Friday 15 February 2013

Beating Dead Horses: Ultima Forever

What is this shit?  It's Mythic Entertainment dragging a relic of PC gamings past to try and squeeze money out of its legacy.

For those that don't know, Ultima is a big long line of old school RPGs that were created by a crazy dude known as Richard Garriot who went by the name of Lord British.  Quest for the Avatar was the 4th game in the Ultima series and it was pretty revolutionary for its time.  It did away with a big bad, and instead had the player focus on trying to become "The Avatar", which in the games world basically amounts to being like Jesus.

So what is Ultima Forever?  From what I can tell in the trailer, it's a dungeon crawl hack n' slash. WRONG! FUCKING, SO GODDAMN WRONG!  Ultima always had its fair share of combat but it was never a hack n' slash dungeon crawl.  It was the fucking opposite, where I think it was the virtue of honor meant that you had to leave fleeing foes and allow them to live because stabbing a dude in the back while he's running away crying is about as dishonourable as it gets.

But this trailer just has a guy smashing the fuck out of everything on screen, and all the depth and brilliant design to be found in the original Ultima 4 appears to be gone. This leads to another problem I have with the gaming industry.

Stop dragging up old names just to make sales on new games.  X-Com got lucky as that game ended up being pretty good.  But Syndicate took it right in the ass, going from an awesome tactics game to a shit first person shooter.  Now Ultima is ready to put its ass in the air and get fucked but the problem here is that Ultima already took it pretty hard after 9.  So Quest for the Avatar, a great game, is now going to have its legacy shit on by turning into an ARPG.

Ultima Forever may actually end up being a really good Action RPG, but there is no reason it should carry Ultimas name, fuck off Mythic.

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