/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ |:= =:| |:= The Ultimate Ultima =:| |:= ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ =:| |:========================================================================:| |:= Disclaimer: This file is an informative file and not aimed =:| |:= at infringing upon the original author's rights or anyone =:| |:= related to the making of this file. =:| |:========================================================================:| |:= Call these lines: =:| |:= =:| |:= Sands of Egypt BBS/AE.........205-979-8409 =:| |:= Twilight AE - No Pass.........305-687-4742 =:| |:= Atlantic Alliance BBS/AE......201-879-2693 =:| \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ As taken from A+ Volume 5 Issue 5 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Typed by: City Slicker of ]:-> 4th Protocol <-:[ "Lovers of fantasy/role playing games, stop making those summer plans, and gamesters if every stripe get ready for some tips." ====================================== THE ULTIMATE ULTIMA? ====================================== Poke holes in the rubber raft. Put those exotic European tanning gels back into the medicine cabinet. Figure on using your beach towel to wipe off your palms. Summer 1987 is scheduled to be the summer of Ultima V. After nearly two years of work and a dramatic increase in the size of his Origin Systems staff, designer/programmer Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, is preparing to release his latest, greatest, and biggest Ultima yet. "Up until this Ultima, I always did all the development myself," Garriott explains in a telephone interview. "The problem is that each Ultima gets much larger and more technologically different than its predecessor. Therefore, they take longer and longer to produce. So this time we have a team of six people, including myself, working on it." By eyeing the competition, inventing new features, and receiving (and personally responding to) mail from Ultima fans, Garriott and company have added significant enhancements to Ultima V. "The technical improvements in Ultima V over Ultima IV are much greater than they were in Ultima IV over Ultima III. There's a much bigger gap technologically between them," Garriott says. Enhanced graphics are the most striking improvement, according to Garriott. Ultima V has eight times as much graphic variety as the original Ultima and twice as much as Ultima IV. "When you go into towns and castles, the amount of detail has increased substantially. I've got things like built-in bookcases and fireplaces and tables and chairs, plates of food on tables. People can sit down in front of tables and eat food, and there's animation for eating food." Dungeon graphics have also been hand-drawn and bit-mapped to simulate brick walls, wooden beams, or craggy caverns. The better looking Ultima world will also be a larger Ultima world. Though the surface map remains the same size as in Ultima IV, it has twice as many cities to explore, some of them five levels high. "There's also an entire underworld," reveals Garriott, "a below-ground world. Not only are there dungeons, but at the bottom edge of the dungeons they connect to this huge underground chasm." Garriott also realizes, though, that bigger and better-looking isn't necessarily better. So many of the game's new features are aimed at making Ultima V's universe more realistic. "Something I think is unique about all the Ultimas compared to any other fantasy/role-playing game, even those being done today, is that Ultima is a simulation of an entire world. You have an entire world to explore; you've got people to talk to; you've got places to go and things to do beyond the aspect of just building up characters and fighting," he explains. The inhabitants of cities and castles who "just kind of moved around and bumped into walls" in previous Ultimas now follow a daily schedule: traveling to the office, eating lunch, returning home to bed. When those cities clear out at night, unscrupulous adventurers can do untold mischief under the cover of darkness, but watch out for fireplaces and street lights that can cast a pool of luminous visibility around your thievery. In response to Ultima players who've criticized the combat system, Garriott has added more substance and strategy to the battle sequences. "In all of the early Ultimas," says Garriott, "the combat systems required brute force. In Ultima V, on the other hand, we've designed a combat system that was play-tested for balance even on paper before we ever put it into the game ." Adventurers can now carry and use more than one weapon, more than one piece of armor. "For instance, you can wear a helmet and breastplate and hold a sword in one arm and a dagger in the other--but, if you have a two-handed sword, you can't use anything else." A newly added feature provides a cross hair in combat sequences that allows combatants to take aim at any on-screen character in any direction, not just the north, south, east, or west of past versions. One of the most notable and controversial developments of Ultima IV was Garriott's sudden attack of morality. In place of the lie, cheat, and steal scenarios of the first three Ultimas, the game required players to quest for virtue and wholesomeness . Ultima V will also revolve around moral issues but in quite a different way. "Ultima V was my first serious attempt to put together an intricate, interconnected story line with some meaning to it," recalls Garriott. "Ultima IV is the first one about which I said, 'Hey, we're going to put more into these games than just Go and Fight the Bad Guy. We're going to have a real story with real meaning so people can enjoy the total environment of both the story and the world.' "Ultima V has some of the same philosophical overtones as Ultima IV did, but it's from a different angle. In Ultima IV, you're personally going out there to prove yourself as this glorious and virtuous person--and all of the towns and villages are preaching or at least expounding on the virtues. Ultima V shows the dark side. It takes on the fact that people can become self-righteous and take these virtues too literally and too far. You and all your friends are going to become Robin Hood-ish outlaws. The whole system of virtues has kind of gone amok." How long can Garriott maintain his momentum with the Ultima series? As long as he can improve the play system and as long as the games continue on their best-selling track (each one has outsold its predecessor dramatically), the Ultimas will keep coming. After eight years of designing Ultimas, however, Garriott has a few other game ideas. With the completion of Ultima V, he plans to split his six-person team into two groups. One will move on into Ultima VI, and the other will begin a new non-Ultima game. "It will still be a fantasy/role-playing project," Garriott confides, "but of fairly different overtones and genre. My intent is to start a second game line in addition to Ultima, and that way we can also start staggering them so that they come out every year instead of every two years." Uh-oh--there goes the summer of 1988! ===================================== End of file. Total Characters: 8068 Total Words: 1139