I’m also an Ultima IX fan. If you were one of the lucky ones with a machine that played it properly, and you didn’t try to play it before it was fully patched, it was a really beautiful-looking RPG recognizably in the Ultima style. I don’t usually replay RPG’s but I went back into Ultima IX just to wander around and look.
I can’t get another RPG until I finish off Wizardry 8, but I’m leaning towards Morrowind as my next because I think it will be most like Ultima IX.
Ultima IX? That’s the one that lets you cross the ocean on a custom built bridge made of bread, bottles, and scrolls, right? :P
It was only this year that I was able to play Ultima IX properly for the first time. I upgraded my old PC to an Athlon XP 1900+ and GF4 Ti4600.
It isn’t that bad. And with some of the fan patches it plays even better and is relatively crash free.
Wait, wait, could that have been sarcasm?
:)
Oh. I didn’t like Black & White, so…
What? Black and White was an astounding example of…
cutscenes that you couldn’t skip. :(
I loaded it back on my machine last week to see if it was really as tedious and bothersome as I remembered it. It was.
Nosehairs, don’t forget clipping nosehairs.
About MW, I too suffered from PR-pumped anticipation. I found that the dungeons are just a little more interesting than a bowl of chilled oatmeal – but I’m on the “beta team,” testing new patches and plugins. The devs are good people. I still have hope that the relatively empty MW world can be populated by official and unofficial mods.
As for Molyneux, he raped me again for $50, as he did for Dungeon Keeper. May he be bitch-slapped in Hell and forced to forever corral and feed the brainless reviewers who gleefully gave B&W high marks before actually playing the game.
I got some enjoyment out of DK until about halfway through I realized I’d seen everything the game had to offer and knew the rest of the scenarios would just cripple me in different ways rather than unlock new stuff. At that point I was bored building the same dungeon each mission. I wish Molyneux would redo Magic Carpet with Internet play enabled. I think that was his last great game. Everything since then has been a bit disappointing. He seems more interested in game concepts than gameplay.
“He seems more interested in game concepts
than gameplay” That sums it up. It’s just that some people think the benefits of innovation outweigh potential game problems. Not me, but some.
I think he’d be quite competent at designing game demos.
I’d like to see him develop a bunch of modules that you could plug together to create games. It’s the ultimate extension of the sandbox gaming concept.
Oh, and I really miss Magic Carpet.
Well, apparently Molyneux is acting as some kind of advisor or something to Project Ego, so it’s not entirely his (although I’m sure his opinion weighs in pretty heavily). Anyway, it does seem really cool, IGN had a pretty good preview of it a while back. Still not enough reason to buy an XBox, though…
The developer is an offshoot of Lionhead/Bullfrog I think. Big Blue Box or something like that. I’m too lazy to look it up right now, but I think some of the team are former Molyneuxites and worked with him on other projects. Molyneux’s just acting as a supervisor as you say. He had said a couple years ago he wanted to oversee more projects but have other developers working on them. This and Republic are part of that I think though Republic seems to have become independent of him since. The main guy behind Republic is a child prodigy that formerly worked at Lionhead though.
Edit: I got curious so I went to Big Blue Box’s website. That’s the developer of Project - Ego. There’s also Intrepid Computer Entertainment. They’re a satellite developer of Lionhead as well and are making a game called BC for the Xbox. So not all this stuff is really Molyneux’s products, but he’s got an overseeing hand. I imagine it’s not all that different than what Pop Top did for Triumph Studios with Age of Wonders II.
–Dave
We have to flip this thread over to the 3rd page this line just jumps out at me everytime I come to look at it. It sounds like a candidate for best opening line of something.
Sorry, back to your regularly scheduled thread.
– Xaroc
It’s all in how you look at it. Those were the bright times of strategy gaming (which is what sucked me in). It was only when the RTS clickfest ended the golden age of strategy that I started playing RPGs heavily. Fortunately, they entered a golden age of their own. (Coincidence? Beats me.)
Actually, I just meant “Dark Times” wrt my own personal lack of a gameable computer. Though I’d been gaming nonstop between 1979 and 1992 or so, from '92 to '99 I had nothing to play on. You see I’d hitched my wagon to Commodore for so long that I was a little shell shocked when the Amiga crashed and burned, and it wasn’t till well after college that I could afford a decent PC. Oh, during college I still played the odd game of Rogue or Star Control on my defunct A500, but that was about it. I was even, for a time, under the delusion that I’d outgrown computer games altogether. Then, in '99 when I finally had a computer that could play it, my brother introduced me to Half-Life…
I still remember, in '90, seeing F-29 Retaliator playing on an IBM (probably a 286 or something) in a computer store. It was so fast and smooth compared to the Amiga version. I saw the writing on the wall, but PC’s intimidated the hell out of me (I could never make head or tail out of DOS) so I stayed with Commodore as long as was humanly possible.
I guess '96 was at the tail end of an RPG dark times as well. Daggerfall and Diablo were perhaps two of the main factors in the genre’s resurrection, then of course Fallout came along the following year. (I know many will protest that Diablo wasn’t an RPG, but it was perceived as one by many, which perhaps matters as much.) But there were a few good RPG’s in the early '90s, no? Krondor, Ultima VII, Darklands – classics all, or so I’m told. (I’ve only played U7 out of those 3.)
>I had nothing to play on. You see I’d hitched my wagon to Commodore for so long that I was a little shell shocked when the Amiga crashed and burned, and it wasn’t till well after college that I could afford a decent PC.
Heh, I did the exact same thing. I bought an Amiga in 89, and it was a decent choice for a year. By the time 1990 came around and I couldn’t play Ultima 6, I was bitter with the choice. I essentially missed 1990-1994 in gaming, until I finished school and could afford a PC. I was glad for the slow period in RPGs from 95-97, because it allowed me time to catch up on everything I’d missed, heh.
Wow I couldn’t imagine holding out that long. I left the Commodore gaming scene after the release of the Commodore 128. Never even touched the Amiga. There were just so many good games coming out for the IBM PC platform.
Is this why you never mention “Betrayal at Krondor” when discussing the great RPG’s? I’m curious about your opinion regarding this game; I found it highly enjoyable and thought it had just about the best story ever.