I also enjoyed part 9. I guess it was because I was only exposed to 7 and just wanted to see the land and towns in a 3D setting.
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EA/Bioware set to make new Ultima game; destroy Ultima series
- Thread starter darrpara
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I also enjoyed part 9. I guess it was because I was only exposed to 7 and just wanted to see the land and towns in a 3D setting.
I forgot to mention that there are "reconstruction" mods where the games are remade using a newer game engine. If you search "ultima reconstruction," you should find a page with mod information. Ultima V Lazorus(sp?) is complete and runs through the game Dungeon Siege. There is a remake of part IV as well but I am not sure if it is complete (I haven't checked in awhile).
Tempest_Prime
I choke on balls regularly
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I doubt it. He's doing his own thing.
Yeah. Watching all his reviews starting from Ultima 1 gives a very good impression how Ultima serie evolved, and ultimately devolved.
LeninGHOLA
Vladimir Hayt
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I hope they add romance options. I want to romance the Avatar!
While I agree with his assessment of 9, I disagree that EA was completely at fault. Origin made some large fuckups in a bunch of ways with it, and indeed had been having problems for some time.
I mean from a technical point, even 7 was pretty bad. 7 was a good game, but programming wise it was crap, it took a retarded amount of conventional memory and indeed I had a special "Ultima 7" menu options in my DOS boot menus to free up enough to make it happy.
Usually when there is a big failure with a game, the developer is not blameless. I'm not saying the publishers don't fuck things up, but the developers usually share a big part of the burden.
Would love to understand what happened at Origin but looking back, the downfall of this once mighty company has to be one of the hugest tragedies of computer gaming history. I mean, this is the company that brought us Wing Commander; one of - if not the - De facto gold standard for space shooters. I still remember buying Wing Commander and then Ultima 7 and playing the shit out of them during my highschool years. The company was just totally at the top of the industry. I even bought their damn screensaver !!
LeninGHOLA
Vladimir Hayt
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Richard Gariott started to go retard before the whole EA thing. He put platforming in Ultima.
Ya I don't understand the absolute worship/absolute hate some gamers have for developers and publishers respectively. They seem to think devs are pure good and never make any mistakes, it is all up to the evil publishers to ruin. No, not so much. Both sides can fuck things up. Two good examples of how publishers can be useful (in different ways):
1) Duke Nukem Forever. No publisher here, just a developer who could do "whatever they wanted". Well with nobody to set deadlines and timetables, they did a whole lot of nothing and eventually folded. They spent too much time goofing around, playing with new engines and so on, not enough time making a working product. Then the property gets sold, a publisher works with a developer and a game comes out. Shitty game to be sure, but infinitely better than what 3DRealms had on account of it actually being a finished product that you can get. Had 3DRealms had a deadline, perhaps they would have produced a good version, and do so a decade ago.
2) Demigod. If you didn't play it, this was Gas Powered Games' attempt at a DOTA clone. When it came out, the thing had real problems on account of shit network code. Stardock, the publisher, sent over some programmers who were good at that kind of thing to fix it, since after all shitty sales would be a problem for SD since they were the ones with the financial stake.
Now you can find examples the opposite way, of course, where publishers fucked something up. However these are just examples of the other way around, where developers fucked it up.
Origin did plenty to fuck up Ultima on their own. As Lenin noted, Garriot wanted platforming in 8. Also while the cuts to 9 may have been a result of EA's meddling, the story inconsistencies and stupidities weren't, that was all on Origin.
LeninGHOLA
Vladimir Hayt
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At least when a developer fucks up, it is theirs to fuck up. I do think Gariott had some bad ideas in more than a couple Ultima games, but you have to admit, this game sounds worse than what he would make.
While they did eventually fix the poor network code the game just wasn't very dynamic. For the short amount of time that I could find players on the game they were only playing a few characters. Game did have a lot of promise.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_14/87-The-Conquest-of-Origin
Really good read with firsthand info from former Origin employees. If this is indeed how things went down, then I have less ire towards EA; it seems EA was willing to give Origin a lot of leeway - at least initially.
The common thread with so many of these creative minds is that they did well when it was the small team of guys working out of a garage, but then come the big budgets and huge dev team and it becomes probably a nightmare to manage
Really good read with firsthand info from former Origin employees. If this is indeed how things went down, then I have less ire towards EA; it seems EA was willing to give Origin a lot of leeway - at least initially.
The common thread with so many of these creative minds is that they did well when it was the small team of guys working out of a garage, but then come the big budgets and huge dev team and it becomes probably a nightmare to manage