Exult Forum

Vivendi it seems are being more aggressive then EA viz. related projects - FreeCraft being a very recent example (Vivendi sending the developers a cease-and-desist). It seems we should (for the moment at least) be glad that EA does not seem to be following Vivendi's litigous example.

That's because Exult isn't a multiplayer online game.

@Stuart

That's the topic I just wanted to start.^^

You are right, that's exactly what came to my mind. They shut it down because a) the name and b) the engine was 'too similar'.
Exult, Nuvie, Pentagram have unique names (well nuvie not really ) but they could do this to them for the same reason regarding the engine ...

Let's hope EA's lawyers are more intelligent and see that you NEED to buy the game before using those. There ain't no other reason for someone without windows(I mean DOS, really^^) to buy Ultima 7 for example.

After U1 Reborn died I had a bad feeling about some projects, I hope that was the last time.

I guess if anything will happen again (from EA's side) it will be the time U10 is released.

Maybe they'll release another single-player Ultima as freeware

Three Things.

You can't confuse Ultima BG and SI with Exult. Its Obvious that you'd know that Exult has nothing to do with Origin/EA. FreeCraft is obviosly infringing on the WarCraft trademark.

Blizzard sells something using the WarCraft trademark. Namely Warcraft 3, and you probably still pickup the war 2 battechest if you look around.

And there's probably some DMCA violation some where. Exult is an independant implementation of a USECODE interperter, War 2 isn't in the same boat - See Sony vs Connectix.

U4 isn't freeware, by the way... unless something changed. The only people who're supposed to have permission to distribute it are the Ultima Dragons of the UDIC, as far as I know. Which -sort- of makes it freeware, but still not.

Author: Armchair_Avatar (---.dip.t-dialin.net)
Date: 06-22-03 05:04

That's because Exult isn't a multiplayer online game.


Neither is freecraft, you can't play it online unless you have a valid cd-key and freecraft does by no means bypass this. Owners of the origional warcraft were always allowed to play internet games without a cd-key through things like Kali.

And also shutting down freecraft just because of its name is plain stupid. No one owns the name "freecraft" so that point is invalid but will probably become a valid reason in the courts due to expensive lawyers.

Another thing, of course the engine is 'too similar', it's used to play warcraft. Is this not obvious to everyone!?
You need to buy warcraft 2 to play freecraft and the freecraft team arn't doing this for commercial interests. Vivendi are a multi-million dollar company that is afraid it's going to lose money over this, but how? you still need the warcraft 2 data files to play freecraft.
It's just another example of corperate America gone @!#$.

Now the old freecraft plans to change its name and make an entirely new game with the origional source (new artwork too) but where does that leave us gamers who enjoyed playing warcraft 2 on multiple OS's and all those extra enhancements? nowhere...

1. FreeCraft, and since it plays war2, Has the possibility to dilute Blizzard's WarCraft trademark. Trademarks are valid as long as one defends them. So you can think that if Blizzard didn't C&D them, you'd get no World of Warcraft, simply because of the loss of the WarCraft trademark. People shelled out extra money for War3 because its was WarCraft, not Medieval RTS.

2. The Perils of reverse engineering. You are allowed to try. but not succed, because success means, by implication, the possibility you violated someone's copyrighted code/patents.

Another possible reason: Exult causes people to buy copies of Ultima, so it's in their interest to let it continue.

And yet another: The people left at Origin are so focused on online games that they haven't even heard of us.

"Another possible reason: Exult causes people to buy copies of Ultima, so it's in their interest to let it continue."

Freecraft is technically more or less the same. You need to buy WC2 to use it with WC2. Otherwise it's like Exult Studio.

My guess is EA is either unsure how to handle fan-projects or simply doesn't care.

Someone also pointed out that Blizzard probably would have never done anything to shut this project (or the player made BNet-server) down, it is said (tm) Vivendi is the active part here.

Could it be? Can another publisher be more evil than Elizabeth&Abraham Inc...?