Reminds me more of Mount & Blade. I’m not sure I like that style.
Well, it was “Ultima-style” prior to Ultima VI. The series invented that game mechanic. I kinda cringe when I read places like IGN attribute it to JRPGs.
Avernum does the same thing. Kind of a welcome feature after playing Avadon without it.
Nice to see that LB is no longer constrained by the technology of square maps!
Ultima VII P1 was my favorite game of all time. I’ll probably end up pledging $25 eventually based on nostalgia. But…I don’t know about this one.
Has Garriott lost his fortune? Why doesn’t he fund it?
What? Avernum is all underground and inside one continuous cave system. I don’t recall an overworld map that you can navigate by.
The puzzler pieces are just a metaphor, aren’t they? I mean, who would design levels that looked like that?
He left his cell phone charger on the International Space Station. Has to go back and get it…
I was referring what a happens whenever you exit a town, when everything shrinks and movement occurs on a different scale until you enter another town (or cave, or whatever).
That’s true. I’ve almost forgotten about this. Good catch Desslock. It’s easier to accept then but with the advances of games technologies, it’s much harder to swallow now.
Oh, wow. I totally forgot about the map of the cave system.
Out of town since friday so this is the first time I saw this.
This is exactly the same Ultima X pitch Garriot made at E3 in, jesus, that must have been like 1998, before U9 released. A shared-world but non-massively multiplayer RPG with heavily instanced content (which was an innovative idea at the time). Well, not exactly, because that one was set in Britannia. But beyond that, it’s the same pitch.
Anyway. I will not be funding this one, but if it turns out well I’ll buy a copy.
It’s Richard Goddamn Garriott making a spiritual successor to the Ultimas, so my initial response is ‘shut up and take my money.’ I pledged $40. Will it be any good? [Kent Brockman]Only time… will tell.[/Kent Brockman]
Well yeah, but the last good ultima was released 20 years ago, in 1993.
Lord British has come out with some major stinkers in the past 20 years. When you look at the list, he’s actually only headlined 3 games since Ultima 7 Part 2, the aforementioned last good Ultima. They are Ultimas 8 and 9, both EA-compromised shit, and Tabula Rasa, a MMO that lasted just over one year.
From all I’ve heard, he didn’t have much to do with UO or Bioforge at Origin or any of the various non Tabula Rasa MMOs at his brief tenure with NCsoft.
That’s why I’m not backing this game, even though Ultima 7 is The Best Game of All Time. But I do wish it well.
Oh I don’t dispute your arguments. But the way I see it, my childhood owes him $40. It’s strictly a ‘thanks for the memories’ gesture. But I also hold out the eternal hope that the lion will roar once more.
For me, $25 is worth seeing what he comes up with when not beholden to corporate overlords. Maybe he’s lost his mojo and it’l be trash, but he’s earned my $25 based off of the amazing experiences I had with the Ultima games as a child.
He came up with Tabula Rasa when not beholden to corporate overlords. NC allowed him to stop and redevelop that game from scratch. They gave him $106m for Tabula Rasa and it only made $5.3m. TR had some interesting ideas but ultimately (get it, ultimately?) it was a huge failure. Was that Garriot’s fault? Well, he was the frontman for the game, but lots of people were involved and we don’t have the inside story, any of a number of things could have happened. But constraints from corporate overlords on budget or design, probably not.
Sigh.
My initial reaction was just like Gordon Cameron’s, and then my brain kicked in. The world of gaming has changed a great deal since his heyday. Even at his best (Ultima IV through VII), his games were always late and buggy as hell.
And then the Kickstarter has lines like this:
Since then, most every other RPG has focused more on level grinding than on “role playing”, which has been reduced to a few initial character choices. While advancements in graphics and sound have been phenomenal, in many ways the virtual worlds we play in have become less real. Less open. Less immersive.
Clearly, Garriott has not been playing anything Bethesda’s made. In my mind, the Elder Scrolls series is the spiritual successor to Ultima. Garriott was a great designer for his time, but this Kickstarter’s page starts out talking as if Skyrim had never been made…
Ultimas IV and V were buggy as hell? The only bug I know of was the one in Ultima IV where you could swap disks while walking around on the overland, and load up tiles from the dungeon set, and loot infinite chests! Which took some doing to unlock, and wasn’t so much a bug as concentrated awesome. I have no idea if those games were late or not – there might have been magazine previews suggesting X release date, but things were a bit more lax in those days I feel, without the internet eyeballing every potential release in real time. (I do remember thinking at the time that Ultima IV couldn’t come out soon enough, but that was just me being excited.)
I daresay the middle Ultimas were extremely polished and tight products, from the packaging on down. I can’t speak to U6/U7 as I couldn’t play them when they released (Commodore fanboi, me).
I agree it’s unlikely Garriott will do anything Bethesda hasn’t done – time marches on, the race goes to the swift or the young or however the quote runs. Still, the word “legend” applies legitimately IMO to a very very few game designers. Miyamoto is one. Garriott is another. That’s worth a bit of my cash. Call me sentimental.
Also, its a bit cynical to think that we’ve seen all that can be done with RPG’s by now. Garriott did some amazing things back in the day, and Id LOVE if he could some new and amazing stuff again that enriches and enhances our rpg games again. While I’m a big fan of Skyrim, its not really that much of an expansion of the gameplay we saw in ultima other than graphical.
Ultima VI onward were all late. However, “late” in those days meant delays of one to six months, not years.
From my hazy memory: VI I believe was about two months late, VII was four months late, VIII was three months late and IX was six months late.
These were all coming from the release date sheets publishers sent to Egghead/Babbages/B Dalton/etc.