U7: phenomenal or retro-phenomenal?

[Andrea B Previtera]

Lately I've been thinking to why Origin didn't understand the full potential of Ultima VII as an expandable game: They released 4 "ultima VII" games then went creating U8 from scratch. In the time U8 took them to complete, it would have been easy for a parallel team to slightly revamp the UVII graphics and create at least eight new successful expansions.

So, maybe at the time UVII was released people saluted it as phenomenal, revolutionary game - but then went on, waiting for the next big hit and advancement into rpg world realism and storytelling depth. Since nothing came and all expectations were deluded in the following years, people went back to what was the last shining gem: UVII.

In the end, what I think is that Ultima VII's value is higher as a retrogame. Just like a good wine.

[zosX]

Well, the problem with this is that Ultima VII had Voodoo memory management, and we all know how well that works, right? You probably can't just easily take such a finely tuned application and rip out its memory management subsystem without a near total rewrite. Everything that is loaded in active memory is dependent upon how that hooks into the manager. I guess I could be wrong, but it seems to me that it would be likely that the biggest hurdle of the Exult project was not decoding and displaying tiles and such (I guess tile order is still somewhat of an issue) but writing the actual engine to do so. Also, historically, every Ultima game was issued with a new engine. While I guess that a lot of the earlier Ultimas probably shared a great deal of code, there was always an effort to make each subsequent game more complex. The addition of schedules is a good example of this.

Ultima VIII probably would have done a lot better without some questionable gameplay choices. Anyone having the frustration of having to reload over and over again after falling into the water will not so fondly remember how long it took to save and load a game.

I agree with what you say about the value though. Some of the games Origin put out are still just as fun today. Privateer comes to mind, and I really need to play the privateer remake one of these days.

How's the engine coming?

zos

[drcode]

Andrea: I think your second paragraph is correct. In the early 90's, everyone expected each new game to be far more advanced than its predecessor. I was a Sierra fan then, and remember how much better each King's Quest game became from 4 through 6 (and then, like Ultima8, they stumbled with KQ7 and made a total mess of KQ8).

[Gradilla Dragon]

Garriott discussed the issue of reusing the game engine in several interviews. He said it cost them just as much money and effort to use the same engine to create a new game than making a complete new game from scratch.

He mentions Savage Empire and Martian Dreams as the attempts to do it with the U6 engine, and Serpent Isle as the attempt to do it with the U7 engine, and notes that the return on investment was not good enough as to keep doing that.

[Andrea B Previtera]

DrCode: I think the Big Mistake was thinking that advancement in graphics and sound were the key to ALL games. It was certainly the key to sport games, to shooters and maybe to graphic adventures. But not to the RPG genre. Graphics, in RPG games could have been stalled to a couple generations behind and no one would complain - if only advances were taken in the direction of NPC schedules, world dynamics and so on. Imagine if Origin kept using the same graphic engine for the next 4 years, but expanding code on those sides: we could have seen complex schedules with NPCs wandering from town to town, interacting one with the other - or random CPU driven parties of adventurers going for their own quests. Town guards fighting monsters, plants growing, streets crowded with people in a sunny day and deserted when it rains or snows. That's what I expect from a RPG game given the enormous CPU power and game budget of today, and I am quite sure that most of the hardcore RPG players would agree. And let me digress and dream a little: with the experience you accumulated by writing both Exult and Pentagram, I am quite confident that the Exult Team could make this happen - with the united efforts of the community for content creation. An RPG game which may not be revolutionary in terms of graphics, but worldwide acclaimed for it's realism and complexity in terms of gameplay and depth.

So, Zos: that's what I am trying to do all by myself. The engine proceeds, but there's nothing to see - no new screenshots - because I am working on the things I mentioned in my answer to DrCode. All those elements which will give great depth to the game but aren't adding anything to the eye candy. It's blooming, though - it's blooming

(ps: I must thank ShadowMoses, if he's reading, for the help he's lending on the graphics side)

[SB-X]

> I am quite sure that most of the hardcore RPG players would agree

I don't think you can say that. Many "hardcore" RPGers don't value realism or world interaction as much as we do, and prefer focus in other areas such as combat, stats, graphics (and interface), world expansiveness, or even story (which is used to say a game has depth). The features you mention are thought of as cool extras, something that can easily be left out and still have a great RPG. (then mentioning several great RPGs that did so and are just fine without them)
But once you (the creators) focus all your energy on the higher priority features, you don't have time for these cool extras.

When I start game(s) development I hope to work on those things too, that you say you're working on now.

[kaszeta]

I don't think they worked on expanding the U7 engine much past Serpent Isle, primarily since Serpent Isle itself already taxes the engine a fair bit beyond what it was designed to do.

For example:

1. Unlike U7, SI actually had multilevel dungeons, but to pull it off, most every "staircase" is actually a teleporter, with the result that the game map of Serpent Isle is really a quilt of little postage stamp dungeon segments, etc (and why there couldn't be something balloon or magic-carpet like in SI).

2. The funky intro with the ship appearing actually required teleporting between three near-identical coastlines.

3. The whole thing with the Banes implemented with funky eggs (cheat-teleport around after the Banes take over, and you can arrive in town before people die, and watch them die as you talk to them)

4. Other similar egg funkiness ties to gates and similar things (seeing how I've frozen to death in Furnace from cheat-teleporting there, for example)

And to think that the designers actually had a much bigger and ambitious game planned originally.

SI is impressive, but it also has more than a bit of "duct tape and baling wire" in it. I think that if they had anything even a bit more complicated than the originally-envision Serpent Isle, they'd need a new engine anyways.

[SB-X]

You could probably have a balloon or magic-carpet but not a seagoing ship. (the dungeons are hidden under the ocean)
What I liked about the original plans was the city design of Moonshade with lots of glass and walkways between buildings.

[Andrea B Previtera]

Kaszeta is totally right here.

SI itself demonstrates that the U7's engine wasn't mature for a slightly more complex plot. The "duct tape and baling wire" metaphore suits the situation completely..

[drcode]

I think they could have improved SI without writing a whole new engine. Adding multiple maps wasn't that hard. And if you cheat, I don't think it matters if things go wrong.

However, U7 graphics were starting to look too primitive by around 1994 or so. When you start talking about switching to higher resolutions, smooth scrolling, and lots more character animation, it's probably better to create a new engine like they did for U8.

[Andrea B Previtera]

Drcode:

U8 took... 3 years? 4 years to be developed?

The graphics were enhanced, yes... by moving from pixel art to rendering. The resolution was the same 320x200 of U7.

Animation was enhanced: quite easy, when all you have to animate is walking, attack and death (except for the avatar which also had jump and something else). So it was enhanced only in terms of smoothness, but variety was drastically reduced.

And, well, variety decreased also in all the other graphical istances: vegetation, objects, walls. Pagan looks all the same, everywhere: where are the deserts and ice plains? The swamp plants and the gloomy trees? The bizarrely coloured walls and floors of Moonshade?

I can't really see the U8 engine as an improvement over u7, too: just think of the world, fragmented in "closed" maps. The non-existant npc schedules, the missing day/night cycle, and so on. So I am still on my point: they could just switch to 640x480, add smooth scrolling and some other lesser tricks - and with a few fiddling on an old successful engine they could have made U8 a masterpiece... and a "franchise"

[Natreg]

U8 had schedules, just not as good as the u7 ones. Most of the problems you said u8 had are because they needed to render lots of graphics. For example, to make on character sleep you must do his animation of waken up and the going going to sleep (Mordea has them) and that is lot of graphics, and so more space in the hard disk (which we didn´t use to have that much back in the day I had a 200 mb hard disk back then and was a pain to have free space for Ultima 8 back then).

The day Cycle thing in u7 was just the palette changing so I don´t know why they didn´t put it in u8

And the engine is more complex than it seems. It has somekind of gravity for the objects, and also elevations in the map. U7 didn´t have those things. And also you have that complex magic system

[Andrea B Previtera]

I never dissected U8's usecode properly, but the feeling is that U8 schedules is something like: at time X, this character will be wandering here. At time Y, this character will be wandering there. Was there more?

U8 took half of my 80mb hard disk, I remember the pain The graphics were heavy, sure - but why did they went from the 2 frames per second of U7 to 24fps or so with U8? Why not a halfway (let's say a reasonable 8 fps) so that they could store some more animations in those forty megabytes of data?

The day/night cycle remains a mystery. It wasn't implemented in a lot of other games although *so* easy to do (Drakkhen was probably the first to have a realistic day/night cycle, in terms of graphics). But remember that a gameplay-realistic night implies characters going to sleep... and this brings us back to the schedule issue.

Gravity, elevations: nice things, complex to code too - but was that an RPG or a platform game? I am unamovable from my point

[wjp]

Mordea, Devon, and at least the blacksmith had somewhat more complex schedules, but most of them were indeed wandering/standing/sitting around somewhere.

The animation framerate was only that high for the Avatar. The animations for the other NPCs had fewer frames per second.

[Natreg]

I think they should have done something like UO does (human animations then the clothes animation) plus some good portraits like Ultima VII and that would have been great

I like the gravity and elevations of Ultima 8, and also that you can jump and all.... PRoblem is that they did that in a way too arcadish

The schedules in Ultima VII were something alike Ultima VIII, but in Ultima VII there were actions programed and u8 doesn´t have any or not too much.

Ultima VIII engine could have been way better with time. And it was later even used for the Crussader games.

[Colourless]

U7 also did have map elevation. U8 just took it to the next level with gravity, climbing, throwing and real projectiles.

U8 could have had complex schedules. But the disk space required for all the animations would have meant a CD-Rom only game. EA would not allow that at the time. Also would have likely made the game need 8 MB of memory.

As a comparison. U7 had 32 frames of anaimation for the Avatar. Ultima 8 has over 1000. That is a huge huge huge increase in data. U7 used it's simple animations to do everything, but in Ultima 8 that would have looked very out of place. Each NPC also has more frames of animation in U8 compared to U7.

[drcode]

Looks to me like they made a huge improvement in the graphics from U7 -> U8, maybe too huge, because it forced them to cut back on many of the cool features in U7. I would have been happy with an improved U7 engine with, say, twice the number of animation frames, maybe twice the resolution, and smooth scrolling.

[Andrea B Previtera]

Exactly. My point == DrCode's. More or less it's what I am coding now: 3d, some stupid visual effect, but basically the engine has the same capabilities as ultima 7's (if not less), so I'll need that... "duct tape and baling wire" to create a complex plot like Serpent Isle's one.

[noja888]

I think one of the reasons U7 Was one of the best ultimas was the huge amount of stuff you could do without following the core plot. I must have spent my first 20 hours of the game just wandering around, checking stuff out, finding secrets and sub-adventures. Then somehow I ended up in the woods with the will'o'wisps and I picked up the thread of the main story from there.

Having an enormous amount of content not pertaining to the main story line makes a RPG seem more real. The less linear an rpg is the better I think.

The second thing that makes Ultima games best is all the items I pick can use - plates , bread , clothes , candles , whatever. And alot of non-vital items are even functional in some way. No other RPG has ever come close to these key points. Who knows how long it will be untill those production minded big software companies realize this. Half-life 2 took seven or so years to produce. They take their time and it shows. Oh well I seem to be rambleing....