Historical Note: Lord British Half-Apologizes for Ultima VIII

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 1, 2010

A long time ago, I bought Ultima VIII: Pagan on CD, but never actually ended up playing more than a few minutes of it. Didn’t quite get into it. And some of the grumblings I heard from other players and critics made me a little less than optimistic to “power through” the beginning of the game in hopes of finding great rewards of fun at the end.

(Kinda like how / why I never finished Final Fantasy XII, come to think of it…)

Stumbling across the CD a couple of weeks ago, I decided to install it again just to reacquaint myself with it. Now, this was a re-release of the game, which originally shipped on floppy discs in 1994 for DOS. The re-release came fully patched and at a discounted price (IIRC). Anyway, as I was figuring out how to install it (in DOSBox), I came across a text file to fans by Richard “Lord British” Garriott that kinda surprised me. Here’s the full text of the message:

Dear Ultima Fans,

With each Ultima we have created, we have made massive changes in technology, interface and approach.  This pattern was started with the first few Ultimas.  Back in those days we were just learning how to make games.  By the time one was finished it was clear that there was a much better way, so the best plan was usually to start over from scratch.  Interestingly, it had another effect as well.  Since each game was really, measurably, noticeably better than its predecessor, it also sold better.  Whereas, most of Ultima’s competitors, were cranking out sequels in the same old engine and selling to a subset of their initial market.  So our pattern of innovation and experimentation that began as a learning experience became a powerful tool to insure success.

With each new game it is always the interface and play style experiments that cause the most debate.   With each product it is interesting to note how changes we have made are received.  I remember how much debate there was about converting from keyboard control to mouse control, a decision I am very pleased with now.  There is still an ongoing debate about ‘mono scale maps’ like we have had in the last few Ultimas.  In fact it appears that for Ultima IX we are going to have two scales, town scale and outdoor travel scale.  This will allow more interesting travel by horses, ships, dragons and such.  I’m sure these debates will continue.  Probably the most debated play style changes, though, came in Ultima VIII.

In Ultima VIII, we worked very hard to reach a lofty goal of audio visual impact.  We wanted the Avatar to be seen in greatly  detailed animation.  We wanted it to feel like you were really there.  In addition we were concerned by the fact that Ultimas had become so big, that only hard core gamers were willing to play them. They were especially daunting to new, non-Ultima-playing gamers.  So we decided to really focus on the scope and pace of the game to try to reach some of this ‘new’ audience.  To a large degree, we succeeded at many of our goals.  Ultima VIII is easily the most beautiful Ultima to date; the animation is smooth and detailed.  This  helped draw new players to the product who had never bothered to look before, especially in Europe.  This did, however, come at some cost.

Many aspects of what people had grown accustomed to in an Ultima were less emphasized, and some new aspects felt a bit out of place. And, overall, there was so much change that I think we had not yet mastered the new style.  Like they say, hindsight is 20/20…

We have studied and examined Ultima VIII, considered customer feedback, and debated new directions for Ultima IX.  We have come up with a plan that, we believe, will retain the strong advancements we made in Ultima VIII and really give people the epic game that will be worthy of the last game in the trilogy of trilogies!

Origin has always prided itself on strong customer interaction.  Customer feedback consistently mentioned issues with the implementation of jumping, the arcade feel, a frustrating user interface, holes in the storyline, and low interactivity. The design of Ultima IX (which is still in progress) relies heavily on this feedback and has resulted in a dramatic turnaround back toward classic role playing. Even better, it has resulted in a classic Britannian Ultima.

Some of the new design features were tested in the Ultima VIII engine. The jumping was improved by removing the fixed distance and allow a ‘targeted’ jump. The user interface was also improved.  Ultima VIII game play was enhanced so much that Origin decided to publish a patch.  As long as a patch was going to be published, some members of the Ultima VIII team got together and fixed other parts of the game: interface, story, and even some map details. In all, nearly 100 different modifications and enhancements were made.

I am confident that if you try out this patch, you will be very pleased.

Lord British

I imagine this is only of interest to geeks like me who are as fascinated by the history of video games as the games themselves. I know there’s a few of you.

While the awesomeness that was supposed to be Ultima IX didn’t quite materialize as planned (but then Ultima Online came out and changed everything), this was a surprisingly frank note to the fans from Garriott explaining why they made the decisions they did, and asking the players to give the game another chance with the patch – and to not give up faith in the next Ultima. And it acknowledged, it seems, the fan’s misgivings about having yet another Ultima set in a different world from the one they loved (as much as I’m sure the designers were sick of it).

I don’t know if this was the right PR move for Origin, to have the founder and originator of the series issue this semi-apology, but I think it reflects a level of integrity, accountability, and personal ownership in the game that gets lost in the modern mainstream games biz today, with the designers and developers shielded by layers of middlemen and lost in committees. One more reason I’m more and more into indie games these days.

I think it also demonstrates the difficulty and risks taking a “hardcore” game series and trying to make it more accessible to a new audience.  It’s a good goal, certainly, but there is a chance you can lose the vets and not pick up the newbies. Fundamentally altering the style of gameplay – in this case, providing more arcade-style feel and mechanics – is probably a mistake. It seems here that they smelled money (or were pushed that way by their new owners, EA) in the more console-style world and made a hybrid that wasn’t appreciated by either side very much. They patched it to eliminate the more aggravating aspects for their core audience – but was it too late?

(Personally, I doubt it was… I think the real problem was that Ultima IX was too late, but that’s just an uninformed opinion).

Anyway, there are undoubtedly some more lessons to be gleaned from this for RPG makers. As indies generally have to learn everything for themselves, without a support network of experienced vets to guide them, it’s helpful to devour whatever lessons history provides us.

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