As an older person and an avid player of Ultima I - V this article is really interesting. Its fascinating to, some 30 years later, get a peek behind the curtain. My personal opinion is that Ultima IV was the pinnacle of computer gaming. Ultima III was supremely entertaining and Ultima V was more polished and still a very enjoyable game, but Ultima IV was absolutely groundbreaking in injecting ethos into an RPG. For any of the younger HN readers who don't mind archaic graphics, I highly recommend checking out Ultima IV.
Ultima is to this day the single most impactful RPG ever made in terms of its influence on future games, it seems nothing new has been done since, almost.
Ultima 6's keyword-based dialogue is in my opinion superior to today's dialogue trees, some of the keywords would be highlighted in the conversation, but some you would have to come up with on your own from your adventures.
Ultima 7 has a much more detailed world than even the modern Elder Scrolls games, its breathtaking how full that world is; Elder Scrolls is still playing catch up almost 30 years later, insane!
Ultima Underworld was also tremendously groundbreaking, it's real, texture-mapped 3D (in 1992!) and does all the things you'd expect from a modern RPG, which is why I am excited that "the band is back together", so to speak, making Underworld Ascendant (no Ultima branding, Underworld was originally not an Ultima game, but was rebranded and reworked for marketing reasons)
I could ramble for hours about these old games. But I'll stop here, go and play, people. :)
As a member of the Ultima Underworld team, I'm looking forward to seeing what Jimmy has to say about it. It's been really fun to watch him cover the stories behind the games of my youth.
The complexity split happened when every game started needing full voice acting to be marketable. Before, text was perfectly sufficient, and a lot more flexible.
When text-to-speech algorithms approach real voice acting, game world depth will start to notch back up.
It's the feature I miss the most in modern RPGs, specially in the "total freedom, sandboxy" subgenre.
I remember it in Morrowind. It was daunting at first, coming from more traditional RPGs. But then it clicked. The ability to ask anyone anything is, may I say it, realistic.
As @mratzloff said, voice acting killed this. It is also my opinion that voice acting impoverished dialog in RPGs greatly.
I couldn't agree more! If I recall, by the time I encountered Ultima IV, I had gone through dozens and dozens of games on Atari, Apple, and other platforms. I had even tried Wizardry (but although a D&D fan, it did not immerse me as much as the Ultimas). With the exception of the Infocom games, mostly Zork, Enchanter, Spellbreaker, nothing came even close to Ultima IV around that era, in terms of immersion and fun. I remember writing down in a notebook, every single town, and every conversation in each of those towns, for later reference, probably my first discovery of the power of analytical thinking as a kid. Ultima V was also great, but I think mostly due to the fact that it was a sequel to U4 and carried on much of the same sense of imagination, excitement and wonder. I played Akalabeth first (from a zip-lock bag), U4, U3, U2, U5 then rest of series.
Agreed, even to this day I long for the characters of Ultima IV and the conversational power of picking out keywords as you talk to them to gleen more and more information. Skyrim, Witcher 3.. for all their graphical power lack what is compelling about Ultima IV. There was a definite conceptual integrity about the game you can only really get when you just have one programmer who can take risks.
Gaming back then was very different. There was an expectation of a big time investment on the end-user. Games were much more 'mentally' immersive. It's something that's hard to describe, but back when games lacked in graphics, they made up for it in a rich story and character development.
I remember plotting dungeon maps for hours on graph paper. For the gold box D&D games you had to translate things with a decoder wheel.
In the case of Ultima IV you had to had to actually converse with people or they didn't give you any information. For those that don't know what I'm talking about you basically have to say:
- name
- job
- <virtue like humility>
to everyone in town. If your lucky they will lead you into another piece of conversation that you have to find 'tag' words in to ask about.
Games like Zork (which literally had NO graphics) had to reel you in on the story alone.
I think it's because the target audience was "bored kids who live in the suburbs." For all intents and purposes, it was like living on your own island, and you had a ton of free time.
Nowadays though we have the Internet, as well as smartphones, much more variety on TV, and many more things competing for attention. Most gamers today are casual gamers, therefore most games are pretty shallow.
Ultima Online continued this. keywords required for opening shop and bank menus, for example.
There was always the urban legend that if you said just the right thing to a wisp, good things would happen...
So ahead of its time, that game. And so unable to evolve to become relevant after most of its groundbreaking ideas were dropped because, for 1998, they were unattainable.
In some respects, it was a victim of its own success...
I've finished IV, V, VI, VII. I think VI and VII are much better not just in terms of graphics but also gameplay, plot, dialog, and characters. That said there are still good things about IV and V, but I wouldn't go back and play them again.
The author has also written a book entitled "Let's Tell a Story Together: A History of Interactive Fiction", which I'd recommend checking out.
It's not on that "ebooks" page; it's on its own page here which has download links for .mobi or .pub versions that can be loaded onto Kindle, Google Books, etc.:
Whatever happened to the 'celebrity' game developer? In the 90s it seemed like the lead developers were lionized (or vilified). John Carmack, Richard Garriot, John Romero, Roberta Williams, Derek Smart. The personalities of the leads really shown through back then. I can't even tell you who the lead dev on Destiny or Dark Souls 3 or whatever are.
> I can't even tell you who the lead dev on Destiny or Dark Souls 3 or whatever are.
I don't intend this as a slight, but you must not follow %Souls games very closely at all. The community practically worships Miyazaki. You can't go one page on any of the given subreddits before stumbling across a mention of him.
Granted, he's a director and maybe not specifically the lead dev - but that's a reflection of the size of modern games. Aside from indie titles (where authors, like Notch or John Blow, are in fact very well known) - AAA games employ such a staggering number of developers that singling any one of them out is almost impossible. Hence, whoever guides the creative vision (in this case, Miyazaki) is the one whose name becomes synonymous with the title.
Great points. I'm certainly not tracking any given franchise to the degree that I'm active in the title's subreddit. My gaming habits are currently more breadth than depth, there far too many great games coming out across genres, platforms, and funding models right now.
The big lead developers of the 90s (I'd add Sid Meier and Peter Molyneux to your list as a start) defined game genres, mechanics and in some cases just purely the concept of 3d game engines. Nowadays most big titles use similar 3d engines, use well-developed game mechanics, often follow (though sometimes with a little variaion) well developed genres, etc. Plus its big business so decision making is much more corporate rather than visionary. Thats why personalities don't stand out on the big titles, although there are a healthy number of indie game programmers who are doing the individual vision thing (Jonathan Blow et al).
Maybe the industrialization of video game making has obscured individual personalities -- it's impossible to imagine there just being one driving persona behind the GTA or console AAA games, as huge as they are. But that's been made up for by the access to social media and the rise of indie game making.
> But that's been made up for by the access to social media and the rise of indie game making.
That's a great point. I was definitely referring to AAA games, above. We are certainly in the midst of an indie renaissance (goes back to playing Hyper Light Drifter).
You were probably more interested in games in 90s than you are now because, if anything, the gaming "rockstars" are a celebrity to more people than the ones in 90s due to more accessible events. You could not watch a press conference in 90s on your TV, now you can watch every event live if you wish so.
The Digital Antiquarian (name of the site hosted at filfre.net) is always an excellent read. I highly recommend starting from the beginning, as our host takes us through a very well-researched history of computer and adventure gaming.
"It was Robert who negotiated the business deals, Robert who represented Origin’s interests with the Software Publishers Association, Robert who put a sober, businesslike face ... Robert who found himself trapped between the practicalities of running a business and the desires of a famous younger brother"
It was also Robert Garriot's way of running a business that killed Origin eventually. So don't waste any tears for the guy. He made a lot of money running a company on the back of his brother's vision and cash-cow games. He was very happy letting said brother maintain a personal fantasy world, which meant he was holding the corporate reins alone. And making sure Richard Garriot was kept out of the actual running of the company he created and the products of whom he was responsible for.
Origin was bought out by EA for 10's of millions of dollars - so hardly destroyed. Both Robert and Richard left several years later to work together again in a new company they both formed - Destination Games. Richard made enough money to pay an estimated 30 million dollars to become a private astronaut.
They were a team and a very successful one. Together they were far more successful than they probably would have been apart.
Fans of Ultima V need to check out the U5 Lazarus project [1], an entirely fan-made re-creation of the game using the Dungeon Siege engine. Hard to believe even that remake is over 10 years old...
One of my great childhood experiences was going to a big Apple conference in Boston and meeting Garriot, right before ultima 4 came out (he was demoing it). After introducing myself, and saying I knew all about the game (I had pirated it) he said "well you seem to know plenty about it and you like it, so why don't you just demo it for me while go out and do some stuff".
I didn't know the combat system for Ultima V was paper-prototyped first. That's an interesting tit-bit! I've never actually seen it done on games I've worked on but since reading about it in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, it's been something I've been looking for an opportunity to try out.
Previous entry from this blog on HN front page was about Wasteland — which prompted me to try play Wasteland 2 again, after initial disappointment. Turns out, when you treat the game as text-based adventure, practice a little bit more patience (with a little help of self-prescribed herbal medication) and concentrate on the story and setting, it is indeed a fantastic game.
I never invested enough time into any Ultima titles to truly enjoy it — and I think after this article I will finally get to it.
This headline alone was worth the nostalgic memories since friends and I logged many hours on Ultima IV on an Apple IIc. Back then it was trivial to open up game files in a hex editor and give yourself unlimited weapons.
Could someone please port a version of Ultima V to the Oculus Rift? I would like it to have the same exact game engine, Just with VR-appropriate graphics. That would the best game ever. OKTHXBYE.
