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Fan-Developed Ultima VI Remake Released
An anonymous reader writes "20 years after the original game launched, a fan-developed Ultima 6 remake has finally been released! The Ultima 6 Project was formed in 2001 by Sliding Dragon to develop a remake of Origin's Ultima VI: The False Prophet with newer graphics and a more immersive engine. Soon assembled under the banner Archon, the team members, who hail from all over the globe, have set about recreating the world of Britannia, adding an enhanced storyline to bolster intraseries continuity and building on the Ultima legacy in a way that will please fans new and old."
The virtues are really where Ultima shines. If you've never played it, essentially, you get bonuses for being virtuous, and not through silly binary GOOD/EVIL choices like most games today.
It's worth to metion that Ultima 4 has a remake too: http://xu4.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
I notice there wasn't anything on the site saying/acknowledging the copyrights/trademarks of the original Ultima...
Queue up the DMCA takedown notice, and the inevitable "oh, the evil DMCA takedown notice" slashdot article...
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It's implemented as a huge Dungeon Siege mod. An installation of Dungeon Siege is prerequisite
I have very fond memories of Ultima 6. It was the first RPG game I played that had a real depth. Many feature were groundbreaking for its time, such as the daily and nightly schedules for the NPCs, the non-linear storyline and enormous freedom you had in exploring the world. The plot was very well written, dealing with a powerful culture clash between two races, humans and gargoyles. The gargoyles started out as a seemingly stereotyped enemy, but actually turned out to be a very evolved and intelligent race fighting for their survival, and that you had to befriend in order to reach the common goal: peace. A stunning work of art created by Richard Garriott, Warren Spector and Dr. Cat.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
check out Voyager Dragon's Ultima: The Reconstruction website. It's a little old but lists all the Ultima 2D & 3D (1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9) remake projects that were active a few years back as well as official & fan patches, Ultima Underworld engine recreations, etc.
http://www.object404.com
Well, let's not forget that Ultima 6 was launched at a time when gaming was something for nerds, and often idealistic nerds. Even years before that, when we started getting online FPS, it was a world where you were _expected_ to be polite and say "good game", and where it would be a mark of the antisocial asshole to even frag someone who's AFK or chatting. Yeah, you could stop in the middle of a deathmatch and start chatting about your kids' grades (seen that verbatim happen), and it would be frowned upon if someone fragged you.
Then came Counter-Strike and the whole gang of insecure and/or psychopathic kiddies (and men at midlife crisis) who had to prove their penis size at every step, had to blame everything on someone else (getting shot at was only because the other was a cheater, not his staying still in the open, see?), and had to inform you of your sexual orientation and mother's weight and sexual prowess at least once per round. And that's just skimming it.
In the meantime it seems to me like they multiplied like rabbits. Yeah, good luck floating the idea of acting virtuously to someone who thinks he _must_ prove his penis size and that he has balls by ganking some AFK newbie and teabagging the corpse. 'Cause if god forbid he missed that at least one day, people might start questioning if he even has an Y chromosome at all. Actually obeying all 8 virtues? You'd probably need a panel of experts to prove to him first that the penis police won't show up to his door with a rusty hedge scissors, revoke his right to pee standing, and sentence him to wear a dress for the rest of his life.
Honestly, at times it looks like half the gamers nowadays don't even understand that it's even theoretically possible to play a game other than as a bigger asshole than on goatse, or that someone could even theoretically have a reason to play nice that doesn't boil down to being in denial.
Case study: witness the descent of the Eve idiots upon STO at launch, and the thousands of posts boiling down to "if I can't cause a random newbie to lose his ship and all he owns -- or, hey, as a compromise just his weapons, engines and bridge officers -- then the game sucks and it can't possibly be fun for anyone." Not even for said newbie, see. Why all those newbies must shed bitter tears at the utter disappointment of still having a ship by the time they hit level 5. Ganking them is just some selfless act to make the game fun for them, see? ;)
So, yeah, good luck with selling the idea of a game which gives bonuses for _not_ being an asshole to _those_.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I just wanted to mention that the U6 remake should generally be safe from legal action from EA, not because of any inherent "rightness" about what they've done, but because of the generally benevolent attitude EA has taken in the past concerning the core Ultima game remakes.
When I was on the Ultima Online team the U5: Lazarus mod for Dungeon Siege came out, and I actually chose a copy of Dungeon Siege II (if I remember correctly) for the weekly developer prize just so I could download the mod and play it. Our producer at the time was asked by the corporate legal department about it, and since it didn't harm UO, and possibly helped boost marketing recognition for Ultima in general, EA decided not to do anything as long as the remake didn't turn a profit.
In general, EA barely remembers the Ultima IP exists - except to co-opt it for brand recognition (such as the new web-game RTS). UO remains an excellent source of revenue for the company, but even with its millions and millions a year is considered extremely minor compared to the core franchises.
As long as the U6 remake team doesn't turn a profit from this, I couldn't imagine EA taking action, especially since the current UO team would still have a minor bit of input at Mythic. For the curious, no, server emulation for UO is not looked kindly upon by the legal department, yet no significant action was taken in all the years I worked there.
Meanwhile, for U6: I pray that the conversation system and scheduling systems have been converted. People remember Ultima 7 as the most "advanced NPC AI" yet U6 had almost all those features before they were perfected in U7, *and* the conversation system was a model for keyword/response recognition for any interactive games to follow. Ultima Online's own NPC speech system was based on U6's, boasting 13,000 unique lines of text before they were scrapped in 1999-2000 during a localization of the game where the translations were projected to cost something like $250k.
As with the Lazarus project, I just want to give my hearty thanks and appreciation to the team who created this. We dreamed of doing updated Ultima remakes at EA, but never gained any traction. Thank you for doing what we couldn't!
TBH, I'm not convinced that it's a generation thing. Just about every charge against generation Y, I've heard levied against generation X before. We were supposed to be the "me" generation, the self-centered idiots, the louts who grew up with entitlement delusions instead of knowing we must work hard, the ones who don't know how good we have it, the ones who never got taught proper respect, etc. Now essentially I hear that _we_ were the good guys (e.g., here in gaming) while the new generation are the real villains. Bah, humbug. I'll be damned if I let some young whippersnapper steal my spotlight like that. Get off my virtual lawn, damn kids, I still have as much self-centeredness left in me as I did in my teens ;)
Now seriously, I've long maintained that, basically, each game gets the gamers it "deserves", or rather those it caters to. As more and more games bend over backwards to cater to assholes, well, they get more assholes.
It was known at least as far back as, oh, I dunno, Phantasy Star Online, that you can make a game where the l33t killer type just can't do much harm and just leaves for greener pastures. The original COH also mostly lost those because there simply was nothing you could do to another player. Even harassment with tells didn't work well (ignore ftw.) Or even sitting in the town square and shouting crap against them or folowing and stealing their kills, well, in a heavily instanced game neither worked too well.
Unfortunately a lot of games basically try to cater to everyone, including the asshole segment, and occasionally disproportionately to the asshole segment. E.g., because it's the loudest group of players and for a while it can seem like everyone wants, in fact even _demands_ unrestricted PvP and disproportionate penalties for the victim. (See STO again: about two dozen Eve rejects could cause the majority of threads, completely out-posting the hundreds of thousands who formed the rest of the community.) E.g., because some developer is himself the kind who doesn't understand why would anyone play for any other reason than proving penis size, and that throwing references to "care bears" and "hello kitty" players makes him sound more properly manly. E.g., because the publisher comes and says "OMG, we need to copy more from WoW/CS/whatever. Like let's start with features X, Y and Z. And in fact let's turn the knobs to 11 on them, so we can brag we're better than WoW/CS/whatever." Sony is probably the lowest hanging fruit there, as it screwed up so often and hard by trying to copy and outdo features it didn't even understand from WoW, that it's not even funny.
And often in the process it ends up catering more to the assholes.
Basically my take is that really nothing happened between generations in the population at large. We still have a bunch of nice kids and a bunch of bad kids, and a lot in between. It's just that more and more games tried to tap into the asshole segment for extra players, and predictably more of the existing assholes became players. Not even all from the newest generation. Some of the most obnoxious players I've met were middle-aged middle-class gentlemen (well, gentlemen when they weren't anonymous online, anyway.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.