character as you progress through its levels. Hythloth feels like a pit leading to Hell; Destard starts out cavern-like and opens into a treasure-filled dragon’s lair. The Sewers seem narrow at first, but lead to a massive cave that carries you halfway across Britannia. And the Pirate Cave twists and doubles back, and is laden with traps and dead ends.
And the dungeons were deep. Oh, some of U7′s dungeons were long in their layout, but there was never really the sense of actually journeying beneath the land. SI has that feeling; U7 does not.
But to return to my point, this is surface stuff, veneer, and it’s not what I’m getting at when I say the world feels empty. In the Britannia of U6, there’s a strong sense that the land itself is alive, and that the Virtues are its…animating force. It’s not just that the shrines talk (though that is part of it); it’s that the Virtues are present beyond the Shrines too. The tavern patrons in Jhelom sing of Valor, the people of Moonglow are fresh and Honest, the people of Yew straightforward and mindful of what is Just. Trinsic is steeped in Honor, New Magincia is a Humble fishing and shepherding village, and…well, you get the idea. Each major city draws life out of the Virtue associated with it, and the very pulse of the world seems to hum with the Virtues as a result.
That’s all gone in U7, so far gone that even the shrines have fallen silent. That animating force, that pulse of the land…none of it is there. None. Of. It.
And all the pirate hovels and sophisticated conversation trees in the world can’t hide that fact. U6 had a lot of those same trappings — not as many, though it did have a wider variety of boats and horses you could actually ride — but it also had a land that felt alive at that deeper level. U7 had the trappings, the veneer, but the land was soulless and dead.
You must not have explored hard enough my friend! In the last year I’ve done several overhead flyby’s of the dungeons for placing loot in u6o so that the dungeons would be more fully explored. There’s a lot of cool stuff in the stock dungeons; from a scenery state. And a lot of random dungeons.
Infact, most of the dungeons weren’t even plot relevant: Spider cave, swamp cave(which was huge and awesome), cyclops cave, despise, and I’m pretty sure destard wasn’t plot relevant. Hythloth wasn’t very plot relevant; you could just moongate to gargland and enter from there and that dungeon was done.
There were loot spots in despise where you had to throw a dead body diagnally through some stalagmites and res them to get the loot. While you couldn’t collect flower and water to make bread and earn some moola. You could turn wool, to yarn, to thread, to silk, to cloth, to sellable clothing and turn a profiit. There was another way to earn money by colleccting honey combs as well.
Like WTF said, they each has it’s own unique feel. Did you ever notice in despise you’re following a gold nugget trail and then have to run thrrough a field of reaper? Kinda like walking down a yellow brick road and getting accosted by trees. I think that’s just as cool as running through a field of poppies and falling asleep.
It’s true, there weren’t many sidequests other than the economic ones mentioned. Some NPCs would ask you to help them, and the missions would be unsolvable. Most notably Quentin in Skara Brae. As Quentin’s portrait was in the gamefiles, I believe he even had a dialogue, but it wasn’t implemented in the game. Which would ellude to the original u6 concept of sidequests being a little more full and grandiose. Pretty amazing we’re picking bones on sidequests in a game from 1990.
I wouldn’t expect u6 and u7 to be exact clones. But I’d say they’re general approach was very similar. Fully interactive, open cohesive world, with the story revolving around believable characters and social issues.
Was that the atmosphere they wanted to create, though? Sure, we all wanted to return to Britannia as we knew it, but the way the game felt (dead, as you put it) did add to the defeated feel of Britannia. The feel that something just wasn’t right (in a more overt way than U7, where it was meant to be more hidden).
And let’s not forget that by the end of the game, Britannia seemed more alive, more whole.
The colour palette was a tad flat, granted. But the world had a pulse — and shrines and Virtues — again. I’ll take that over a Britannia with shrine-husks any day, no matter how well-kept said husks may be (or how sexually forward the redheaded keepers thereof might be).
Not really. It was more a happenstance thing to do with the fact that they thought fully voiced audio would be a great idea on a CD’s space. That limited the NPC count and made things really sparse.
Eh, fair enough, although that was a limitation that was almost necessary for gaming to evolve as it did from Ultima 9 onward. Had DVDs been commonplace as a storage media, it wouldn’t have been an issue…but that wasn’t for a couple of years more, at least.
C’est la vie. Origin, as always, dreamed just a little bit bigger than the technology of the day was able to fully handle.
I haven’t watched the review yet (too busy coding and not too invested seeing as I stayed the hell away from IX), but I have to say that the comments here remind me of why I tend not to speak of how much I enjoyed Ultima 8 and how much potential it had. When I do that it tends to illicit similar responses Ken is getting.
It’s entirely possible to disagree with the fandom majority view on a game and not be an EA shill or a rabid fanboy, you know.
I love Ultima 8. I think it fit well into the flow of the series, and I liked the gameplay. It’d be a lot harder to get across the feeling of being in a hostile world where danger is everywhere if you couldn’t die (easily). No other Ultima made me afraid of exploring dungeons. Even just getting through them (not even fighting, but walking/jumping/etc) was scary.
I should probably change that to “No other main Ultima game made me afraid…”. The Underworld games were pretty scary in parts
I found some of the dungeons in Ultima 9 kinda spooky and tense.
And Ultima 6 with a good sound board has the best (that is: creepy) dungeon music.
I agree, Ultima 8 had way better ambiance than the other games, at least I think so. It was extremely moody and as far as setting a tone well crafted. The platforming… well, aside from the horrible jumping puzzles, it actually had potential. I enjoyed climbing onto buildings, feeling like I was accessing areas I wasn’t “supposed to”, and then of course using roof entry to loot the place.
There was a lot in Ultima 8 that could’ve worked had they polished it more, even though as an Ultima game on the whole it was rather a failure. Still, I get lambasted for that opinion more often than not cause it’s not popular to not hate on U8.
@Thepal @WtF Dragon
Could 8 and 9 have used more development time and corporate support? Yes, especially 9 given how much they changed it up both technically and storyline. I remember the hardware changing quite a bit around that time. The problems that affected 9 also affected a lot of games in a similar situation around that time. It wasn’t helped by Windows 95 and 98 and the driver support from the hardware companies.
Still. I think the biggest problem for 8 and 9 is that they came after Ultima VII. It is very hard to make a follow-up game when its predecessor was so incredibly iconic and well received. I suppose a movie example would be following up Alien with Aliens or Terminator and Terminator 2. Cameron pulled it off because he took them in slightly different directions. Alien went from horror to action. Terminator went from the star/”monster” being the bad guy to the good guy.
While 8 and 9 had different styles of gameplay, at their heart they were still Ultima RPGs and expectations were really high.
It is a shame that 8 didn’t get the Lost Vale expansion as well. I wondered whether that would have maybe added more to its reputation in a positive manner.
Any game could use more time/support. You need to remember it wasn’t EA that made the decisions on how to make those games. That is where this argument tends to come from. Some people blame EA. But the truth is, Garriott and Origin decided to completely rework how U9 was going to play. I remember seeing screenshots of it years before release when it was still isometric. How much more time would they have had if they didn’t rework the whole game after that? Not using time well is usually the problem of the developer, not the money behind it. With U8, Origin made the decision to make the game they made. Not EA.
If EA was instead to say “Here! Have some more money and time! As much as you need!”… Well… Amalur was a good game that destroyed the companies behind it.
Yeah.
As pointed before Ultima VIII was done at a time where EA basically let Origin do all they wanted. So blaming them for Ultima VIII is just hypocrite.
They can definitly take a more direct blame for Ultima IX since they put a ship of kill for the game, and in the last years didn’t care about it anymore and juts wanted it gone – but again they never forced Origin to restard the game twice, and revamp it one last time a year before release.
That’s where Origin and Garriott make the biggest mistake for me – they were exciting about 3D and thought a full 3D Ultima would have been awesome. But the BWP Ultima IX was so advanced they could just have completed it after UO – worries about it looking dated made no sense if they added 3DFX into the mix. A shame.
I’ve heard both games had deadlines, but I know that IX had a ship date that was all but set in stone. As Sergorn mentions, it was partly Origin/Garriott’s fault for switching to 3D, but EA management should have either made him stick to the original plan, or allowed more time and money for the 3D stuff since it was a very highly anticipated game.
Either way, IX was buggy as hell for me and everybody I knew, some of whom bought into 3DFX hardware thinking that it would make it better. It was not cheap. I did not upgrade as I had upgraded the previous year for UO and couldn’t afford it.
To be fair, I would assume with the 3D craze that was starting, EA must have been supportive of the switch to 3D in ’97. I think the issue is that priority changed during ’98 when UO’s success became more and more apparent, culminating with the decision in early ’99 to chance OSI to as Online Games only company
At that point Ultima IX became a thorn on the side of the company, who didn’t want this game anymore and probably saw it at just using ressources that would have been better used on online game. I’m pretty sure they didn’t outright cancel it because they didn’t want to piss Garriott (keeping in mind there at this point Garriott was not supposed to leave Origin as he wanted to do “X” with UIX Team, but he eventually left because EA wouldnt let him do anything outisde UO2).
Perhaps in a different ciruncstance they would have allowed more time and ressources to UIX to be properly completed, but at this point all they wanted were online game. Altough what’s really crazy is that EA had high hope for the sales of Ultima IX (I remember an interview with Garriott saying they were hoping numbers along Baldur’s Gate: ie 500 000 copies), which is just ludicrous, especially for a game so obviously rushed and buggy. It would likely have sold better if it had been bug free, smooth and polished considered this was was reviewers mostly complained about.
(On a side note I do think there were some crazy expectation for Ultima IX – I mean the Del Castillo version of the game was expected to ship for XMas ’98 and I just don’t see how that could have been remotely doable).
Ah but it did ! The game was still buggy of course, but with 3Dfx it was smooth and had less graphical glitches and issues.
Doubtful.
Irony has it that The Lost Vale has become this sort of holy grail of the Ultima series, but really this would just have been more of the same : more puzzles, more pre patch jumping, more combat….
Had it been released in ’94 as originall planned… fans would have *HATED* it, just like they hated Ultima VIII.
Even Sheri Graner Ray the designer, thought it was terrible, and was actually baffled there was so much fan interest in it
Remember: we saw the plot document(s) for it!
Yeah. More of the same basically heh.
Do people really believe it would have fixed things?
Fans get excited over content they haven’t seen. They tend to want it to be good. But I don’t know anyone who thinks it would have been like a super-bandaid.
I don’t know I’ve seen many people have some crazy expectations abou the Lost Vale, that almost seemed to grow over the years.
I’ve stop counting the amount of times I’ve seen fans thinking Lost Vale would have awesome, would have fixed decrepensies in the plost and the series’ continuité, would have brought the Tree of Elerion, tied everything with Morghrim and Serpent Isle, go and explain the true nature of the Guardian and what else. And of course the dev docs proved us it was just a small side quest with no relation to any of that
Honestly fans tends to fantasize a lot about cut and cancelled content thinking it would have made everything perfect…
Hell you have a beautiful exemple with the BWP, with many people feeling for a decade this would have been teh prefect Ultima sequel while getting the full plot doc just proved us a LOT of contreversial ideas from the final game were alerady in the game, and there was even more controversial content in it. (Eck I remember someone telling be after reading the BWP summary from ’99 how it was awesome because the Guardian was “just” an evil entity as it should be with no Guardian/Avatar nonsense… and yet in the end he would still have been his “evil Twin” in the original plot as well
)
Now the BWP UIX would likely have been better solely on account that it likely would have been a much more polished game… but Lost Vale ? Yeah no it would just have more Ultima VIII that fans would have hated just as much.
The Guardian wasn’t exactly an “evil twin” in the BWP, not in the same way. He was born because the Avatar became the Avatar, but other than that they weren’t metaphysically bound to each other in any way. (so the Avatar can kill him without killing himself)
Well he wasn’t exactly an “evil twin” in the final game either
The Guardian in the BWP was formed from the Shadowlords whch was spawned from the Avatar’s own darknes within the Gem of Immortality – so it’s not -that- different, except the final game somehow simplified all this by removing the Gem/Shadowlords from the equation.
But my point is – I doubt the Guardian/Avatar link would have pleased everyone either way.
I don’t know that it would have fixed things – I’ve read the docs about it, but for me it would have given it a little more depth. VIII always felt too short, but again, it’s coming after VII and that’s a tough act to follow.
Again, the fact that the Guardian isn’t literally bound to the Avatar in the original plot is a significant difference.
It’s the difference between him being basically his own being with a personality and a history (an evil Gargoyle who influenced Gargoyle culture) and just being a magical construct defined only by his relationship with the Avatar.
That was supposed to be “evil Gargoyle deity”
Seems to me you’re forgetting the part where it’s explained that the Guardian is the coalesced Shadowlords which *were* formed from the Avatar’s Darkness.
The whole thing about him/them afterward possesing a Wingless Gargoyle and serving as a Gargoyle prophet before going whoknowswhere adds to his background of course (altough if that was to be explanation the explanation as to why he’s big read entity that’s a bit… silly) but doesn’t really change the fact that he’s tied to the Avatar from get go and was basically born from him and his actions. So that adds background but doesn’t really define his nature
And well nevermind the whole Hawkwind Ultima background which states how Avatar of Virtues lead to the creation of Guardians of Darkness – whic is pretty much how the final game summs up the Avatar/Guardian thing.
That being said, there are some obvious contradictions in the Guardian/Avatar/Ultima background in that plot doc, probably due to the multiple revisions – but you can see how the Guardian/Avatar aspect evolved to how it is presented in the game through simplication.
(And eck I mean technically there is nothing that would pevent the whole Gargoyle background to work with he Guardian as defined in the final game a it is… well nothing except the fact they didn’t bother adding any backround info for anything within the game
)
Sergorn: I don’t understand what you aren’t getting.
In the original plot, the Guardian is an autonomous being. He can kill you, and you can kill him. The only way he’s connected to the Avatar is the circumstances of his birth.
Did you forget what happens in the released UIX when you try to stab the Guardian? And don’t you think it’s weird that the Guardian has been fighting the Avatar for three or four games but can’t actually kill him? (what happens to the Guardian if the Avatar is killed by a random monster, anyway?)
Ultima VIII is pretty good once you got the patch. I wouldn’t call it a good “Ultima” game (unlike UIX whihc for all its flaws felt like an Ultima through and through to me), but it was a good game.
The whole “BETRAYAL” thing is basically a Spoony meme, btw. He famously shouted it at E3 2011, at the XCOM FPS exhibit.
Awesome video. All game designers should listen to his lampoon. His often insightful (and generally humorous) perspectives show how ridiculous and inconsistent game IP can be. My personal highlight I present here:
http://eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/misc/What's%20a%20Paladin%3f.flac
Sucks!
Betrayal!
Betrayed me!
I fail to see how fans’ hatred for EA is unjustified. That EA rushed U9′s release, causing the final product to be rather buggy, Britannia to be rather short, plot to be rather simplified, and the inconsistencies to be worse (ie: the Avatar summoning Pyros in U9 was a result of the game being rushed, as if Origin had been able to incorporate the full plot, that event would merely have been a vision produced by the Guardian) is true. That they caused the series’ death is also true, as they almost prevented U9 from being made (after UO’s success, they wanted Origin to foccus on that game rather than making more single player games), and they cancelled UO2 and UX. And that they caused the death of Origin is true, too, as they prevented them from releasing post U9 games and finally disbanded it in the 2000′s.
And most UO players will tell you that EA also ruined UO, as after Garriot left and EA took over control of the game, most changes done to it were for the worse in most players’ eyes. And the fact that after EA took over the game, the game lost a huge portion of its userbase (and kept losing players in the following years despite the game becoming more casual every year) supports their argument. Heck, many of the reasons why fans of the single player Ultima games dislike UO (ie: how far it strayed from its Ultima roots to the point that it no longer feels like it belong to the series, a fact that even you agreed with) are a result of EA taking over tha game.
It’s true that EA aren’t blameless, but the true culprit for Ultima’s death is none other than Richard Garriott, who it seems had a critical lack of awareness of what people liked in his games. I blame it on his jealousy of the Wing Commander franchise’s greater sales.
In truth, Ultima was doomed as a high-brow RPG series the day U8 was released, and the next five years were just a long, protracted death.
Garriot changed U9 after the fans’ reactions to U8 to make it appealing to them. And (dare I say it) if U9 had been granted the developed time it needed, it wouldn’t have been as disliked by fans as it was.
It still would have been a weird action adventure thingy and not a nostalgic early 90′s-style RPG.
Maybe they could have fixed the engine with enough time. That still wouldn’t have made the game a worthy successor to the U7/UW2/Serpent Isle “holy trilogy”, and in fact there’s no sign that Origin ever intended to live up to that standard.
I don’t see where you’re coming from. So what if the combat was more action-oriented? Like U7 is remembered for its combat system.
If Origin had implemented a Britannia as detailed as U7′s, as well as NPCs and dialogue on par with the ones seen in the games you mentioned, then it would have been a 3D version of U7 with a better combat system.
I think Infini’s point is that Origin wasn’t looking to make another U7, but 3D and with better combat. They’d already made U7; it was time for something different.
That’s what’s seemingly never understood about Origin: they hated doing the same thing twice.
I dunno, I mean the BWP Overhead 3D version of Ultima IX, doesn’t sound like it was going to be arcadish.
Now I assume it would still have had real time combat but I don’t think it would have aimed at the Arcadish combat U8 and U9 had.
That being I think Ultima had been gradually moving away from hardcore RPG stuff since Ultima VI, placing a stronger enphase on adventure, dialogue and exploration elements, rather the usual RPG troppes (ie: combat, levelling, skills and such). But basically I don’t think the series would ever have evolved into something like a Fallout or Baldur’s Gate.
Now whether this could have been a worthy Ultima depends on one what would expect and want from an Ultima really. I do think for a lot of fans though that was the immersiveness and a virtual world in addition to a great plot. There were a lot of fans for which Ultima IX was fine in term of world, immersiveness and basic gameplay… but for whom the game fell appart solely because of the plot, which is understandable.
But i think many people would have been okay if we’d take Ultima IX’s gameplay has it is, polish it as it should have been (ie better and balanced combat, NCP schedules and the like) and with a more consistent plot.
But even a Ultima IX as it is polished to the extreme with the best plot ever, would never have been an hardcore old school RPG and more of an action/adventure kind of game with hints of Zelda and some RPGs elements.
@WTF – I think it’s more that Garriott hated doing the same thing twice.
Chris Roberts seemed okay doing basically the same game with improved graphics or different settings.
What Ken said. I’m not just talking about the combat.
I’d argue that this partially misrepresents the position Sergorn and I (among others) are stating. EA isn’t blameless, and nobody is saying that fan rage at the time didn’t have some basis. That it has persisted for over a decade is kind of silly, but whatever…the salient point is that nobody is saying that EA is free and clear of all blame.
What some of us are saying, however, is that Origin were also complicit in their own downfall, and indeed were also complicit in how U9 (and UO) turned out. But many fans seem to whitewash these facts in an attempt to paint EA as the most evil company in the world (or whatever).
It’s also true that Origin — not EA, Origin — rewrote the game’s plot at least four times, switched engines once, and heavily modified the 3D engine they ultimately went with at least twice (once to add hardware rendering support, and once to move the camera from an isometric view to an over-the-shoulder view).
It’s also true that EA ultimately put the ship-or-kill on the game to actually make Origin ship the damn thing already, please and thank you, rather than continue throwing time and money into it ad nauseam. Infinitron is right to note Garriott’s jealousy of Chris Roberts’ success…and it would seem he was also jealous of the budgets Roberts could secure for his projects.
Take care not to omit mention of the fact that lots of fans of both Ultima and UO were very vocally disdainful of both projects. That can’t have helped EA’s projections about how well both games would do.
And really, look also to Garriott himself; he thought online was the future too, and his vision for “X” was not a strictly single-player thing.
Think about it: where did Garriott go after Origin? What did he work on? What is he working on now? Did he ever touch single-player after U9? Heck no…he was as committed to online as EA wanted Origin to be.
And I’m sure fan outcry over UO2 and UXO had no impact at all on those decisions.
EA obviously did close Origin…they bear the blame of that, sure. But at the time, their rationale — consolidating studios to Redwood to enhance resource sharing and trim costs associated with running geographically disparate studios in the days before everyone and their phones had cheap broadband connectivity — made sense. It’s a moot point now, in 2012, but it made sense in 2004.
Not that many of us — even me — were willing to admit that point at the time.
Garriott left Origin in 2000. UO saw its subscribership peak in 2003, three years and four expansion packs later. Your argument is weakened by available evidence.
Not that you’re entirely wrong, however. It is true that after 2003, UO subscribership dropped, and has continued to do so since then for the most part. Some of the more controversial expansions for UO — LBR and AoS, notably — we’re Origin-made. Others — SE, notably — we’re developed at EA Redwood Shores. But then, so was the Stygian Abyss expansion (Mythic also worked on it)…which was a big return to Ultima lore for UO and which has, to my understanding, drawn praise from fans.
So it’s hit and miss. EA made some missteps, but so did Origin. And the decline of UO is quite significantly de-coupled from Garriott’s departure from Origin.
Arguably, the departure from canon began with the first Origin-produced expansion, T2A, and continued through each successive expansion that was released.
And as I’ve already addressed this above, I’m going to stop right…here.
“I’d argue that this partially misrepresents the position Sergorn and I (among others) are stating. EA isn’t blameless, and nobody is saying that fan rage at the time didn’t have some basis. That it has persisted for over a decade is kind of silly, but whatever…the salient point is that nobody is saying that EA is free and clear of all blame.
What some of us are saying, however, is that Origin were also complicit in their own downfall, and indeed were also complicit in how U9 (and UO) turned out. But many fans seem to whitewash these facts in an attempt to paint EA as the most evil company in the world (or whatever). ”
Ok, fair enough.
“It’s also true that Origin — not EA, Origin — rewrote the game’s plot at least four times, switched engines once, and heavily modified the 3D engine they ultimately went with at least twice (once to add hardware rendering support, and once to move the camera from an isometric view to an over-the-shoulder view).
It’s also true that EA ultimately put the ship-or-kill on the game to actually make Origin ship the damn thing already, please and thank you, rather than continue throwing time and money into it ad nauseam.
Considering that the reason for U9 to go through so many revisions was that Origin put aside the project in order to develop UO, which became a huge success and gave EA lots of millions, I’d say those revisions were justified and Origin wasn’t being that unreasonable.
“Take care not to omit mention of the fact that lots of fans of both Ultima and UO were very vocally disdainful of both projects. That can’t have helped EA’s projections about how well both games would do.
And really, look also to Garriott himself; he thought online was the future too, and his vision for “X” was not a strictly single-player thing.”
Although you have a point, the generally accepted reasons for those games’ cancellations had nothing to do with the fans’ opinions.
“And really, look also to Garriott himself; he thought online was the future too, and his vision for “X” was not a strictly single-player thing.
Think about it: where did Garriott go after Origin? What did he work on? What is he working on now? Did he ever touch single-player after U9? Heck no…he was as committed to online as EA wanted Origin to be. ”
He might have considered online to be the future, but I don’t remember him ever stating that a Ultima X produced by him would be a MMORPG.
And I remember reading a relatively recent interview in which Garriot was asked if he would be willing to go back to making single player RPGs, to which he replied that yes, he would be interested in producing Ultima games again if given the chance.
“Arguably, the departure from canon began with the first Origin-produced expansion, T2A, and continued through each successive expansion that was released.”
Oh, come one. T2A merely added a small area that was considered part of Britannia and had no culture or history and whose only purpose was expanding the world and providing with more space for housing. That’s different from what later expansions did by introducing lots of huge landmasses unrelated to the single player series or Britannia and, as well as un-Ultima-ish elements like samurais, ninjas and elves. And I still haven’t forgiven EA for introducing Luna, which caused frigging Britain to become deserted (which is just wrong).
And one more thing… sorry for my noobishness, but I include use quotes in my messages?
Well, yes and no. The switch to hardware-accelerated 3D was warranted, but all the plot rewrites? The switch to an OTS view? The Bob White Plot and the Ed del Castillo plot were both fine stories…why not work with one of them, trimming as need arose, rather than trigger another costly rewrite?
But that’s what happened, and it happened at Garriott’s behest (and against EA’s wishes).
Since he later drew parallels between Tabula Rasa and X, it’s a fairly safe assumption to make.
Can I point out that, as phrased, Garriott’s answer as you relate it says something potentially quite different than what the question posed to him actually asked?
Judging by the number of pre-T2A freeshards, there must have been some controversy there even so.
I’m with you on the samurais. Can’t really blame EA for what the players chose to do, though.
The blockquote HTML tag is allowed.
Just a note about UO – T2A didn’t add additional housing. Well there were some bugs allowing people to place structures where they shouldn’t have, but the first housing expansion was Renaissance.
But I agree with you that later expansions did move UO away from Ultima and UO clearly lost its way, but the last expansion did try and move UO back into the world of Ultima.
The problem is that is probably the last expansion we will ever see.
For over a decade, we got fairly regular expansions. Then they stopped doing expansions.
Then after the last expansion, Stygian Abyss, we got the “High Seas” booster, which added a lot to the navel aspect of UO, and which a lot of us liked. We were told that these boosters were to replace expansions, and that we would see 1-2 a year. That was in 2010. High Seas remains the only booster, and last year they dropped the booster concept in favor of these small theme packs that add in new systems and new housing tiles. Now even those theme packs have been dropped after only the first two.
So they are taking steps forward, hopefully towards 3D, they are doing more with in-game stories and bring in Dupre, etc., but they are also taking steps backward.
Somebody has decided to try and make something out of UO. They just refuse to tell us what they want it to be.
Why is it that people disliking EA makes you butthurt, WTF Dragon? You keep telling us that we should be hating on Origin as they brought their own fall, yet when people bring up valid points to dislike EA, your answer is “Ok, EA was at fault, too. But Origin was worse, and this is why: (insert weak reasons to dislike Origin, such as that U9 went through multiple revisions during its development, like MOST video games do)”? You keep attacking people who express their disapproval of EA and telling them to stop being such haters, yet you act like a EA sympathizer to the point that your arguments make you sound like a Origin hater.
I’m not WTF but since we usually see eye to eye on this…
The EA hate can get annoying because it is sometimes unwarranted and it really feels silly to carry on that hate nowadays anyway considering the vast majority of the involved involved in EA/OSI 20-15 years ago aren’t there anymore.
And you know this is true about many other companies bought out by EA – you’ll keep hearing people pointing EA’s evil about how they bought and destroyed companies like say Maxis and Westwood… and yet completly fail to understand that the closure of these companies weren’t so much closure as “moving” and that the majority of the staff just moved to Redwood to keep doing what they were doing before. To these days there are *still* Maxis people and Westwood people working on Sims/C&C games.
But most people won’t even want to hear that because this would put a dent in the whole ‘EA IS EVIL AND RUINED EVERYTHING’ line that is so common on the internet.
This is why the EA hate is annoying, because it tends to be irrational and a lot of haters refuse to hear anything that goes beyond the usual EA hate. And on a personnal note when I see irrational hate, I tend to want to be the devil’s advocate. That is not to say there aren’t legitimate arguments to bring against EA… (they’re one of the biggest publisher, and like all of them they have their share of faults and questionnable politics) but most people do not. Which is sad.
That being said, where is WTF putting up any reasons to “hate Origin” ? Indeed why should anyone hate Origin just because we point they made some mistakes and have their part of responsibilty for U8 & U9′s debacle ? This is silly.
What WTF, myself and a couple of other dragons are trying to make people understand, is that things ARE NOT BLACK & WHITE, with the poor wonderful Origin company being mistreated by the BIG EVIL CORPORATE EA who is just evil because it is evil.
Indeed on a personnal level I’ve always had issues with the argument even when I was resentful of EA, because really a lot of people forget that EA ALSO saved Origin and helped them strive and release quantity of quality games through the ’90. Which is why I take issue when people go and say they’d wish EA had never bought Origin. An Origin closure after Ultima would have been terrible for gaming. And while it all went to hell because of UO, EA certainly did not aim to bring Origin to the ground – no they wanted to turn it into a huge successful AAA MMORPGs studio… and they failed miserably because they just poorly managed the whole thing (which is true of pretty much all EA’s venture into MMO in the early 2000′)
So basically perhaps people should just try to look at our posts beyond the basic “LOVE/HATE” glasses of internet and they’ll understand there are more shades of gray that they’d think.
All we’re saying is that there are plenty of blame to go around in both OSI *and* EA and people would see that if they’d try to look at things objectively since a lof ot this is documented.
Ultima VIII is a prime exemple really – do we really need to dig up AGAIN these quotes from Origin people explaining how EA basically left them alone at time ? And yet it HAS to be EA’s fault because of course there is no way Origin and Garriott would have made wanted to turn Ultima into this action RPG kind of game (in spite of the fact that there is some logical evolution when you look at how Ultima went between U6 -> U7 -> SI -> U8).
The thing is people make mistakes. Our favorite studios can make mistakes too. And just like a wonderful director can some time come out with a turd, yeah a game studio can screw things up and blaming it all on the big publisher is just too easy and almost looks like denial because some people just don’t seem to want to accept that a studio they’re fan of can make poor design decisions or poor managment.
So basically: shades of grey.
Yes, we get that you and WTF are tired of the EA bashing and think we’re silly for still holding the fact that they caused the death of our favorite video game series after all those years against them. Guess what? That’s common human behavior for you. If you ruin something people like, they won’t forget about it. People still haven’t forgiven Lucas for ruining Star Wars and Indiana Jones either. You don’t like it? Ignore our comments. But telling us “Origin had a hand in it downfall too, so you have no right to be pissed off at EA” isn’t going to change anyone’s mind, especially since you haven’t proven us wrong. So what if OSI made mistakes? The difference between them and EA is that OSI wanted to make good and creative games, while EA was just interested in making money. “That’s what all companies are after, money. You can’t blame or call them evil for that”, I hear you saying. And you would be right. But when making money means pissing all over a beloved franchise, people are going to get mad, whether you like it or not. And piss all over a beloved franchise was what they did, as they tried to cancel U9, refused to give Origin enough time to finish and polish it, turned them into a group that only works on online games, and ended up closing it. And no, I’m don’t care if the OSI people were still working in Redwood; EA still officially disbanded the studio responsible for some of the most revolutionary and beloved games ever, and I still hold this against them.
And about EA not having any fault for U8′s suckiness – Garriott claimed that the reason why U8 was rushed was that EA convinced him that rushing games to make them come out as soon as possible was a good strategy. Granted, EA didn’t force him to rush the game, so they don’t deserve to accused of doing it… which I’m not doing. What I’m accusing them of doing is convincing him that rushing the game was a good idea.
Oh but I’m the first to complain about EA’s role in U9′s debacle – and there is certainly a lot of legitimate reasons to do so. I’m also the first to say that turning OSI (which was one of the their most succesful studio) into an MMO only company was a completly DUMB and TERRIBLE decision that eventually killed the company.
But I’m also not forgetting the GOOD things I got from OSI thanks to EA between ’92 and ’98 as an Origin fan. Origin created some of my favorite games of all times in the ’90, and in the end this was thanks to EA’s money so I’m not gonna to hate them for that.
Does a good cancels a wrong? Perhaps not, but a wrong doesn’t erase all the goods things that came before either. Frankly people (whether it’s about EA or anything else) tends to only focus on the negative aspects and forget everything else.
To keep with Ultima, there are people who despise Garriott because of U8, UO, U9 and/or Tabula Rasa for instance. Why ?
Someone give me 1 or 4 reasons to despise him ? Yeah well I can give 7 undeniable reason to respect him. Personnaly I don’t like some of stuff Garriott has done – I thought Tabula Rasa was terrible, but there’s no way this would make waver the respect I have for him for creating a series that and marked my life as a gamer and nurtured my imagination.
So that’s what I’m saying again: things are not black & white. Yeah I’m pissed at how EA ruined Origin by making it online only in ’99… but I’m also grateful for them saving them and funding a lot of their great games.
And I think that’s just sensible. But if some people prefer to be angry and hateful all the time yeah well, good for them I guess but I don’t think that’s a very healthy attitude to have in life
As as far as EA goes, I don’t see why I should be pissed at the EA of *now* because of what the EA of 99/2000 did since it’s no longer the same people in charge and making decisions. (As a matter of fact I seriously doubt the EA of now would have made the same dumb mistake with Origin as they did in 99/2000 – but I’m not saying the EA of now if all sweet and candy of course)
However : I’m also pissed at Origin and Garriott for UIX’s debacle because they cancelled the BWP version of the game. Make no mistake : the decision to switch to full 3D *was* driven by Garriott and part of U9′s team who were very excited by all the new possibilities this offered. And I think it was a mistake, they should have taken the 3D isometric game (which was near alpha), completed it, add 3D acceleration and they would have blown everyone in ’98 with a game and an engine looking like DS1 or NWN1 years before these game ever existed. And they could have gone full 3D for the next game or whatever.
The decision to drop the whole civil war storyline for something more focused about Virtues in mid ’98 was Garriott’s as well (he wrote the final plot) and not just a matter of “cutting stuff to get things done in time”. So this is also his responsability.
And I’m not saying people should hate Garriott and Origin for this… I certainly don’t. But they made mistakes. Tis okay. Sh*t happens.
Actually there aren’t really. The thing with Origin’s closure is that since the move of Maxis and Westwood to Redwood went so well, EA thought it was a great idea to do the same with Origin.
However while over 2/3 of Westwood of Maxis’ staff moved to Redwood… basically no one from Origin did (likely because Austin being such a big videogames hub already, they know they’d find more work there). Hence OSI being closed for good and UXO cancelled.
That being said. If OSI had moved to EA and completed Ultima X as EA Redwood that honestly would have been fine by me. If that’s the same team with basically the same people under a different location, why does it matter if it’s under a different name ? That’s not to say I wouldn’t have been sad to see the Origin name goes, but it’s secondary to who actually works on the games IMO.
Just my two cents’
Well as you point this was Garriott’s decision – and you know I can understand that, they’d just been bought recently and he didn’t want to piss EA (or as he says “the shareholders”) by making OSI look like it was this company that ALWAYS released games with a ton of delays (especially well… remember this was right after Strike Commander
)
But to be fair though – Ultima VIII *did* get delayed. It was supposed to come out for Xmas ’93, but only came in Marc ’94. As the publisher they likely could have pushed to have it out for Xmas but they let it slide (it’s not the only time they did so – Wing Commander IV was planned for Xmas and released in February) but this shows they were not *always* about just getting it done for deadlines.
But I’m actually rambling for nothing here because this is beside the point.
The issue with Ultima VIII is not that it was rushed.
The issue with Ultima VIII is that Origin and Garriott decided to turn Ultima into a hack’n slash action RPG, without a party, with a shiny engine incapable of seamlessness, small towns with few NCPs, lots of dungeon crawling, clickfest combat and tons of jumping (because Garriott had just discovered -and loved- Prince of Persia). And this rests solely on Origin’s shoulder (note that Ultima VIII had begun its developments before the EA buyout).
What I mean is that contrary to what some Ultima fans deludes themselves to believe: a few more month of development wouldn’t have changed anything about Ultima VIII. Sure we might have had Moriens’ Birthplace, Tempestry or an undead invasion of Tenebrae and a more cohesive plot… but it still would have been a solo hack’n slash game with a lot of jumping which would still have been hated and despised by a majority of fans. The fact that a part of the fandom grew to enjoy or accept Ultima VIII over the years doesn’t change the initial reaction over release, and it would have been the same either way.
The issue with Ultima VIII is not that it was “rushed”. The issue with Ultima VIII was its core and basic design. (And honestly I sometime have the feeling that Garriott doesn’t get it anymore.)
For my own, though Sergorn does an ample job of offering up reasons, I think I’ve already explained my opinions on this matter in some detail in this comments thread. You’re of course welcome to accuse me of being an Origin-hater; I’ve heard that before. I’ve also been accused of being on the EA payroll, both officially and in an under-the-table capacity. I think I’ve been called a shill, and I’m reasonably sure I’ve been accused of selling out…even for doing as little as including a link to EA’s Origin digital storefront on a website.
C’est la vie. Those are opinions people have, and they hold them whether or not they are opinions grounded in reality, evidenced by facts or logic. So too the whole EA/Origin controversy, in many respects; people believe what they will about both companies regardless of what the evidence actually suggests is the case.
For the record, no, I don’t hate Origin…and if I come off sounding as an Origin hater, I suspect this is only because most people who deign to comment on the matter tend to utterly and completely acquit Origin of any complicity in their own demise, or in the way this-or-that Ultima game turned out. Said same persons also tend to rush to place the blame for everything — the demise of Origin and everything they hated about this-or-that Ultima game — at EA’s feet. EA is their bogeyman, their scapegoat, the external locus they can point to in their need to reassure themselves that Origin didn’t help bring about their own downfall or actually design that kind of game.
Let’s stick with Ultima 8 as the example, since it has been mentioned. What did Ultima fans pan U8 for? Well…lots of things, but some of the issues I can think of off the top of my head include the abandonment of an open-world design, the removal of the party and Avatar sex/appearance selection, the jumping puzzles (and the jumping mechanic in general)…and, of course, the bugginess.
Now, is all of that EA’s fault? No, of course not. The last one is, arguably. Origin wanted to publish the game around Christmas initially, then petitioned EA for a delay, to which EA agreed…and the game was shipped in March. But EA did indeed expect the game to ship in March, and the game did in fact need more bug-fixing than it was able to receive by that deadline. So it shipped in a buggy state. So EA bears some responsibility there, and perhaps for encouraging Garriott to set a tighter initial deadline as well.
But what about the rest of it?
Fans hated the inclusion of a jumping mechanic and related puzzles, and continued to hate it even after Origin released a fix for some of its more annoying aspects. Was this EA’s fault? No…Origin built an engine that supported jumping, and so included that in the story they told. That was how they designed games! The technological foundation was built first; the game’s story was crafted later to fit the technology.
Fans hated the lack of a party. Was this EA’s fault? No…the engine Origin built didn’t support a party, and given how Serpent Isle ended it made sense that Origin would opt to tell a tale about the Avatar out on his own, unaccompanied by friends and allies.
Fans hated the lack of sex and appearance selection. Was this EA’s fault? Some might argue yes, and might have argued that had Origin had more time, they would have included the necessary additional animations and other graphics to allow for characters to select a female Avatar, or a non-blond Avatar. Personally, I doubt this, because the game was released on 3.5″ diskettes.
In case you’re wondering why the 3.5″ diskettes have any bearing, keep in mind that it was a costly enterprise to ship a run of tens or hundreds of thousands of game boxes, each containing a game that required quite a lot of diskettes to hold. This was exacerbated, of course, by the various other goodies that Origin also included in the box — cloth maps don’t come cheap. But it was ultimately the cost of diskettes, and the limited capacity thereof, that was the limiting factor for several Origin games…including Ultima 8. And even if they had been given as much time as they could have possibly needed, they wouldn’t have been able to ship much more with the released game than they ultimately did; they wouldn’t have been able to afford the needed diskettes to do so.
So, was the lack of sex and appearance selection EA’s fault? No, not really. And it wasn’t really Origin’s fault either, for that matter…it was just an economic limitation that everyone involved had to accept, and which forced certain compromises.
And the lack of an open world? Again, this can’t be said to be EA’s fault. Origin just didn’t build an open world-capable engine for Ultima 8; so be it.
Why am I going into this detail? Let’s remove EA from the picture for a moment. They’re gone. So…what changes? Well, the game isn’t rushed, Origin takes a few more months to smooth out the bugs…and, assuming they don’t go bankrupt in the process, they release Ultima 8 in…June, say.
The same damn Ultima 8 that has all those other things that people hated. They release that game…only it’s less buggy. Because that is the game that Origin wanted to make. And the same is largely true of Ultima 9…remove EA from the picture, and what you’d be left with is a less buggy version of the same game.
(Or, maybe, no such game at all, because Origin would probably have become entirely consumed by Ultima Online but for the financial and manpower support it was able to draw on from within EA. Assuming they didn’t go bankrupt long before then, which was a very real possibility and one of the reasons they ultimately opted to merge with EA.)
And as I’ve said several times before, even in this thread, it’s the fact that people will not just sidestep the fact that Origin made certain decisions, but that they will attempt to blame those decisions on EA and more or less try to absolve Origin of any negative opinion or blame.
Anyway…Spoony does it in this review as well; for him, everything he hated about Ultima 9 ties back to EA in his mind. And he’s welcome to think that…but he’s wrong, and he’s ultimately lying to himself and to us as a result, just the same way other Ultima fans are lying to themselves and to us when they spin the tired old “EA killed Ultima/Origin” cliche up for one more use.
And fine, that’s “common human behaviour” for me. I get that. But — and I cannot stress this enough — that doesn’t make it right. Designating scapegoats and other sin animals may go back to the deepest parts of the human psyche, but it’s still not acceptable.
As somebody who has watched the UO saga play out from the beginning, I don’t think there was one day where all of the sudden “EA took over”.
Much of the design changes and decisions were made by individuals or the UO team and not by some suit in California. They may have been told to get subscriptions up or stem the subscription losses (in the case of Renaissance and added Trammel), but it was left up to the designers and producers for the most part on how to do that.
I’m not a fan of EA’s treatment of UO over the years, not even close, but I think one very important thing should be mentioned in their defense: While many fell in love with UO’s open-world PvP and sandbox style, most did not. Players made this known by leaving UO for other games that were not open-world PvP. Members of the UO teams of that time mentioned that the open-world PvP was not working for the game, and that something needed to be done, because they were losing players.
This is proven by the fact that 15 years later the industry is mostly non-open-world PvP and non-sandbox like. You can count the number of well-known open-world PvP sandbox-style MMORPGs on one hand and still have fingers left over.
That’s not EA’s fault.
As for what’s EA’s fault, EA has failed UO in several major areas: Moving the teams around the country has never done UO any good whatsoever. Destroying UO’s dedicated community relation team and allowing the Warhammer branding to carry over to UO’s websites. Those are all EA’s fault. It’s telling that in 2012, UO, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer Online do not have a dedicated community manager or community relations team – they share a small number of very overworked individuals between the franchises and they farm out the communities for Dark Age of Camelot and UO to fansites, something no other company does. Even though BioWare claims to have taken over Mythic completely, there are aspects that they have left in place that do harm to UO and DAOC. There is no excuse, especially since EA has stated UO was profitable, for not allowing UO to have an actual dedicated community relations manager.
And EA failed UO by letting it stagnant technically, being unwilling to risk upsetting some subscribers and making a serious attempt at upgrading the system to 3D for modern computers and to make it easier for the artwork folks to add content. UO took the lead early, but the refusal to make a serious attempt at modernizing it has moved it to the end of the pack.
They tried, oh yes, they tried, but they didn’t follow through, either through apathy, turnover causing turmoil, or being scared to lose what they had. As a matter of fact, Paul Sage, the Creative Director of The Elder Scrolls Online, was the Lead Designer when UO’s original 3D client was released, and had this to say: “I honestly believe that the next few months will be the most exciting months ever in UO history“. EA failed by releasing first the Third Dawn client and then never pushing it as far as it should have went, while making a much more serious effort to get people to switch. Then they canceled it for the Kingdom Reborn client, then failed to push that as far as it should have went and get people to switch.
I think they are making changes on the technical front though. A lot of work is being done to prepare UO for 3D of some sort. All of the artwork is slowing being rendered in high resolution and from 3D sources. UO’s art budget was increased to help with this – EA isn’t giving them money to increase the artwork budget for this stuff unless they were planning on using it. The lead UO CG Supervisor has been reworking the pipeline to support 3D, and has recently added support for high resolution animation processing for creatures (in April). It was done “just in case we decide to add it.” Let me tell you, he did not get permission to just add this on a whim, since EA was paying him to do this. The UO team is small, but over the last few years, he’s been doing a lot of work to set UO up for some kind of transition to 3D.
As far as the divide between UO and the single-player Ultimas? I won’t defend that one bit, but it should be noted that with Stygian Abyss in 2009 and now with the current story and Dupre’s reapparance, there are attempts to bring back things back together. The first time I saw Stygian Abyss during the beta, it was impressive and was clearly designed by somebody who loved Ultima and Ultima Online and wanted to bring them together. Unfortunately we lost that somebody and many of his team, and our community relations, in the post-Warhammer layoffs.
I think big things are in store for UO for the 15th Anniversary in September. There’s too much work being done on the technical/back-end. Somebody has decided UO has to be ready to go 3D. The only question I have is not when, but if EA will be willing to finally go through with it, at the risk of upsetting certain groups. My guess is they have reached that decision, because the money is being spent on it. They just have yet to announce it.