Successor to the Ultima Series

My assumption was that her name has been Arabella, which I find to be a stupid name. I always knew her as the gypsy, but since everyone has referred to her as Arabella over there for a long time, I assumed I misremembered. Gypsy woman has a sense of mystery that Arabella (generic feminine fantasy name generator result) does not.

Ahah, this is something I hit upon at the start of my ITWILLBEDONEONEDAY video. I basically agree with you, let's say, but I am sympathetic to why it's being critiqued now...

Coding a system that can take into account morals has been a goal of more than one game, but nobody's ever succeeded afaik. That's not unlike trying to have an organic-feeling dialogue system where you just type whatever. The idea sounds great, but I've never seen a game pull it off.

I give props to Port for trying to do some genuinely ground-breaking things, but I fear that they may fall short of reinventing dialogue and properly gauging ethics.

Ultima VII is where it is at. But if you can't sit through that spritefest, give the Ultima 5 Lazarus project a try. You will need to, attain, the Dungeon Seige 1.x game prior to installing the U5L patch, but it played quite nice and has just about all of the orig contents in the game. Shadow of Light Dragon also did the dialogue, and she has been wishing to help SotA with dialogue but you know how that goes. Lum and enderandrew have that shit buttoned down for whatever reason. Sorry Shadow, don't mean to put words in your mouth, that is only my opinion. Music is beautiful also, very, very well done fan project.


www.u5lazarus.com/

I have only gotten into the first 58 seconds of the video. It is nicely done, and the music is excellent.

I have a minor grievance with the content from the game (not the video).

This sort of consequences:



See, there is a "middle path." It's not black and white. One should be able to share the gold, telling the truth and giving half the gold to your friend, because even if you had the killing blow, it took 2 to fight. Alone, one may not have won.

Further, choosing to be truthful may make you feel guilty. Lying and being accommodating, to not hurt your friend's feeling, also may leave a sense of unfairness or bitterness.

So in effect, it punishes truthfulness. And that is in keeping to my experience on the Shroud forums.

I don't mean to make this into a big affair or that I'm right and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. It's just the way it struck me when I read it.

Games have gotten close, though. Single-player games often struggle with the main storyline and morality. Think of Mass Effect: amazing game, deep. I absolutely loved it (had a crush on Tali). But, you can only bounce between Paragon and Renegade - you can't actually be BAD. You're saving the universe, after all, and the entire storyline depends on doing that, even if you're an asshole about it.

Check Ultima VI. Talking to different characters by typing in information. You can kill just about everybody. However, while you CAN be a merciless asshole murdering everyone on the planet (which I would do after saving my game, taking a galleon and pirating cities), the game itself cannot be completed without being "the good guy".

Enter sandboxes. I've been playing a shit ton of Mount & Blade: Warband. I can be a major asshole, raid villages, build a war party and take over the world. It allows me that freedom, but that freedom exists in action, not in chatting to NPCs. So while there's a depth of freedom and consequences for taking on the world, pissing everyone off in the process, there's also a limitation in what that means for you as the player: NPCs will hate you, many will fear you, but other than everyone just fighting you and trying to stop you, there's no storyline or plot that's directly impacted by those decisions. Like those people who play GTA but never do the actual quests; can you have fun and do what you want? Sure, but you're never really beating the game.

Things change dramatically when you throw that into the multi-player sphere. Since you can't have morality-based decisions without actual choices, that kills just about 99% of MMOs out there that send you from one exclamation mark to the next. Limits the pool to choose from heavily. It honestly comes down to just a few: Ultima Online, Mortal Online, Star Citizen, and that one sci-fi game that was basically Cops & Robbers in the far future (it allowed for perma death).

UO and Mortal Online are cut from the same cloth; more specifically, MO is cut from UO circa 1999, so I won't go too far into that one. The idea of jumping into a sandbox and doing whatever it is you want to do. Obviously, they have the flagging system to determine things like criminality and murderer status, mechanics to punish you for committing crimes, and so on. Karma systems allow players to get an idea of the kind of things you do; Glorious Lord is likely not going to steal from you while a Scoundrel is probably a petty thief. Morality in an MMO has to be considered differently; you aren't talking to NPCs, necessarily, to push your game along. It's the players that feel that sense of morality. In UO, being a Lord/Lady meant that NPCs would sometimes bow to you as you walked by; being Dread meant you couldn't purchase things from them anymore. There wasn't much depth to karma and NPC interactions beyond that, though.

Likewise, people on SotA were the types to see a name in red and immediately assume they were of immoral character, a griefer, and so on. Anyone who played UO more than a year in the non-Trammel servers knows that the blues are the ones you have to watch out for. Reds wear their actions on their heads, blues can be opportunists (like I was). Reds also did what they wanted to do, killed who needed to be killed, whatever the reason. That blue tamer jerk that talks shit in town and harasses people? Blind loot his ass and reskill him until he quits. To some, the red is a common thug; to others, he's a hero who gives the douchebag his due come uppance.

Yet that wasn't accurate morality. A karma system that didn't have any effect other than a vague idea of what someone did with most of their time (and as a blue PK, I always maintained Renowned for the RP - 0 Karma, +3 Fame) plus a very limited flagging system that was easily abused meant that morality in UO was almost a farce. Star Citizen aims to include NPC interactions and a more realistic sense of infamy, but I think in line with how Warband works: more in action and response than in any kind of in-depth NPC storyline. But in a primarily multi-player game, I think that works, at least for the NPCs.

The real problem comes in the same thing I always harp on about when it comes to gaming: consequences. There are none. In single-player games, the consequences are often more easily coded: you died, game over. You chose Faction Red over Team Blue? The rest of the game is you fighting Team Blue. The original Way of the Samurai was really fun in this regard, but it was also relatively short, encouraging you to play it over and over again to try the different ways it could play out. Morality, I would argue, gets into the realm of it being a matter of orthodoxy and consequences; on a PvP server, killing people randomly isn't the same as suddenly turning off Trammel protection on a Trammel-only server and inviting gank squads in. Likewise, playing a game like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and dying repeatedly isn't the same as playing PlanetSide 2 and dying repeatedly, or playing UO and getting killed being the same as playing Guild Wars 2 and getting killed. The consequences for failure, as one example, aren't the same, so what you do differs. In Chivalry, for example, I like to go balls deep in the fight and swing away; in PlanetSide 2, I play more conservatively, because failure means respawning from further from the action or wasting potential nanites or simply lowering my overall K/D - something I don't get a hard-on over but something that is hardwired into my character over his career.

So if the simple win/lose element of a game directly determines how I play that game, so too then consequences need to be considered for interactions that don't necessarily have a win-lose scenario, or rather redefine what win-loss means. Time spent less on generic quests and how to carefully place level 2 rabbits on this hill, then level 3 spikey turtles on that one over there with level 4 harpies near the coast further along the path means spending more time on an immersive world with mechanics to facilitate that experience.

Something else, I read about Pantheon here from the creators of EverQuest. It reads like literally every single game that has come out since 2005. "Open world." "Challenging gameplay." "Realms vying for power (ie, factions/races)." Nothing new, and no surprise they didn't reach their Kickstarter goal. Sounds like there won't be any more choices there than in SotA. And while I agree with Drocis that in a (supposedly) open-ended realm where you can be whomever, like Lord British said, that it is strange I have to follow a Principle from the outset, isn't it ironic that he wants to embrace "dissent, curiosity and rejection"?

How bizarre.

While I think this quote is genius, I got the impression from Ultima that the design was intended to force a choice of virtue (by leaving out the other), inherently preventing a compromising (and in this case significantly more logical) decision.

While that's great and all, the black and white scenario you quoted leaves the virtuously-minded player effectively with two options (read all CAPS-LOCKS in the voice of Dr. Borous):

1) TRUTH: Disregard your equally penniless friend and his help that you received and instead claim all of the reward by virtue of the fact that you got the kill. (No sacrifice, sure but this decision comes off so unsavory because it also taps into voids of compassion, honor, humility, and love).
2) SACRIFICE: Allow your friend to take the full reward, despite not making the final blow. This isn't quite as unpalatable a choice, though there is an abandonment of truth and justice, since you both landed the killing blow and deserved part of the reward (or all of it under Old-Britannian law?).

The obvious conclusion that most people put in this scenario would find is that, because 1) you're both equally poor, 2) he's your friend, 3) you're a virtuous sort, and 4) you both worked together to overcome a difficult task, you ought to claim having landed the felling blow and share half of the reward with your friend. This option couldn't be in Ultima, because it reconciles all of the virtues (and in doing so removes the moral depth of the choices), but such is the inherent flaw in trying to to define virtues by separating them, a flaw that all of the Ultimas (and FO, Mass Effect, and GTA) suffer from.

The weird thing is, being "truthful" that you got the killing blow does not feel virtuous. Lying to your friend does not either. So I'm having trouble digesting if either choice could be perceived as virtuous.

No, not slow. You're right, it was all new then. And the video you posted, that I watched entirely, did have intrigue and kept one's attention. Especially a younger person, and the age range that liked Tolkien.

I'm just questioning it now, if they plan to use the same sort of choice. The gypsy in SotA is a bit frustrating because I don't like being given weapons and spells based on what I answer and it's all a mystery. A person knows what they want to be, regardless of virtues or not. I usually choose magic or archery, but it gave me a sword. It made no sense.

Great read, props!

Yeah it doesn't really work any longer. This is a bark from the past and while nostalgic I am sure they could find a creative way to re-introduce the very same concept in a much more creative light!

Do you think this stems from the original SotA idea of not having "classes" ? I mean, we already have some pretty clear classes, so...

I wasn't paying attention, I should have, but she did determine some of mine. Both Glyphs and Passives in the Fire Magic tree. I guess oddly enough even the SotA NPC thought I wanted to burn the world down...