PC Gamer UK on NMA and AoD

[Sorrow]

Welcome back !

 

[janjetina]

What the people (and I use the term loosely) at Bethesda should do is read Roshambo's post with comprehension, or since reading is not "next-gen" enough (translation: their reading skills are impaired), they should have one of their voice actors read it to them repeatedly until the realization that they are mangling Fallout beyond recognition manages to penetrate their simple minds.

Unfortunately, that will not happen. Instead, they will turn to their target audience, primates whose brains have evolved to the point that they are able to appreciate flashy visual effects and worship their creators, "Gods of Bloom" with Torr Howard at the head of the panteon, but higher cognitive skills are forever beyond their reach. After hearing reassuring grunts ("L33T! COOLZORS!!!!111") from their target audience they will return to "reinventing" Fallout. Their reinventing Fallout is just like reinventing the wheel by making it triangular and with complementary punctures as extras.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

ROSH I WAS COLD WITHOUT YOU. we need someone with hate but brains to fight the bethesda machine and not just the hate that gets us a made fun of maybe. Welcome back soldier

 

[Fyu-jon!!!]

Hi Rosh. How's your game coming along?

 

[Black]

Wow, I've already read that post few times and still can't get enough.
Moar pls

 

[Ausir]

Wow, the Deathclaw is back! Go Rosh!

 

[Roshambo]

and before fallout i didnt consider the RPG market dead, we had U7 and U7.2 in the 94-95 areas i believe. although they were more linear than previous titles they were still good. my fav ultimas are 5 and 6 even though i play 7.2 the most.

Amusingly enough, as I look through the development schedules and release dates...I could possibly see that this might be seen as "revenge" or a "conquer" of a competing title, as Arena was released in 1994, when the market was nearly devoid of anything good, and the Fallout developers have cited this enough times over the years even Pete Hines shouldn't miss it. It was EA's acquisition of Origin around 92, during the development of Ultima 7, that things started to go wrong. Hence why the three blackrock objects used by The Fellowship were the symbols of the EA logo. Ultima VIII was released...in 1994. Eye of the Beholder III sucked out loud in 93. About the only decent real CRPGs to be released in 94 that I can remember off the top of my head were the M&M Xeen games, Dark Sun, and...that's about it.

From that point on, most of the game series I mentioned previously that were failing either got worse or DIED because they alienated the original audience, and the new audience saw little they cared for. The publishers started going on about consoles, citing ease of development despite costing the end consumer up to sometimes $20 more than the PC version, and of course as Nintendo proved long before Microsoft - consoles are all about the simple action titles. The attitude of the publishers extended into PC games, and so the quality of the market suffered greatly.

That is the impact Fallout had, which most Bethesda developers and the gaming media are wholly ignorant about, since they were playing the SNES, mowing lawns, and delivering newspapers at the time.

janjetina: Torr Howard! I love it, it sticks.

As for my "game", with what we've been working on it's turned into several games, mainly because the engine effects we've detailed in the CRPG trilogy's design docs (written all together so the sequel stories shouldn't feel "tacked on") lend themselves to a couple of other genres we'd like to make indie games for, increasing the total to about 5. 6 if I allow the engine to be used for a breakout/tempest/space invaders mangling (their words, not mine, but I've seen the concept screens and I think it may be novel enough to permit.) So that means the CRPG won't be the first release, but the other games will be a good exercise in the engine. The games are done when they are done, and I'm not looking to bow to any trends for cheap consumer interest, but rather try to offer solid gameplay.

But maybe I'm just as "back-assward" as Tim Cain and others were around 1996, who were stuck eight years in the past. Wait...eight years in the past from 1996 would make it 1988. Which was when Wasteland and many other good games were released, a very important and pivotal time in CRPG history. Including the games that inspired developers to add moral choice and consequences into CRPGs, Ultima IV-V. Those games were universally loved then, even by other competing companies, as each brought fun and new things to the industry, raising the bar as a challenge to other developers to find some way to elbow in some creative improvement.

What does Oblivion bring to the table? Overhype and failure in design that was often alleviated by a fan's patch hours after release, but that's okay because millions of ignorants and morons bought it and loved it since they don't know of anything else. Neither does Bethesda, as the only ones there who know of the game design in the past are in denial of their own mangling of the series. Or they were too busy fetching coffee to pay attention.

So, who wants to bet nobody at Bethesda understands why the words "Remember Wasteland?" were on the inside flap of the Fallout box, and why Fallout's designers were "stuck eight years into the past"?

No takers? Good, people here aren't as stupid and naive as the rest of the industry/media, and that's a good thing. While I might not be able to devote my full time towards these forums, I will be around to debunk Petey and Torr's lies and ignorant bullshit. This is their biggest fear as relayed by my contacts, that the old school will prove them to be liars.

I'd say it's time for class to begin.

 

[welsh]

Good to see you back Rosh. And yes, time for classes to begin.

 

[Brother None]

Good to have you back, Rosh, albeit under your PS:T nick.

Good, wordy post, including a lot of points and concerns others have voiced before and after (the entire community is getting like a broken record player, but if you can't get someone to learn something by reason, get them to learn it by rote, is one of the things I learned in my short stint as a teacher). Any feedback/thoughts on NMA's preview?

Todd, you forgot something else from the "Fallout Vision Statement", though I am more inclined to believe it was purposefully omitted because it turns you into a liar and a con man. "Return to RPG roots" was in there in some form. Why the fuck do you think they initially chose GURPS?

It wasn't as a separate bullet point, Todd quoted all of those. I suspect it was under the old "close to GURPS" header, but obviously Todd wouldn't quote it*. His cherry picking of quotes there was quickly unmasked, too. Interesting how Bethesda hasn't put up a new post on that site since.

* not that it matters, the whole "emulating pen and paper/tabletop gameplay" and "remember Wasteland" points have been repeated so many times by the original developers you'd have to be pretty damn obtuse not to understand that it was part of the core design.

 

[Ausir]

Would be funny if InXile's Wasteland 2 was more like Fallout than Fallout 3 is and had "Remember Fallout?" on the box, even though I doubt it after their Bard's Tale.

 

[Brother None]

Would be funny if InXile's Wasteland 2 was more like Fallout than Fallout 3 is and had "Remember Fallout?" on the box, even though I doubt it after their Bard's Tale.

It would be funny, but yeah, it's Fargo. Nothing against the man, but let's not get our hopes up too much.

 

[Ausir]

Given the wide misconception about Fargo's role in the development of Fallout (due to the "Brian Fargo presents"), the media will probably call WL2 a new game "by the maker of Fallout".

 

[Roshambo]

Good to have you back, Rosh, albeit under your PS:T nick.

Already looking to get my old handle back, though I don't have time to be an admin anymore.

Good, wordy post, including a lot of points and concerns others have voiced before and after (the entire community is getting like a broken record player, but if you can't get someone to learn something by reason, get them to learn it by rote, is one of the things I learned in my short stint as a teacher). Any feedback/thoughts on NMA's preview?

I would say it was more fair than most other outlets, again pointing out the holes in Bethesda's smoke and mirrors approach to "it's not REALLY this cheesy...honestly!" in regards to PREVIEW CONTENT.

The preview was where I nabbed the best description of the Fatman weapon, and Pete's absolutely moronic defense of it. Plus the "Local Cult" sign being Pete's favorite. He really must be THAT simple to think such a "derp" joke to NOT be slapstick or silly. (6th definition, as per Stone and Parker's description of it being a stupid joke you can see coming a mile away.)

Nowhere in the demo was any presence of dark irony, but instead it felt like a continuation of Chuck Cuevas' design docs, down to the modern military clichés that don't have any place in the setting. A 50's science fiction pulp artist would really not have depicted them as being so...undisciplined like that.

It wasn't as a separate bullet point, Todd quoted all of those. I suspect it was under the old "close to GURPS" header, but obviously Todd wouldn't quote it*. His cherry picking of quotes there was quickly unmasked, too. Interesting how Bethesda hasn't put up a new post on that site since.

* not that it matters, the whole "emulating pen and paper/tabletop gameplay" and "remember Wasteland" points have been repeated so many times by the original developers you'd have to be pretty damn obtuse not to understand that it was part of the core design.

Bethesda loves to cherry pick quotes. Which makes it even more fun when we get to do it back to them and then display how they're totally full of shit. Repeatedly. Then we get to post the original words of the developers, repeated for the benefit of those too noobish to have actually been on the Interplay forums when the game was being designed (like some of us were), and watch as Bethesda tries to pretend that doesn't exist.

I still love the differentiating "America's First Choice in Post Nuclear Simulation", as if totally disowning the RPG aspect of it and everything the original developers said in regards to their design. Pete Hines and Torr Howard have definitely raised the bar from Chuck Cuevas' standards...measuring the amount of pure self-adulating bullshit they spew.

Would be funny if InXile's Wasteland 2 was more like Fallout than Fallout 3 is and had "Remember Fallout?" on the box, even though I doubt it after their Bard's Tale.

That would certainly make my millenium. I do hope that Fargo remembers the impact his work had years ago, and how good design lasts forever, but shiny tits are easily replaced by porn.

 

[Ausir]

That would certainly make my millenium. I do hope that Fargo remembers the impact his work had years ago, and how good design lasts forever, but shiny tits are easily replaced by porn.

Well, he did say that he intends to approach Wasteland more seriously than Bard's Tale, but I'll believe it when I see it. And the original Wasteland was also superior to the original Bard's Tale.

Also, as I said before a few times, IMHO the best approach to Wasteland 2 would be to make it based stylistically on 1980s science fiction (think Back to the Future 2), just like Fallout is based on the 1950s. This would be a homage both to Wasteland, which was made in the 1980s and it shows, especially in character portraits, and to Fallout, with its retro-futurism.

 

[TheWesDude]

and before fallout i didnt consider the RPG market dead, we had U7 and U7.2 in the 94-95 areas i believe. although they were more linear than previous titles they were still good. my fav ultimas are 5 and 6 even though i play 7.2 the most.

Amusingly enough, as I look through the development schedules and release dates...I could possibly see that this might be seen as "revenge" or a "conquer" of a competing title, as Arena was released in 1994, when the market was nearly devoid of anything good, and the Fallout developers have cited this enough times over the years even Pete Hines shouldn't miss it. It was EA's acquisition of Origin around 92, during the development of Ultima 7, that things started to go wrong. Hence why the three blackrock objects used by The Fellowship were the symbols of the EA logo. Ultima VIII was released...in 1994. Eye of the Beholder III sucked out loud in 93. About the only decent real CRPGs to be released in 94 that I can remember off the top of my head were the M&M Xeen games, Dark Sun, and...that's about it.

OSI was looking for a full time publisher in 1990, they were wanting a firm deal with sierra but that fell apart and eventually they settled with EA in early 91 when they purchased i think it was a 25% or 33% stake in OSI and became their full time publisher and then in 1992 they demanded i think it was 51% share, then in like 1996 they demanded 100% share the whole time maintaining that while they did " own " OSI that RG would be permitted to run it any way he wished as long as he was there. but then in 1997 the EA bean counters started interfering and it screwed up U7.2 a lot, destroyed U8 because EA was wanting the games published and pressuring RG to release the games, and then by the time UO and U9 hit, RG realized he had so little control over the company he finally left in 2001 with that famous party with the t-shirts saying like " Origin Systems Inc, We Built Worlds, 1981-2001 " which imo was accurate, but he should have put the 1979 year on them some of that information may be off by a little, thats what i remember from UDIC discussions though.

i did play 1 EOB game, but i couldnt play it because it seemed full of puzzles and tricks and acrobatics over an actual RPG to me. i do love the M&M series even though they are very simplistic and RT simply for the story which doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me from one game to the next. for M&M it seems like they said " what wierd and funky way can we take this story next! " and it was interesting, at least they got creative with each successive game with mechanics and minutia in the gameplay that was fun. and i do have both dark sun on the original collectors edition CDs along with my SSI gold box games collection. i was extremely pissed at the remake of pools of radiance, i always felt the strongest games in the pools line were SSB and POR, and the best story wise was COAB while POR was reminescent of the older style dungeon crawlers where you had to play them with a notebook and graph paper. ( yes you know what i mean! )

From that point on, most of the game series I mentioned previously that were failing either got worse or DIED because they alienated the original audience, and the new audience saw little they cared for. The publishers started going on about consoles, citing ease of development despite costing the end consumer up to sometimes $20 more than the PC version, and of course as Nintendo proved long before Microsoft - consoles are all about the simple action titles. The attitude of the publishers extended into PC games, and so the quality of the market suffered greatly.

i think the M&M series was very very strong from 3 up to 8 and died in a fucking fire on 9. i have never been able to play 9 for more than 2-3 hrs. for me SSI was dungeon crawlers with some good story at times, M&M was a good innovative system, but the ultima series is where my heart is. while fallout are great games, they will always fall behind for my love of ultima. hell, i even bought ultima 3 and 4 for the nes but never got 5 for the snes or 6, i simply couldnt play them very much because of the atrocity that was done to them when ported to the console. hell i even bought a copy of Time Bandits on DVD i liked ultima so much and watch it once every 2-3 months. and the moongate system and the parallels with the tv show Stargate SG-1 and the movie. but i do agree that now that console kiddies are growing up and moving away from the consoles its completely destroying computer games as a whole not just RPGs and the degredation being done to catagories... like oblivious and fable being called RPGs when a far more fitting classification is action or action-adventure games with RPG elements.

That is the impact Fallout had, which most Bethesda developers and the gaming media are wholly ignorant about, since they were playing the SNES, mowing lawns, and delivering newspapers at the time.

LOL this reminds me of one of my childhood friends, Brian Barry, who always had the newest consoles and the best games at the time and how all of us would go to his house and play the consoles... normally i would just sit and watch them play because i just couldnt take the simplicity of the interfaces and the games after playing a computer game.

But maybe I'm just as "back-assward" as Tim Cain and others were around 1996, who were stuck eight years in the past. Wait...eight years in the past from 1996 would make it 1988. Which was when Wasteland and many other good games were released, a very important and pivotal time in CRPG history. Including the games that inspired developers to add moral choice and consequences into CRPGs, Ultima IV-V. Those games were universally loved then, even by other competing companies, as each brought fun and new things to the industry, raising the bar as a challenge to other developers to find some way to elbow in some creative improvement.

stop talking about the older ultimas, im getting weepy eyed and nostalgic even though i have exult and dosbox WTB ultima game made with todays technology. and if any of you computer game companies try and buy the rights to those ultimas and try to do what beth is doing to fallout, just ban my IP now because there is no way in the world i would let anyone disgrace the memories i have of that series. U9 was bad enough and i will not live through another dissapointment like that.

EDIT:

i just wanted to add this, my favorite trivia question about ultima lore is to ask what virtue magincia is the home of... you can always tell the google kiddies because they will say humility which anyone familiar with the ultima lore knows its not humility at all.

 

[SuAside]

janjetina: Torr Howard! I love it, it sticks.

i prefer Toddler, personally.

 

[Roshambo]

OSI was looking for a full time publisher in 1990, they were wanting a firm deal with sierra but that fell apart and eventually they settled with EA in early 91 when they purchased i think it was a 25% or 33% stake in OSI and became their full time publisher and then in 1992 they demanded i think it was 51% share, then in like 1996 they demanded 100% share the whole time maintaining that while they did " own " OSI that RG would be permitted to run it any way he wished as long as he was there. but then in 1997 the EA bean counters started interfering and it screwed up U7.2 a lot, destroyed U8 because EA was wanting the games published and pressuring RG to release the games, and then by the time UO and U9 hit, RG realized he had so little control over the company he finally left in 2001 with that famous party with the t-shirts saying like " Origin Systems Inc, We Built Worlds, 1981-2001 " which imo was accurate, but he should have put the 1979 year on them some of that information may be off by a little, thats what i remember from UDIC discussions though.

The UDIC I view as the Ultima version of the Fallout fans.

My first indication that things were going sour was back in 92, when EA was really starting to pull their lame tricks. They were offering more development resources, but those often came with numerous strings attached. Origin found out what kind of an evil beast EA was, in turn giving EA logo a representation as the tools of the Guardian. It was at that point, when Ultima 7: Serpent Isle's development went sour, that it was REALLY obvious to me that RG had little to no real control over Origin's development. Ultima VIII really proved it to make people, leading to what was seen as a delayed demise of Origin. Origin would have been gone as fast as Bullfrog, another EA butchery of a good game studio, if it were not for Ultima Online.

i did play 1 EOB game, but i couldnt play it because it seemed full of puzzles and tricks and acrobatics over an actual RPG to me. i do love the M&M series even though they are very simplistic and RT simply for the story which doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me from one game to the next.

Might and Magic: World of Xeen has the best construction, puzzles, and detail of the series. It seems that a load of clones followed this one along with Wizardry. At this point in the series, it was entirely TB in combat.

for M&M it seems like they said " what wierd and funky way can we take this story next! " and it was interesting, at least they got creative with each successive game with mechanics and minutia in the gameplay that was fun.

Dude, the backstory they gave Might and Magic was complex from the start. Not only did they poke fun at the "imaginary world boundaries" that define the straight line that ended the game world in many other games, but wrote it into the story. The story was pretty good for that time, too. 1986.

Compared to the lame backstory Nival and others came up with for Zeroes of Might and Magic and Dark Mess of Might and Magic, NWC were fucking geniuses back in the mid 80's when they added their twist on the typical (cliché as hell even by 86) fantasy story. The mixture of science fiction and fantasy elements, using Arthur C. Clarke's third rule that sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic, and explored new realms for the CRPG genre.

Might and Magic raised the bar on backstory writing.

Ultima raised the bar on moral considerations, giving more choice and consequence, making the world come alive.

and i do have both dark sun on the original collectors edition CDs along with my SSI gold box games collection. i was extremely pissed at the remake of pools of radiance, i always felt the strongest games in the pools line were SSB and POR, and the best story wise was COAB while POR was reminescent of the older style dungeon crawlers where you had to play them with a notebook and graph paper. ( yes you know what i mean! )

These games are PRECISELY why I look at BioWare and ask "What the fuck is YOUR excuse?" An RTS on a bitmap was hardly inspiring compared to that work. Using the same name as the previous Neverwinter Nights was also blasphemous in some people's eyes, as the strategy and cooperation was turned non-existent for the "remake". The latter Neverwinter Nights should have been more appropriately been named "Unlimited Adventures", since the gameplay and construction style made it a logical and spiritual sequel to that title.

i think the M&M series was very very strong from 3 up to 8 and died in a fucking fire on 9.

Not really. Might and Magic, up to VI, was much beloved on Usenet. VI got the attention of a few new players, but it alienated the core fanbase by a good amount. Parts of Might and Magic VI were the subjects of some of the very first online death threats given to a developer, and most involving the title were indeed quite colorful. Fucking Castle Darkmoor, as it's commonly known by, followed up by a number of other "drag and drop" creature placement mistakes. Little thought or strategy went into much of Might and Magic's design, when thinking of how to dispatch your enemies quickly and efficiently was the object from before. Replacing that beloved gameplay with something from a FPS, you either had to be good at abusing line of sight and dumping your mana, or take a dungeon one room at a time between rest breaks. And that's often WITH a group that has done the pilgrimages and everything in-between.

I honestly tried to love the design of the later games, yet they often didn't quite match up to the novelty and legacy built up from the first game up to VII. Might and Magic was all about discovery, of some hidden element that seems magical, yet is found to be a piece of technology. The Oracle was one such device. In VII, there are several such remnants of technology, it's the continued feeling that your dungeon crawls might have some discovery of the past, to put everything into context and give you a story of what happened long before you arrived.

You start a simple sword-swinger, spell-caster, bow-plucker or whatever. You grow and learn of the world as it works as present, growing with knowledge and experience on how to survive. Then you learn of the unknown, and what might have been the summit of your knowledge just got dropped into the ocean like a skipping stone. You notice several small pieces of the setting's history, a little at a time, and then it plunges you right into the past, fighting Sheltem through whatever its illogic perceives, and the results of his warped plots. Including chunking the planetoid into the sun.

I truly was expecting for Might and Magic VIII to continue on with even more of the combination and perhaps even make as some had hoped, multiple planets, something that even the Wizardry folks were begging from Sir-Tech. You can see, it is also a favorite topic of mine.

Fallout, in many ways, could be said to borrow from that discovery. You start out a simple Vault grub, you're given one of the few pieces of working technology left, valuable since it's the most modern thing made before the war (and it's kinda fucked up), a Pip-Boy 2000.

You also start with NO clue where you are, and it's your job to piece it, step by step, together as you wander through the wasteland and piece it into context. This is why Fallout had fictional location names, because the wasteland had eaten society to the point that all people care about is what the location means to the Wasteland. The Hub - merchants. Boneyards - duh, lotsa dead people, L.A.. Necropolis - the undead remains of Bakersfield (I'm guessing zombies somewhere, knowing Beth...) Junktown - who the fuck knows where, but it's a walled "safe haven" in the wasteland. Dubious security present, however.

i have never been able to play 9 for more than 2-3 hrs. for me SSI was dungeon crawlers with some good story at times, M&M was a good innovative system, but the ultima series is where my heart is. while fallout are great games, they will always fall behind for my love of ultima. hell, i even bought ultima 3 and 4 for the nes but never got 5 for the snes or 6, i simply couldnt play them very much because of the atrocity that was done to them when ported to the console. hell i even bought a copy of Time Bandits on DVD i liked ultima so much and watch it once every 2-3 months. and the moongate system and the parallels with the tv show Stargate SG-1 and the movie. but i do agree that now that console kiddies are growing up and moving away from the consoles its completely destroying computer games as a whole not just RPGs and the degredation being done to catagories... like oblivious and fable being called RPGs when a far more fitting classification is action or action-adventure games with RPG elements.

To me, since I've known the fancies of some of the Bard's Tale folks, and discussion on the Bard's Tale forums/groups tended to include Ultima, Wizardry, and Might and Magic. So I kind of have to conclude that Fallout's creators tapped into the designs and principles of those games to come up with a combination of many things they did right, and offered a bit more vision as technology allowed - yet never straying from the RPG principles and design from where it borrowed.

LOL this reminds me of one of my childhood friends, Brian Barry, who always had the newest consoles and the best games at the time and how all of us would go to his house and play the consoles... normally i would just sit and watch them play because i just couldnt take the simplicity of the interfaces and the games after playing a computer game.

I've often wondered what the fuck is up with Halo. I've seen better, before, although not as hyped. Ah, it's on X-box and given the Microslut treatment. Mystery solved.

After playing a good number of TC mods for everything between Quake and several flavors of Unreal, I've really been failed to be impressed by most FPS games. Most of these are on console, sell for full console prices, and barely offer 12 hours of gameplay. I've been playing that stealthy shit since Thief, and I can even use mods and map packs that aren't pre-formatted and sanctioned by the publishers...and which cost another $9 each on X-Whore Live.

stop talking about the older ultimas, im getting weepy eyed and nostalgic even though i have exult and dosbox WTB ultima game made with todays technology.

How do you think I feel about having been a Dragon, and played nearly everything that was on the market for nearly twenty years? I first was a QA bug/exploit hunter and interface tester. I worked as a programmer's toadie to fine-tune the engine. It was my job to look around, see what was done, what was done right and liked by many, then see what could be done to offer similar or better to currently developed interface work. People are taught by the interfaces they use, and tend to enjoy a specific style, whether it's WASD, arrow pad, or number pad, everyone's left hand is busy while the right is clickin.

To accommodate, developers added the ability to rebind keys, to adjust for many styles. RPGs, at least the P&P old-school variety, never really suffered from this as they each had their own keys. In the case of Ultima...(Z)tats.

and if any of you computer game companies try and buy the rights to those ultimas and try to do what beth is doing to fallout, just ban my IP now because there is no way in the world i would let anyone disgrace the memories i have of that series. U9 was bad enough and i will not live through another dissapointment like that.

Virtue Raider. I think I got Dr. Cat to shoot TWO bananas from his nose with that one. Although that may have just been normal for him.

EDIT:

i just wanted to add this, my favorite trivia question about ultima lore is to ask what virtue magincia is the home of... you can always tell the google kiddies because they will say humility which anyone familiar with the ultima lore knows its not humility at all.

Aye, the correct Virtue of Magincia is Pride.

"Mul...Mul...Mul..."

i prefer Toddler, personally.

*snickers and snorts beer through nose*

Beautiful. I have to admit the job you guys did with the preview was quite impressive. That is one to make Eliezer bow. So when did you think Pete caught onto that someone from NMA was there? The questions that made him think?

 

[TheWesDude]

The UDIC I view as the Ultima version of the Fallout fans.

i remember them as being a lot more critical and a lot " worse " than you guys are here to bethesda. of course that was a number of years ago so it may be my failing memory at this point.

My first indication that things were going sour was back in 92, when EA was really starting to pull their lame tricks.

mine was ultima 7.2 with how short and linear it was. it is sorely dissapointing in how linear it is but the story is great.

Ultima VIII really proved it to make people, leading to what was seen as a delayed demise of Origin.

8 was just horrible with fps elements reminescent of TES formulaic gaining of stats, and there is no doubt in anyones mind that 9 was horribly rushed. when 9 came out i knew for sure that OSI was dead even though it was heralded loud and clear in 8 with some of the poor mechanics in it.

OSI always managed to come out with great stories but even those couldnt save the ultima legacy.

Origin would have been gone as fast as Bullfrog, another EA butchery of a good game studio, if it were not for Ultima Online.

bullfrog was awesome with populous and dungeon keeper. to this day i will still occasionally boot up dungeon keeper 2 to play it because it was just so damn cool. its really sad what happened to them. it just seems like EA buys up successful companies, guts the talent, and turns out mindless repetitions that are worse than the predecessor which is why the franchises die. when will EA realize that you can certianly buy those successful companies but they were successful for a very good reason and the more meddling EA does the faster those companies die. they lose what they had.

Might and Magic: World of Xeen has the best construction, puzzles, and detail of the series. It seems that a load of clones followed this one along with Wizardry. At this point in the series, it was entirely TB in combat.

yes world of xeen is a kick ass game which is why i think that series still sells well in collectors sets to this day. i didnt even mind it when it changed to phase based or inititave based combat like it did in further incarnations but it set the original gameplay well and didnt seem to me like a huge change to the feel of the originals. the sci-fi and fantasy blending for me was great for story but it really broke believability but it was interesting because its sooo easy to see the concept. what happens when you have a suffeciently advanced technological race happen upon a primative planet and get stranded? that was a cool story line and im suprised they were able to carry it for as long as they did and keep it interesting, but for me the series died at 9 which was just horrible.

Might and Magic raised the bar on backstory writing.

it makes you wonder if bethesda would have ever done the huge amount of lore that they have done for their TES games if M&M hadnt done it first eh?

at this point i am a firm believer that nothing done since about 1992-3 in the computer game genre has been new or innovative other than in graphics and physics engines. not even in the AI field.

Ultima raised the bar on moral considerations, giving more choice and consequence, making the world come alive.

i think that you cant get more into moral considerations than ultima 4s famous room of kids, ultima 5s twisting of morals to be literal directives, or ultima 6s blurring the lines of prejudice and examining the issues. plus the amount of world interactivity in underworld 2 and U6 were absolutely uniqe in their time.

Using the same name as the previous Neverwinter Nights was also blasphemous in some people's eyes, as the strategy and cooperation was turned non-existent for the "remake".

the hugest part of the blasphemy to me was it was no comparison to the original version of NWN that i played on AOL. they should have called it something different because it was a huge atrocity to name it after that game when it bore no resembelance. it wasnt a very good online/persistant world engine which i hear is much better in NWN 2 but still falls far short of what it should be. by the way current trends are going it wont be till NWN5-6 before it is capable of carrying off what it professes to be.

I truly was expecting for Might and Magic VIII to continue on with even more of the combination and perhaps even make as some had hoped, multiple planets,

see now if they had actually done this that would have totally made the series much more believeable and much more acceptable. it just seemed to me like it was a saturday cartoon, where you are the heros always fighting against the same enemy. if they would have truely let the story evolve to where you were travelling to other planets that would have totally taken the story to the next level and really done the stories up to then a huge favor and let the series grow to untold lengths. at least we can get SOMETHING akin to this in underworld 2 eh?

To me, since I've known the fancies of some of the Bard's Tale folks, and discussion on the Bard's Tale forums/groups tended to include Ultima, Wizardry, and Might and Magic. So I kind of have to conclude that Fallout's creators tapped into the designs and principles of those games to come up with a combination of many things they did right, and offered a bit more vision as technology allowed - yet never straying from the RPG principles and design from where it borrowed.

thats why i like fallout, it seems like its a spiritual successor to all those series that came before: wizardry, M&M, ultima, BT... its sorta like the makers said " ok we know the original series died horribly, but here is our last gift to you the fans to have what you want before the series truely does die as a quiet whimper in the night " and really, i dont care who makes it, i just want the next RPG that harkens back to the feelings of playing those original games.

I've often wondered what the fuck is up with Halo. I've seen better, before, although not as hyped. Ah, it's on X-box and given the Microslut treatment. Mystery solved.

dude, you cannot beat doom... do you remember that hacking program dehacked that let you totally change stuff around... doom was set around i think it was 30 internal fps and how they setup all the weapons were it would draw the weapon animations for so many frames. what dehacked let you do was customize those values and what i normally did was set the rocket launcher max ammo to 999 and change all those animations to 1 frame... i LOVED shooting like 30-40 rockets a second and rampaging around.

my friends and i didnt play modem-modem games untill duke nukem though and i would make a map every month and we would play it. great memories.

to date though, my favorite FPS for multiplayer is ROTT. now THOSE weapons were uniqe and to this day i dont think any company has used even half the original weapons that were in that game.

After playing a good number of TC mods for everything between Quake and several flavors of Unreal, I've really been failed to be impressed by most FPS games.

my problems with FPSes in multiplayer isnt the games itself, its the players. so far the only FPS type game i have found to be even close to enjoyable is the HL engines TFC flavors and i hope to get the TFC 2 that is comming out soon. hopefully in a month or 2.

To accommodate, developers added the ability to rebind keys, to adjust for many styles. RPGs, at least the P&P old-school variety, never really suffered from this as they each had their own keys. In the case of Ultima...(Z)tats.

thats my biggest problem when trying to play ultima 4 or before, all the hotkeys for each individual command/spell. it was ingenious in its time for how quick it was to access exactly what you were looking for, but i am glad that interfaces have gotten a little simpler in that regard

Virtue Raider. I think I got Dr. Cat to shoot TWO bananas from his nose with that one. Although that may have just been normal for him.

you showed dr cat that and he liked it?

i still very fondly remember that book that came out after U6 that had like 200 pages of Q&A with RG and then had a compendium of hints/walkthrough for U1-U6. i dont know where that book went, i loved reading that and playing ultima games with that. i really miss that book

 

[Roshambo]

The UDIC I view as the Ultima version of the Fallout fans.

i remember them as being a lot more critical and a lot " worse " than you guys are here to bethesda. of course that was a number of years ago so it may be my failing memory at this point.

Pfft...one of the things that grated at me as an admin here was the emo twatwaffle newbs who got a little pussy hurt at a little rough verbiage. One, Usenet was FAR more rough, having originated from universities and the military/govt. and then given to the unsuspecting public. Second, the game industry needs to get standards again, and cut out the cattle mentality.

Using "modern" as an excuse to use certain game designs is simply bullshit to anyone who has experience. There are simply trends and flavors. The Japanese markets know this quite well, which is why they are varied to take advantage of the different audiences. Developers like Spiderweb Software also keep to certain game mechanic ideals, and therefore gain their own audience of followers who enjoy their work. I am one of them.

Mine was ultima 7.2 with how short and linear it was. it is sorely dissapointing in how linear it is but the story is great.

I was lucky/unlucky enough to have been in the Origin loop since chatting to Loubet, Cat, and a good many others. Mainly about game design. The secret to getting a good developer's tricks - ask them what they enjoy most about a game. They will undoubtedly tell you in depth what they

Believe it or not, many developers like hearing from their fans, and many don't receive the communication they would like to hear. A lot attribute it to "Little Guy Syndrome", like being one of the assistant artists in a Disney production. The Big Names are known and talked to, but who has e-mailed an assistant artist on DOOM and told them a "kickass game, dude!"?

I believe there are far too many primadonnas, a lot of name-brand worship on forums, but not a lot of real development in the industry, and even less existing vision.

Myself, I like being faceless, as the art is what matters to me. Even on my own games, which I will simply be credited as "The Storyteller".

bullfrog was awesome with populous and dungeon keeper. to this day i will still occasionally boot up dungeon keeper 2 to play it because it was just so damn cool. its really sad what happened to them. it just seems like EA buys up successful companies, guts the talent, and turns out mindless repetitions that are worse than the predecessor which is why the franchises die. when will EA realize that you can certianly buy those successful companies but they were successful for a very good reason and the more meddling EA does the faster those companies die. they lose what they had.

Bullfrog is THE reason why I still have respect for Molyneaux.

Rusty Nails sends his regards if you ever read this.

yes world of xeen is a kick ass game which is why i think that series still sells well in collectors sets to this day. i didnt even mind it when it changed to phase based or inititave based combat like it did in further incarnations but it set the original gameplay well and didnt seem to me like a huge change to the feel of the originals. the sci-fi and fantasy blending for me was great for story but it really broke believability but it was interesting because its sooo easy to see the concept. what happens when you have a suffeciently advanced technological race happen upon a primative planet and get stranded? that was a cool story line and im suprised they were able to carry it for as long as they did and keep it interesting, but for me the series died at 9 which was just horrible.

The story pretty much died at 8, 7 still had the Ancients' War remnants and Archibald. I kinda liked Archie.

I loved the construction of the series, which is why I absolutely loathe the new "Might-ily Tragic" series. The writing is absolute shit, the gameplay is awful, and the action game called itself "Action RPG Redefined", which is developer's terms means, "This game will suck out louder than Daikatana. We PROMISE!"

it makes you wonder if bethesda would have ever done the huge amount of lore that they have done for their TES games if M&M hadnt done it first eh?

at this point i am a firm believer that nothing done since about 1992-3 in the computer game genre has been new or innovative other than in graphics and physics engines. not even in the AI field.

Heh, another reason why I called the "Inbred Engine" from BioWare a total laugh is due to the AI. It really is a joke. When a character can't make their way across the map, or point-blanks a dangerous spell like a fireball, the AI is a FAILURE.

i think that you cant get more into moral considerations than ultima 4s famous room of kids, ultima 5s twisting of morals to be literal directives, or ultima 6s blurring the lines of prejudice and examining the issues. plus the amount of world interactivity in underworld 2 and U6 were absolutely uniqe in their time.

I loved the twist in Ultima 6, the revelation of the society you learned to hate in the previous games.

From about 1985-1993, the role-playing games became awesome...then died out.

the hugest part of the blasphemy to me was it was no comparison to the original version of NWN that i played on AOL. they should have called it something different because it was a huge atrocity to name it after that game when it bore no resembelance. it wasnt a very good online/persistant world engine which i hear is much better in NWN 2 but still falls far short of what it should be. by the way current trends are going it wont be till NWN5-6 before it is capable of carrying off what it professes to be.

Which is why I called it what it should be. More likely it should be called "Unlimited Adventures Online".

see now if they had actually done this that would have totally made the series much more believeable and much more acceptable. it just seemed to me like it was a saturday cartoon, where you are the heros always fighting against the same enemy. if they would have truely let the story evolve to where you were travelling to other planets that would have totally taken the story to the next level and really done the stories up to then a huge favor and let the series grow to untold lengths. at least we can get SOMETHING akin to this in underworld 2 eh?

A dream of mine, too, and which is why I intend to see it out in some form...

thats why i like fallout, it seems like its a spiritual successor to all those series that came before: wizardry, M&M, ultima, BT... its sorta like the makers said " ok we know the original series died horribly, but here is our last gift to you the fans to have what you want before the series truely does die as a quiet whimper in the night " and really, i dont care who makes it, i just want the next RPG that harkens back to the feelings of playing those original games.

Same here. And honestly, I'd rather the next good CRPG in this vein be not one I know the story to already. That's my biggest worry at the moment. I saw a few Ultimas before they were done, and a few other games before they were done, and I'd say it diminished some of the impact of the games for me, but I still have a good respect for them.

Then there are games you see before they are released, you ask the creators HOW the hell they can remotely feel proud of that, and some miserable fools mistakenly worship Dungeon Tards....err, Dungeon Lords.

dude, you cannot beat doom... do you remember that hacking program dehacked that let you totally change stuff around... doom was set around i think it was 30 internal fps and how they setup all the weapons were it would draw the weapon animations for so many frames. what dehacked let you do was customize those values and what i normally did was set the rocket launcher max ammo to 999 and change all those animations to 1 frame... i LOVED shooting like 30-40 rockets a second and rampaging around.

my friends and i didnt play modem-modem games untill duke nukem though and i would make a map every month and we would play it. great memories.

to date though, my favorite FPS for multiplayer is ROTT. now THOSE weapons were uniqe and to this day i dont think any company has used even half the original weapons that were in that game.

I liked a lot of the titles around, including how Shadowcaster was from an earlier port of DOOM, yet seemed to do a lot of things DOOM wasn't capable of. I was a big Raven fan at the time, and watched them abuse Carmack's engines in so many ways. GOOD ways.

thats my biggest problem when trying to play ultima 4 or before, all the hotkeys for each individual command/spell. it was ingenious in its time for how quick it was to access exactly what you were looking for, but i am glad that interfaces have gotten a little simpler in that regard

To me, observing the progression of interface design is essential to knowing why certain conventions are made and often kept.

you showed dr cat that and he liked it?

He ran screaming from Origin shortly before EA started heavily toying around, and it turned a thinking game into an action game.

Cat gets a chuckle from a lot of things, though can be a bastard of a puzzle game player.

i still very fondly remember that book that came out after U6 that had like 200 pages of Q&A with RG and then had a compendium of hints/walkthrough for U1-U6. i dont know where that book went, i loved reading that and playing ultima games with that. i really miss that book

I think the Ultima Collection CD might have that in some form on it, might want to give it a check.

 

[Wooz]

How do you think I feel about having been a Dragon

Rosh, what... have you been doing on your leave from NMA? This quote bears disturbing images of green, scaly rubber suits, diving fins and styrofoam tails.