quote: Original post by FiveFootFreak
Sure, the world is sorta small, Britain consists of about 10 residents and rats appear to be carrying money... but it was beautiful and fun to play anyway. I had absolutely no error related problems with the game.
The problem is, it sounds nothing like an Ultima
quote: Look into the german game "Gothic" for what a 3D ultima 9 should have been like: www.gothic.de
It''s absolutely excellent.
A lot of people have said that Gothic could have been great, but that it was hopelessly flawed. I quote this from a game design mailing list, reporting on the demo:
"That''s the worst UI I''ve seen in a long time, especially for a demo. I had to print out the Readme file and keep referring to it to get anything done. Why I can''t just walk up to a ladder and climb it is beyond me. Oh, and once I knew the magic left_mouse+UP to make it work, it didn''t work but 1 out of 10 times. Everything requires these left_or_right_mouse+cursor_key combos, and it''s just a big pain in the ass. Makes fighting really suck. So, I''m tossing this demo as too painful to deal with. Pity because it otherwise seemed to have a good setup and
production values. That seems to be the pattern with the demos I try lately. They get the eye candy and story stuff going, but they can''t deliver on UI and gameplay."
And a review says this, "Another issue, one that doesn''t go away as you progress in the game, is a terrible interface. Your character is controlled with either the keyboard alone or with a mouse- keyboard combo setup that works like a first-person shooter. Piranha somehow managed to screw this up, though, with a desire to ensure that the real-time engine wasn''t as simplistic as, say, Diablo. Combat requires key combinations that make fighting sort of an arcade challenge that''s bound to turn off conservative RPG players. [...] This is a hit and miss proposition in more ways than one, as the system occasionally doesn''t work. You might pull off a great attack one moment and find the keyboard unresponsive to the same key presses the next. Strangely, these combinations are also required to begin conversations, climb ladders, and pick up items. [...] Compounding things is a quirky inventory system that doesn''t support a mouse cursor. Although you can use the mouse to guide your character, you can''t use it to equip weapons or armor, buy and sell from merchants, and so on. This clunky system really made me appreciate the simple "drag and drop" paper doll interface of the Infinity Engine titles... and wonder what the hell Piranha was thinking here. Is enabling mouse support in the menus really that difficult of a programming task?"
It seems such a shame that someone has gone to so much trouble to make a detailed world and an engrossing story, and put a crap interface on it. In fact, some of the main criticisms of Ultima 8 were to do with the fiddly interface, so I guess there''s a precedent here.
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