New Ultima game on Kickstarter
polycounter lvl 11
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0
From the original maker. Looks like another remake that will surpass its own goal.
From the original maker. Looks like another remake that will surpass its own goal.
Replies
http://kotaku.com/5989447/richard-garriott-revolutionized-video-game-rpgs-now-the-creator-of-ultima-wants-to-do-it-again
Really hope the project gets funded!
If you want to see Ultima's legacy, look at Skyrim or Oblivion. Ultima championed sand box RPGs with highly interactive worlds already in the good old DOS days, and it wouldn't be a lie if you say that good old Ultima VII had almost as interactive a world as Skyrim has today.
Miss Tabula Rasa too. Ashamed they went down.
i loved ultima online back then, its a shame there isnt a 3d remake of it
and no, the 3d client does not count =(
we only played on a free shard where everything was custom made, but with the added classes and a strict role-playing code it was really fun
oh how i miss those days
$1 million is a pretty low budget. Most big games you're probably used to have budgets of $30 million and up.
except that skyrim and oblivion (unless you mod them) hold your hand through the entire questline, and make it almost impossible for you to fail once you start getting your first few powerful items/spells.
my only experience with the Ultima series, was Ultima 8... widely considdered the best of them. and that game was BRUTAL, just about everything could and would kill you no matter how "powerful" you became. in fact, power was largely an illusion. i loved it.
BUT, i can see how that's very niche nowadays, because the majority of the gaming community that exists loves the handheld (lolpun) gameplay and invincible feeling you get... nobody can take dying anymore, in fact when people die "it's a shit game", and is unlikely to be supported through a sequal.
ALL THAT ASIDE - i can't see myself being excited about this new ultima. graphically it looks as dated as the ideas behind it. i don't see how moving backward toward the old great ideas is a good thing. absolutely integrate some of those philosophies into something new... BUT MAKE IT NEW, make it something nobody has seen before.
Should be able to get them all on GOG. The games really don't hold your hand, but that's the nice thing about them. You actually have to explore the world, talk to people. Especially Ultima VI and VII are full with side quests with unique story lines (no stupid "fetch me 23 wombat skins" quests) that really add a lot of depth to the world. Almost all NPCs have a background story and a little virtual life they follow. Ultima 7 is probably the best of them and the easiest one to get into if you haven't grown up with 8 bit machines. Ultima 5 and 6 (1992) feel more dated graphic wise but are just as complex. Story wise and immersion wise they still smoke many contemporary RPGs.
For those who played Ultima Online, Ultima 7 is the closest to it. The world is almost as interactive, except the graphics are of course 320x200 resolution (I think with the GOG version you can have higher res)
I agree that it's a niche game, but I can see enough people caring for it to make it worthwhile. Grimrock did a great job at resurrecting some gameplay that's as ancient as Ultima itself. Actually the dungeons in Ultima I - V are pretty similar to Grimrock's. Just have to give it into the hands of some developers who love these sort of games and something good comes out. Definitely much better than giving it to people who only care because "the franchise is worth something and we can warm it up for a quick buck". I think if people love the franchise then there's a good chance it will be new and not a rehash, that it will be a work that can stand on its own. For me a sequel that can stand on its own feet is just as good as a new game.
Only the graphics... why didn't they go for something like Titan Quest?! Would have been so more true to the original franchise. Only Ultima 9 was first person 3D and you can just ask everyone who played it how much it sucked.
They're at $740k already and have 26 days left to go. Wouldn't be surprising if they could get as far as 3-5 million in that time.
Actually it was considered to be one of the worst, because it was too ambitious and a lot of content got cut to make a pre-set release date. Ultima IX suffered a similar fate.
The one most people and fans consider to be the best is Ultima VII. That's where NPCs had daily schedules, opening their shop and baking bread and sleeping in their beds at night, waking up if you broke into their house. It was very long and had a complex story involving murders and investigation and lots of complex sidequests and so on.
Although it also had a sort-of-sequel called Ultima VII Part 2 - the Serpent Isle, which some consider to be better - it had a more linear story, but with more dramatic twists and such.
I think the combat system in U8 was actually flawed, the other games were quite unlike that one.
In U7 you could gather magical armor and weapons that made the party pretty much invulnerable after about 2/3 of the game in most battles. So you could focus on the important ones and on the final stretch of the story and quests.
Yeah, it was the fixed release date by EA. Some of the cut content is still in the files, like when the undead were supposed to invade the city, and there was meant to be a party system too.
On the other hand they've used the engine in SVGA for the Crusader games some time later.
U9 was actually third person and the graphics had little to do with the fan reaction. Once again the game was without a party system, and there were a lot of puzzles in the dungeons that felt like Super Mario 3D... People also didn't like the story too much.
But the game looked pretty damn nice for its time, despite the segmented character models, especially if you were able to crank up the view distance. But it was a resource hog, I think you needed like 128 MB RAM to run it reasonably well and direct3D support was buggy, it preferred a Voodoo 2.
Some time later I re-installed it on a new PC that had an ATI Radeon and at least 1GB RAM or so. Turned on forced AA and AF and copied the whole game to ram drive... it run pretty well
So much ego.
"and I usually find in my history that the artists and programmers are, in fact, as good of designers as the designers. They're often better, because they understand the technology or the art."
For my own sake I hope he can deliver after taking his mouth so full; I backed that game
I also hope the guardian comes back with an unchanged design in HD glory!!!!Lol