Fan-Developed Ultima VI Remake Released 161
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."
Uhoh (Score:2, Insightful)
In before we get another C&D happening again.
Yes, it may be different this time, but nobody cares about that these days.
Let's just hope that doesn't happen.
U5 Available too (Score:2, Insightful)
I think these are the same people who did the Ultima 5 remake, "Project Lazarus".
Wonder if they'll take on U7 next... but I think it will be hard to improve on the original. It doesn't have 3D graphics, but the world in U7 is beautiful and alive even in plain old 2D.
Re:Dungeon Siege (Score:3, Insightful)
Rotating schedules and jobs were actually introduced in Ultima V (and enhanced in VI and VII).
Let's see how well it flies (Score:5, Insightful)
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_.
Re:Will they do VIII? (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the Ultima games have massive plotholes and inconsistencies. Heck, in the early Ultima games, you could be a friggin' Hobbit.
Ultima VIII wasn't as much of a massive sandbox as Ultima VII. It was far shorter, more linear, and there was no party. As a stand alone game, Utlima VIII is pretty good actually. As a follow-up to perhaps my favorite PC game of all time, it falls short.
Re:Let's see how well it flies (Score:3, Insightful)
We had FPSes in 1990. I don't remember any of them being online
Marathon [wikipedia.org] rocked at the time, hands down the best FPS of its day. It featured LAN gaming for up to 8 (or was it 16?) players. There were hacks around that would knit together distant LANs vpn-style for internet play, but the game wasn't designed for that level of lag so it didn't play well over the internet.
(it also had a story line that, in the context of a fps, rivaled that of Ultima. It's a shame that feat is rarely equalled even nowadays)
Re:Let's see how well it flies (Score:3, Insightful)
I still find it entertaining that contrary to public opinion, as gaming has opened up to a wider audience it has become less mature and more low-brow than ever.
The gamers of a generation ago got their share of slanderous nicknames but they seemed to be more respectful, intelligent and mature in general than those found today.
Re:Dungeon Siege (Score:1, Insightful)
You say that as if MUDs didn't have this long before it was "revolutionary" in UO
TBH, I'm not convinced (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
I'll play it if... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let's see how well it flies (Score:1, Insightful)