Ultima I-III Available at Good Old Games

Last week it was reported that Good Old Games would be selling Ultima I-III and they are now doing so.

If you’re only experience with the Ultima series of games is Ultima Online, you’ll be in for a bit of a surprise.

$5.99 gets you the following:
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress
Ultima III: Exodus
Manuals, Cluebook, Spellbook, and Maps

You can find the games, screenshots, and information at GOG’s Ultima I-III page.

Ultima Aiera is celebrating by posting several stories, videos, and information about the Ultima I-III games, including a look at the difference in platforms, the introductions, and many other things.

Good Old Games Offering First 4 Ultima Games Next Week

Update: They are now available!

Something else to occupy our time while we wait for Pub 72 for UO – reading about other Ultima-related news. Earlier in the summer, Good Old Games began offering the first of what we hope is many games from the EA and Origin back catalogs, including Wing Commander: Privateer and Ultima Underworld 1 and 2. Yesterday, they added to their Origin offerings with Wing Commander 1 and 2.

Now PC Gamer is reporting that next week they will offer Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar for free, along with the first three Ultima games in a bundle for $5.99. The bundle is considered to be the “Age of Darkness” Ultimas, with the following games:
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress
Ultima III: Exodus

Now, “Ultima 0”, aka Akalabeth: World of Doom is not being included, however it’s available elsewhere, including an iOS port for Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad platform.

Yes, you can download Ultima IV for free through UltimaForever.com, however you will need to set up DOSBox. One of the advantages that Good Old Games offers is that the games are packaged in a DOSBox environment, allowing you to just download the games and start playing them under Windows without a lot of effort (my fellow Mac users, there are ways to play these).

There is also an iPad remake of Ultima IV in development.

If you want to read more about the early days of Ultima, see this brief Ultima synopsis at Ultima Aiera.

The timing of this is very interesting, just as we head into Ultima Online’s 14th Anniversary, and the expected high resolution artwork update.

Source: PC Gamer

Richard Garriott Talks a Lot About Ultima Online and Crafting

Richard Garriott gave a keynote this week at the GDC Europe conference, where he touched on the Ultima and Ultima Online series as well as what he’s learned.

While I don’t have a transcript of the keynote, He gave a really in-depth interview that was published on the Soulrift blog.

Here are some excerpts. In regards to in-game economies and trying to control how much players have at what levels:

Well, when you generate a massively multiplayer game, the ability to tightly control and constrain things goes out the window. Even if you start with a basis of saying at level 1 you get 1s of gold and level 2 you get 10s and level 3 you get 100s, etc., the problem then becomes that anyone of high level can basically hand that value to a person of low level.

In regards to non-combat roles and real estate and housing in UO:

We had the circumstance where, I think one of the most interesting emergent value assets that came up in Ultima Online was how quickly and how valuable virtual real-estate became. I think that the reason why they became so valuable and the impact on the economy kinda goes like this: Ultima Online, to this day I think, is the only MMO that did such a good job of giving players non-combat roles that were so thoroughly simulated that people had entire lives that they would live out in the virtual world that had little or nothing to do with adventuring. The classical case is the blacksmith. There were people who would literally spend their entire virtual life online buying ore that would be brought by adventurers in dungeons, smelting it down into ingots, taking those ingots and forging weapons, and selling those weapons back to the adventurers who would go back into the dungeon and get more ore. Well, if your joy in this game was to be a blacksmith and make weapons, well your blacksmith shop sorta needed to be somewhere on the beaten path between the dungeon and the city centre where the players usually had their caravans of player groups going for safety. And that real-estate, of course, was almost immediately bought up by players early in the game, so late in the game the only place to build a new blacksmith shop was way out in the woods somewhere, which was, frankly, no amount of advertising would bring people to you. So the real-estate suddenly became the thing of value.

Right after this part, he went on to discuss how officially Origin/EA had no stance on Real Money Transactions (RMTs) and then once they saw what started to happen – scams, third world labor, etc., they began to shift their official stance against RMT

In regards to crafting in other games and UO, Garriott mentioned that it should be as powerful in other MMOs as it was in UO, and that he had no idea early on just how powerful it would be in UO:

but I had no idea of the power of these levels of activity that were not combat within Ultima Online until I was a game master within the game itself and I would do things like… I remember a day that I was running around in the Help Queue and just responding to complaints, people getting stuck somewhere or whatever their problem might be, and I would teleport in as Lord British and help them out and feel very proud of myself.

I remember one time I was invisible and just walking around the coast line and there was this man standing along the shore and he had decorated and adorned his character very carefully, he was wearing cut-off short and a holey shirt and a big straw hat and he was standing on the beach with a fishing pole catching fish and laying the fish out beside him on the dirt. At that time, this was very early in Ultima Online, the simulation for fishing was precisely this: use fishpole on water, 50/50 chance to generate a fish. End of simulation. So there really was no simulation. I did not think of fishing as a profession, I did not think of fishing as something we were simulating, I just thought everything you can see that is a decoration in Ultima Online, it should work. So if you saw a typewriter – not that we ever had one – but if we did, it should work. If there’s a telephone, it should work.

He described how important it, when discussing the fisherman mentioned above, and how it changed his perception and reinforced certain beliefs:

That was a very important lesson for me, when I saw that. It really taught me that people were already playing Ultima Online for reasons that I had never in my wildest imagination have thought that people would desire, much less pull off an entire existing around fishing. But because we were devoted to “everything works” and you really could fish and you really could sell that fish in the market and you really could go into the pub and not only, of course, buy drinks but there was also a board game, you could sit down and play

The whole thing is very much worth a read with a huge emphasis on in-game economies and crafting, and Garriott goes on to talk about Tabula Rasa, some of the other games he’s worked on, and the next Lord British game.

So what are you waiting for, head over to Soulrift to read the full interview.

Richard Garriott Discusses Ultima, Ultima Online at GDC Europe

Richard Garriott gave the final keynote at this week’s Game Developers Conference in Europe, using the Ultima series, Ultima Online, and his upcoming Lord British game as examples for the three phases, aka the “Three Grand Eras of Game Development” as he calls them. They move from single-player to MMORPGs to social gaming.

He discussed a bit of what helped him succeed, while making it clear that he felt it was time to move on.

“One thing that I really lucked into was creating storylines with what I will call ‘social relevance’,” he said, pointing to the moral choices inherent in the Ultima games.

The “save the kingdom” story of the original games in the series is no longer enough, though it still has traction in the industry, he said. “The first Ultimas were very simple stories… And if you look at most games today they still are. Personally, I don’t know about you, after I told that story a few times I was done with it.”

He also discussed the very early days of UO when it wasn’t always a sure thing, and he even discussed that the graphics were outdated in the 1990s:

When he launched the Ultima Online project, EA’s “faith in the team and faith in the project was so low,” he said, that “projected sales were 30k lifetime.”

“Sales and marketing were not in favor of us working with the game,” he said. “It wasn’t until we put up a prototype and put up a web page… 50,000 people signed up to be beta testers in the first couple of weeks. When it finally did ship it was the fastest selling PC game in origin and EA history at the time. Within about two years had outsold all of the other previous Ultimas combined.”

Even so, he said, “Despite the success, lots of people were not convinced that this was a good future for gaming in general.”

This is because the game had dated graphics and a lack of story — putting it behind the current state of the art of single player games. “When a new era starts with graphics that are five or 10 years behind the state of the art, very quickly that changes.”

One thing I found very interesting and agreed with, is Garriott’s take on mobile gaming:

“I am now much more of a gamer than I ever been been in my whole life, but the vast majority of the gaming I have played has been on this machine,” Garriott said, while holding up an iPhone.

“I’m a devout believer that this is the current and near-term future of games.”

I agree with that – I’ve played far more games on my iPhone and have been impressed by how far it’s come in such a short time. I’m playing the Ultima IV beta on the iPad as well and it’s very impressive and makes for a good platform for older games.

This is just a general comment, but I wonder at times if he’s got a case of sour grapes when it comes to certain things. He’s had some really bad experiences that weren’t his fault, especially with MMOs – Ultima Online 2, Tabula Rasa, but also with Ultima 8, which he mentioned:

“There are only two games I look back with some sense of regret… They happened under similar conditions and I made the same mistake twice,” said Garriott.

They were both the first games he worked on after selling his company to a new publisher. Ultima 8 was rushed to hit a holiday release window, and it’s his biggest regret.

“Tabula Rasa — the original vision we had for the game, I wish we had stuck by… The vision was seen as too strange and far out by sales, marketing, and international concerns… It put us further and further behind before we even really got started.”

He had very little to say about Lord British’s New Britannia, other than it wasn’t ready, but he did mention that MMOs are changing to suit the many playstyles out there and used UO as an example:

One important problem with today’s MMOs is that “every player is a combatant”, he said. “In Ultima Online, that was not true.”

It is easy for me to say that you should judge his comments in light of the bad experiences he’s had with some large companies when it came to both his Ultima and Ultima Online games and other properties later on, but some of those experiences ended in court. I think it’s especially telling that more and more MMORPGs are being released all the time – when you visit sites like Massively.joystiq.com or MMORPG.com, the selection of MMOs now versus even just five years ago is staggering. Some of the largest and most anticipated games in the next two years are MMORPGs – Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s Titan, just to name two.

On the other hand, he always had a thing for trying to be cutting edge, whether it was pushing the boundaries of computer hardware with games coming out of Origin, or helping take the MMORPG genre into the mainstream when companies and players weren’t sure what they were or what they were capable of. And let’s face it, some of the social games he talks about have 5-6 times the players that games like World of Warcraft have. Just because those social or Facebook games may appeal to a broader audience than MMORPGs doesn’t make them any less of a game and they are still making their developers 100s of millions, even billions of dollars.

I’ll still take single-player games and MMORPGs over 95% of the social games out there though. And the games I play most on my iPhone – mostly single-player, especially “retro” games that just aren’t being made on the Mac or PC platform. I’m still not sure why EA hasn’t started releasing Origin’s back catalog of Ultima and Wing Commander games on the iPhone. That’s a lot of money just waiting to be made.

It’s a very entertaining read, and while Gamasutra has highlights, I will try to find a transcript or video.

Source: Gamasutra

Richard Garriott to Keynote GDC Europe, Speaks with Gamasutra

Richard Garriott has been making the news a lot recently, with his talk about the three eras of gaming, his views on social gaming, and his future plans.

He’s going to be the keynote speaker at GDC Europe 2011, which takes place in August in Cologne, Germany. He will be giving his talk entitled “The Three Eras of Gaming and Why This One is a Game Changer” which he has given before, and which is currently driving his gaming plans.

Next up, he spoke with Gamasutra, where Ultima Online was mentioned yet again:

Garriott recalled that the current state of social games reminds him of initial reactions to his classic Ultima Online, which was among the first titles to break into the MMO space. “People, even in our own company, were heavily critical of the game, right up until just before its release when the wave of pre-orders came in at a rate that was hard to ignore,” he said. Today, Garriott sees a similar trend with the reaction toward social and casual games.

He believes we are moving away from MMOs and towards games that offer greater accessibility while lowering the cost.

Garriott defines the second era of gaming as that of the “massively multiplayer game,” which introduced the concept of playing with an community of users, but still held on to some of the limitations of a traditional boxed product.

“That era still required that you go to the store, you pay 50 dollars, you return home, and then before you play it you subscribe to it for an additional 15 or so dollars per month,” he said. “These massively multiplayer games are also generally more complicated; they take longer to get into.”

He believes we have entered into the third era of gaming with the rise of social, casual, and mobile games, as these sorts of titles offer several advantages over traditional single player and MMO titles.

Garriott said with casual or social games, players can more easily access titles they might be interested in. “You remove the barrier of driving to the store, and you also remove the barrier of a significant up-front investment,” he explained, noting that these games are most often available via download either for free or for a very low price.

He has mentioned all of this before, but it’s still interesting nonetheless, and is yet another mention of Ultima Online in the mainstream gaming media.