Lord British talks about Ultima VIII in Berlin
G+L Net (TL)
'Intel Computer Game Championchip' [their pun, not mine]
in Berlin. Since Intel does not seem to be very good at
public relations, not too many people showed up, so we got
a chance to talk with Richard Garriott about Ultima VIII.
We originally expected some kind of big presentation of
Ultima VIII with him as the guest star with a question and
answer session afterwards and were rather surprised to find
him just standing around in front of one of the PCs,
demonstrating the game without anyone really taking notice.
Anyway, we talked to him and asked a couple of questions
about Ultima VIII. What follows is basically a 'brain dump'
of what we remembered from his comments about the Ultima series
and is thus highly unstructured and might contain minor spoilers.
=====
Ultima VIII will be out in February 1994, the CD version will
follow about a month later.
Ultima Underworld III won't be out until 1995. ("Not this
christmas and not the next one either.") They are at an early
planning stage at the moment and won't really start start
working on it until Ultima VIII is finished.
They are developing an english, a german and a french version
which will all be released at the same time. The disk versions
will contain only contain the language for the country where
they are sold, while the CD version will probably have all three
languages, switchable via a commandline switch.
'Sepent Isle' had only a paper map in the german edition due to some
early problems with Electronic Arts. ("This was a mistake and won't
happen again.") Future parts of Ultima will have a cloth map again.
There won't be a 'datadisk' for Ultima VIII or a re-use of the same
engine (like 'Serpent Isle' was basically a re-use of the Ultima VII
engine), but some minor addition (like "Forge of Virtue") might be
possible. They tried to make some easy money with "Serpent Isle" by
re-using the engine of "The Black Gate" and 'just' doing a new story
with the same engine, but found that they were tempted to do a lot
of improvements and additions for the engine and missed their deadlines,
making Ultima VIII late and pushing it beyond the possibility of a
christmas 1993 release, something "that will cost us a few million dollars."
Ultima VIII will take you to the (or a?) homeworld of the Guardian.
While your magic still works there, you find out that the beings there
are much more powerful than you are, so you'll have to aquire their
kind of power to be able to take on the Guardian in Ultima IX.
In doing so, you'll meet the Titans of Air, Earth, Fire and Water
and have to do thing that are rather untypical for the Avatar.
(As an example, Richard Garriott mentioned that the Titans get part
of their power through their worshipers, so the Avatar has to gather
worshippers, which is not something he would have done in earlier Ultimas.)
You'll travel alone through Ultima VIII (no Iolo, no Dupre, no Gwenno,...
just the Avatar). The view will be similar to Ultima VII, but the
area will be more detailed (which unfortunatly results in larger
represenations of the surroundings, which in turn leads to a smaller
'visible area'). The world will be only about a quarter of the size of
Britannia in Ultima VII, so "it's harder to get lost, except for some
of the dungeons where we intend you to loose the orientation".
The dungeons will be in the same style as in Ultima VII and will
stay this way in Ultima IX. There is the possibility that there will
be Ultima Underworld style (3-D) dungeons in Ultima X.
The Ultima series will get further away from being role-playing
orientated and get more story orientated. (Asked about whether
this means that we get more linear plots like in Ultima VII where
you just check of a number of plot points in 1-2-3 fashion, he
replied that they try for more diversity, but yes, the general
trend will go that way.)
The Avatar won't return to Earth in the near future (at least not
in VIII, IX and probably not in Ultima X).
======
Here are a couple of additional comments about what we've seen from
the game itself:
It is highly unstable at the moment. It crashed about every three
minutes. IMHO the release date of February 1994 seems a bit optimistic.
June/July sounds more like it.
The animation of the Avatar is fairly smooth ("about 2000 sprites"),
making him look more like someone from 'Prince of Persia' than
the Avatar from Ultima VII. (When attacked, he reached into his
backpack, got his weapon out and charged, all in one smooth movement.)
The game seems a bit slow on a 486DX2-66, (might or might not be faster
in the final version) but at least the scrolling is reasonably smooth
(not as jerky as un Ultima VII). The smooth scrolling may have something
to do with the fact that they used an data cache of about 8 megabytes.
(One advantage of the frequent crashes were the chance to have a few
glimpses into some internal error messages. It seems that they are
using EMM386 as the memory manager, so Ultima VIII probably won't
require you to remove all memory managers before starting.)
The interaction between the Avatar and other characters will be more
'Monkey Island' - style than before. (So you have a choice of possible
sentences that direct the flow of the conversation. This will be
quite different from the 'keyword'-style communication of Ultima VII.)
There will be more preprogrammed 'cut scenes'.
Garriott showed one decapacitation scene (where the Avatar just stands
and watches a scene were a man is sentenced to death and beheaded) and
a summoning scene (were the Avatar participates in the summoning of
some pagan demon/deity/whatever). There are supposingly a lot more
of preprogrammed events than there were in earlier Ultimas.
You can have hit point and status information on the screen during
combat (and probably movement), so you know when you are almost
dying and need to run.
=====
That's about all I can think of at the moment.
Christian Fuhrhop
If there are any questions, comments or additional informations:
My e-mail address is: fuh...@fokus.gmd.de
Since I can read Usenet, but can't post to it (due to some odd problem
with the posting software on my site), this message has been posted
from a friends account. But since he was also present during the
talk with Richard Garriott, you might as well send questions to him.
Subject: Richard Garriot talks about Ultima VIII at Berlin
Keywords: Ultima VIII