Ultima7 was extremely buggy, and the memory manager they invented for it was a complete pain in the ass.
I don’t remember any of the earlier Ultimas being buggy. Ultima8 had some major bugs that were patched (but remember, getting the patch was problematic back then). Ultima9… who cares.
I had some issues with Ultima VI. But for U5 and before, we’re talking about a game that was smaller and far simpler than what U6 and beyond would introduce.
Indeed, and again this was all pre-internet so if your game was buggy you were largely SOL.
That’s not really what I’m saying; it’s more a knee-jerk shudder to the Kickstarter’s claims that they’ll advance the art, given:
Point is this: if Garriott were to make a game equivalent to Morrowind, then he would have succeeded in making the most immersive, character-driven RPG of his career, and yet he’d still be about 3 or 4 major titles behind where Bethesda is now (including FO3 in the discussion here).
I know that e.g. Double Fine can make an old-school graphical adventure game; they’re not claiming to be making anything else, and you basically have two of the masters of the art working on it together. I do not know if Garriott can push the envelope – or even equal – the level of immersion and storytelling that we’ve come to expect from the best RPGs nowadays, and he is arrogantly claiming to be restoring lost elements of immersion and gameplay.
Come on, man!
If he were selling it old-school, I’d dig it. But how am I supposed to believe he’s going to do something I’ve never seen before, when I haven’t even see him equal the state of the art?
What a crybaby.
Ultima 7 was slightly buggy at best - Daggerfall was extremely buggy.
Also, as long as you made and used a bootdisk, the memory manager was basically a non-issue. Toying around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to make a game run was just commonplace back then, U7 required special care because of the memory manager, but in practice, that made little difference.
rezaf
I was able to return my copy (can you believe that? Returning an open box game?) and bought instead this game called “Star Control” which looked kinda fun… :)
Yet another way in which Bethesda has carried the Ultima torch. :D
U7 had major issues, but Daggerfall was legendarily buggy.
Again, U7 is my personal best game of all time. But it wasn’t smooth sailing. Origin aimed right past the state of the art back then.
Heh, if you want to make that distinction, fine. I don’t remember running into major bugs before I started messing around with the cheat menu.
Yeah, the whole multiplayer (but not MMORPG!) angle with replayable “events” on the map sounds kinda odd.
Plus - maybe it’s greedy or whatever the correct term to use - it slightly rubs me the wrong way that mister millionaire there is asking for crowdfunding. A million is spare change for Garriott, after all.
rezaf
Thanks for the conversation, guys. You all convinced me to cancel my pledge. The whole point about how the Kickstarter seems to exist in a world where Skyrim never shipped was the nail in the coffin. I will watch this one go forward without my money on board. There’s a $25 slot available for the next sixty seconds ;-)
Garriot paid $30m to fly in space, I don’t see why he needs my money.
If his company makes the game and it looks good, I’ll pay full price on day 1 just like everybody else. I just don’t plan to prepurchase 2 years in advance.
Ultima 7 had a bug that caused the key to get in to the final dungeon to disappear from my inventory. To get a fix, I had to send for new 3.5" disks by mail. When the patch arrived, it broke all my saved games and I had to start over.
I loved the game even more after replaying it up to that point.
Ultima 7 is in my top 5 of all time.
I remember buying a brand new computer(i486)just for this game back then and then having to mess around with the Voodoo Memory Manager to get the thing to work, but it was worth it.
I loved Ultima 6, one of my all time favorites. But I remember starting up Ultima 7 and being profoundly disappointed with it and never bothered to finish. Looking at the pitch video and the game he’s proposing, I can’t help but feel that he’s missing the mark. I wish him well, but this just doesn’t sound like a game I want to play. Thankfully we have Shadowun, Wasteland 2, Torment and project eternity in the works.
If they were pitching a game more like Ultima 6 or 7, I would feel more confident that they had the resources to complete the game and do it well. But going for a 3D engine opens up a huge can of worms, everything becomes so much more expensive to do properly. Well outside the budget of a Kickstarter I would have thought.
But then again Mount and Blade was basically made by 2 people, and its an amazing game, so what do I know? M&B was much more of a system driven game though, rather than an RPG. An RPG can’t get away with so much reuse of assets.
Tony
I think that depends a lot on how its done. Mount & Blade functions in many ways like an RPG, and yes, it does re-use many assets but it doesn’t really matter, because the gameplay is so damn fine. Ultima 4 and 5 is pretty much the same - Its the same 3 backgrounds, the same sprites more or less moving around, but a HUUUGE world and still it worked. I know the more graphics we get, the more we want, but I’m confident if the gameplay is well enough done, we will not mind the reuse of assets.
Your recollections are way off - Ultima IV-VI were not late, nor buggy (at all). Remember, they were released prior to the days when patches were even possible, let alone practical. Ultima VII was also not late (released within 2 years of Ultima VI), and while it was less polished, it was still played without patches. It was only Ultima 8 and 9 that were a mess (and UO).
That all said, I obviously don’t blame you for being cynical that this game is going to be worthwhile, and clearly the Elder Scrolls series picked up the baton dropped after Ultima VII, although it took until Oblivion and Skyrim to finally surpass a 1992 game. The Gothic/Risen games are also heavily Ultima-inspired.
The Ultima series is very important to me, and in recognition of that fact I’ll still make a sizeable donation to this kickstarter. If I made a list of my 25 favorite games of all time, the Ultimas would fill at least 5 spots, and until the past few years they might still be in my top 10. I posted more detailed reasons on twitter, but the bottom line is while this game won’t exactly supplant Skyrim, it’s good to have Garriott back in the conversation, even if I think I’d give this pitch about a B-. It’s still better than I expected, to be honest, and feels far more Ultima-ish than I thought it might – some of his design goals, such as having the main bad act dynamically instead of being static or having a scripted timeline, actually do feel like Ultima-ish innovations.
Given his history over the past 20 years, I think this project is a realistic, welcome step forward, and I’m definitely supporting it.
So I guess I just dreamed that Ultima 6 corrupted my save game – which, given that it only allowed a single save, meant I had to start over from the beginning?
The early Ultimas weren’t exceptionally buggy, mind you, by the standards of the time. But the single save system meant that any bug at all could be a disaster to the player.
I don’t recall any bugs when I completed Ultima 3 and 4 back on the C64 when they were released. I did have a problem with Ultima 5 where there was a location pretty far along in the game that just wouldn’t load and would not continue - somewhere in the underworld I believe. It basically made the game such that I couldn’t complete it, but that was most likely due to one of my floppies having a problem. I never did pursue getting a replacement for some reason.
I am not quite sure on this kickstarter, but being that I played U3 and U4 during my formative teen years I feel I owe a lot to the Ultima franchise and will most likely give it some support to see what Garriott can do with it and gain access to the early builds.
Well, 20 years since Ultima VII. Not sure what’s the point in exaggerating that to a quarter century, but in “gaming years” it doesn’t really matter - a long time ago. But what you’re ignoring is that it took over a decade after that for any game (initially Gothic 2) to catch up to the Ultima series in virtual world features like NPCs having individual homes/schedules. Bethesda didn’t manage to incorporate that feature until 2006 and Oblivion, a full 20 years after it appeared in the Ultima series. And it terms of world interactivity and interactive objects, malleable world, etc., the Ultima series’ features weren’t matched until now, with Skyrim, and in some ways (using objects creatively to find alternative solutions to problems/quests) Ultima VII still hasn’t been surpassed. The Ultima series was that revolutionary.
And some of Garriott’s new ideas do seem surprisingly refreshing, such as a dynamic enemy who doesn’t just wait around for you to stomp him. While a few RPGs and adventures have had enemy timetables, like Star Control 2 (which is probably still the best example of that feature, despite also being ancient in gaming years) and Fallout, a more dynamic main-bad would be a damn cool feature. Obviously some of the multiplayer/social features have some new, or at least still relatively novel, ideas as well.
I love Morrowind, by the way - a game I’ve probably spent a thousand hours with - but you’re just being goofy by suggesting it was more “character-driven” than Ultima VII. The NPCs in Morrowind were static, cardboard cutouts by comparison. And while Morrowind was visually immersive, and was the first Elder Scrolls to even try to incorporate objects/decorated houses, etc. (a feature the Ultima series had, more than a decade previously), there was none of the interactivity of the Ultima series, and none of the NPC scheduling, etc. (which wouldn’t arrive until Oblivion).
But although you’re needlessly exaggerating your points (or just have a really crappy memory), obviously you’re correct that Garriott’s $1 Million kickstarter is clearly not going to create a game that surpasses the current state of the art RPGs – that’s not exactly a realistic goal and clearly Garriott is aiming for something more modest. But it’s not goofy for Garriott to stress his past history of innovation and belief that he can add some innovative ideas again - he’s proposed several in his pitch, after all. And much as I’d be happy to see another game even closer to Ultima VII in design for pure nostalgia, I doubt that would ultimately work out well, and one of the main distinguishing features of Garriott’s game development career is how each subsequent game he developed introduced fundamental changes over the previous ones, even when more common to reuse the same engines/tech/designs repeatedly.
Again, I just think having him back in the conversation is welcome, and believe he can certainly still be a constructive influence on the genre. I can’t imagine that’s not worth a small investment to foster that process.
Din’s Curse. AI War.