Ultima V - Unofficially Reborn Via Dungeon Siege

Ian "Tiberius" Frazier writes "Team Lazarus, a volunteer-run 'mod' organization, has released a playable demo of Ultima V: Lazarus to the public. Ultima V: Lazarus is a complete, but unofficial recreation of ORIGIN Systems' classic 1987 role-playing game Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, utilizing the modding capabilities of Gas-Powered Games' Dungeon Siege. Functional on both Mac and PC versions of Dungeon Siege, Lazarus Alpha Demo 1.0 is not yet feature-complete, but includes the ability to explore all of Verity Isle, a robust dialogue system, re-designed, custom artwork, vicious monsters and cunning wizards, and a digitally re-mastered soundtrack."

Comments

Congrats to the Lazarus Team

[Render]

The demo has been a long time coming, and I'm glad to see that they've pulled it off. Congrats to Tiberius and the Lazarus Team!

Other Ultima remakes worth mentioning:

Ultima IV - The Dawn of Virtue, a recreation of Ultima IV using a custom engine, from the author of Nethack Falcon's Eye:
http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/ultima4/

Exult, a fully-playable reimplementation of the Ultima 7 engine that runs on Windows, Linux, and a few other platforms (Slashdot had better know all about this by now):
http://exult.sourceforge.net/

The Ultima 6 project, which is developing their Dungeon Seige mod in cooperation with the Lazarus team:
http://www.planetdungeonsiege.com/archon/

That will do to go on, but there are plenty of other such projects out there. AFAIK, every Ultima game but Ultima VIII is getting the remake treatment by someone.

Re:Congrats to the Lazarus Team

[nekura]

I'd like to add the Ultima IV remake Avatarship Polished to this list, which is a Neverwinter Nights module.

Re:Licensing the Ultima name

[j-turkey]

Britannia, for example, would work as a game name

According to this page:

ELECTRONIC ARTS, ORIGIN, UltimaTM and Britannia are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. ORIGINTM is an Electronic ArtsTM brand. Lord British is a trademark or registered trademark of Richard Garriott in the U.S. and/or other countries.

It sounds like EA's got their bases covered on the trademarks. Fortunately, since the project is pretty low-key, it would be really easy to just change the name(s) if it ever came up. I am glad that it got Richard Gariott's blessing, and I hope that it is able to keep all of the original Ultima names. I do think that the names, places, titles, etc add alot to an Ultima game (famaliarity, authenticity, etc) and it would be a shame to see EA put a halt to this.