quote: Original post by MatrixCubed
I had been playing the Ultima series since IV, and I would wholeheartedly disagree that it has either a poor storyline or a poor game engine.
I guess this is subjective. I do know that public opinion among Ultima fans seems to be against you though. In particular, the people who read the first draft of the storyline for U9 remarked on how much better it was than the storyline that was eventually chosen.
quote: If you check out any of his statements or interviews, you''ll see similar ones to Warren Spector''s: that living, breathing worlds are paramount in RPGs.
And they had a pretty much living and breathing world in Ultima 7... they dumped a large part of that for 8, brought about half of it back for 9.
quote: Granted, both games did have their share of problems (I am the first to admit swearing profusely under my breath after losing efforts to an uncooperative random-application-exit), but comparing that to the overall quality of the package? I''m not saying "overlook the faults and only look at the pros", but rather "look at the bigger picture of how differently the developers attempted to present their game world".
Even though I am a programmer, I don''t give marks for technical effort
When it comes down to it, I consider stability to be paramount in a software product, and U9 failed. There were 101 other technical hitches that constituted bugs, even though they weren''t ''show-stoppers''. All these things help to break the fiction, really. It also failed on most of the other aspects that I personally found essential to ''Ultima'' games, although I admitted above that these are subjective. However, bear in mind that just because I consider the game to be very poor, I don''t entirely blame the developers for this - I know it was rushed out the door through pressure from EA, who continued on to pretty much stamp Origin into the ground over the last few years, just as they did with Bullfrog and presumably every other development house they ever bought. *rant*By the way, I think this is still relevant to the original question
I''d much rather see a well-done version of Diablo 2 than an over-ambitious game like U9 which just disappoints. [ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost ]
