How Ultima do you want the game?

yuuup exept the very own dreams of that Avatar/Stranger... seemingly noone wants to hear about them

 

It's tricky when you're using the term "Ultima" in what you're looking for. Is it going to have blatant references to the original series? Absolutely not. Are there tongue-in-cheek and sly winks towards things from the games? Sure, along with stuff that tends to carry over from the fantasy trope in general. I'll agree that the Obsidian's twisting magics and the creations that were born from the Chaos magics does bring back the Mondain/U1 feels.

What I'm personally looking for though is more the ambiance and design of the Ultima games. Stuff where the player's choices mattering to the overall gameplay. Having to make difficult ethical decisions. Exploring a world that is both filled with hidden lore and knowledge. Seeing the NPCs and towns being a living breathing world (I want to see them get up, go to work, go to the tavern, go home, etc).

I haven't had the chance to get in depth into the story stuff yet, but I'm hoping it's got a good narrative and keeps me immersed in the plot

 

Agree with everything everything you have said. I think has an old ultima Player when you here Richard Garriot's name mentioned with a rpg you do tend to hope it will be very similar to the ultima's of old. I understand it wont be exactly the same but have a hope that some of the similar type of gameplay will be involved. i am happy with the way it is going at the moment and obviously you want new and intresting twists in it to keep things intresting. Housing being one of the new things i like. in the long run it will be intresting to see what sort of game it eventually becomes and has the saying goes 'you can't please everybody all of the time.'

 

EA's not going to let us have returning characters from Ultima. So that's out. Mechanics/visuals/sound/interface is not going to be the same.

I'd look at the core values of the Ultima games.

Everything in game is usable. - If there is a piano players should be able to play them, craft them, destroy them.
Actions have consequences. - Kill someone in cold blood and the community will react. (even if that victim respawns)
NPC's have a schedule. - If an NPC is roaming the forest and is attacked by wolves there isn't a clone of the NPC in town. The NPC walks from it's home/shop to exit the town, enter the forest, wanders around in the forest for a reason, then happens to be jumped by wolves.

 

There were also a lot of other things I liked about Martian Dreams.

There were a lot of things in the world with mystery that took on more importance as the game went on, like the canal system and the towers and the dream machines. When you start the game, all of that is broken, and as you go on in the game and explore the world, you learn about the mysteries of these things. You have to go underground into ancient caverns, where you find broken down pieces of machinery and robots you have to restore to life.

Traveling from place to place was an adventure, it took time, and was filled with a lot of perils. Even survival elements like having to face the cold, dressing warm enough to survive the cold, and sleeping at night to avoid freezing. Also chewing oxium in order to breathe, which you had to mine from oxy-geodes. You had to learn to navigate the canal system with all of the bridges, avoid sexteleggers and other creatures in the wild. Your ammunition and lamp oil was limited, so you had keep track of your supplies and use them wisely.

You had to use psychic berries to deal with puzzles, like moving planks so you could get over chasms. The spyglass. The fact that some crates and doors were nailed shut and you needed to use a crowbar to open them. The fact that you could dig out ice from the polar areas, and it could melt. The bits and pieces of strange martian jewelry and foot rags. Agriculture; growing a Martian pod and watering it. Pushing carts by hand in the mines in order to bring out ore. Traveling to the top of Olympus Mons.

 

One thing that gets me currently, is all players run everywhere, but all NPCs walk everywhere. If walking has no benefits, and running has no penalties, then NPCs should be doing it too.

I remember in the Ultimas, there were often other characters that looked and acted just like my party of adventurers. They would come out and hunt me down if I lost enough virtue. There definitely needs to be other adventurers out doing the same things we're doing in the game. The ability for NPCs to cross zone lines, so pilgrims can go on pilgrimages, scouts can go scouting, mail can be delivered, pages can deliver messages to field commanders, armies can travel across the land and lay seige on cities, farmers could work on farms in the summer, and sell their harvest in the cities in the fall.. etc. etc. etc..

 

Just add it to the list of Ultima games that would be an amazing HD remake.

 

Omg . What is going on ? .? Can everyone see this post loads of times

 

Personally I'd rather see more Ultima in the sense of a storyline centered around the player, the avatar, the virtues, and/or some combination of those.
But..
I would rather see procedurally generated quests, unique to each player, instead of what's in place now.
It's not that hard to do, and would add immensely to the "unique path" feel of the game that Ultima had, for me.

Spoiler: How to do it?

In short, this is how you do it:
When you speak to an NPC, and use job, health, name, task, errand, etc keywords, the game picks a nearby zone, a nearby harvestable/lootable type in that zone, and then creates an errand around it, just for you.
What it means is, you get a task to perform, from that NPC and it's something like this.
I can't go [hunting|gathering] at [location] due to [reasons], please help me by [hunting|gathering] this [resource] from that [location] and returning it to me for [a reward.]
The reward could be XP, plus one of: a long term buff directly, consumables, consumables that provide buffs, ammo, crafting supplies, recipes, housing decorations, books, and more. The errand and location is always level appropriate. The reward could be random, or based on the errand.
It could change daily or simply be outstanding and unique per NPC. Every NPC in the world could require and reward for these errands, randomly and uniquely, per player.
What I mean by that is, if Player_A talks to the tavern patron, ask asks for an errand, he gets a completely different errand, location, items and reward versus Player_B that talks to the exact same tavern patron.
Perhaps as a cap, you could perform only one of these errands per NPC, per 24 hours. That way, you'd always want to talk to every NPC, no matter what, because at the very least, they'd all have some errand of some kind.
Not everyone needs to do the exact same thing to progress in the game, and this makes for a unique journey, in my opinion. At the very least, better than static quests that just go into the wiki.
Such a system should be trivial to code, it's just a few queries and deterministic randomizations based on a unique seed value per player. The existing framework should more than permit such a thing, given http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/procedural-quest-generation.280858/ and http://www.skotos.net/articles/dawnof26.shtml and http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/quest-mission-system.300168/

 

Sorry, my internet connection is soooo bad.. it screws up the forums.. you don't want to know how bad playing the game is these days.

P.S. I think i cleared up the duplicates

 

He's illustrating how it would look if he was an instanced NPC instead of someone on a schedule!

 

Thank goodness for that I thought I had been drinking

 

If you aren't actually sure if you've been drinking, that is a whole different issue entirely.

 

Not so sure how people may take this... but what if we had NPCs that are outlanders and come from Earth? this can make so much sense in single player, since you're AN outlander and every single NPC talks about "the outlanders that have been coming".

You could make outlanders NPCs having more complex schedules, you may find them settling in towns (filling all those "player lots"), hunting in scenes, travelling on the overworld, afk in front of a rift, drinking at the tavern... Some chat lines and barks to give them personality, all dropped in a big wheel, then you generate the Outlanders by building its "personality" (it has this lines, that barks, this skills, go from here to there, usually hunts there, likes this crafting profession). I don't think it's easy but the result could be incredible.

Something like this is what i was talking about before... but instead of making it a fixed system assigned to each NPC i'd make it to randomly pop up (Suddenly an NPC says "help!" or "could you do me a favor?") or to find them in random encounters or as part of a special encounter in a scene. I'd also like to see how quests have two different results impacting your virtue, basically picturing the same situations that Arabella points out in her questions, but in game. For example:

• An old lady tells you to find some herbs for her leg pain and promises a reward. You find those and when you get back she tells you she lied to you and she has no money... do you still give her the herbs?
• A widow wants to take his husband ashes to his hometown, and will pay you in advance. Do you ditch the urn or fulfill your task?
• An injured warrior asks you for some healing remedies (potions, heal spell). When healed, he tells you to help him fight back the bandits that brought him to that state. Knowing he's not fully recovered... do you assist him or let him alone knowing he probably die this time?

All those, of course, properly procedured so everything could be changed as you said; different errands, different rewards, and also, different outcomes.

 

@agra,

The BEST GAME EVER for generated quests was Darklands. The whole game was just generated quests. There was also a storyline, but you entered into it very slowly, and were introduced to it through random encounters while traveling.

Darklands quests:
http://www.darklands.net/faq/4.shtml

Yes, and as @KuBaTRiZeS is saying, you could also have quests that start in random encounters, or that bring you to random encounters. You can also have regular quests to attack some enemy camp (kobolds, elves, whatever), siege some tower or castle. You could also patrol roads and save merchants from attacks. Etc.

Quests could also be given at taverns by visiting travelers or by traders at docks. Or based on rumors by the tavernkeep.

 

I am really disappointed by the quests we have in the game right now
I hope that those are just placeholders as fedex quests are really neither complex nor interesting.

 

In offline mode I want to be able to feed my
Companions butter to save costs!

 

I don't know, even at its simplest,basest white stick figure incarnations, Ultima towns,npc's,companions,world map sites of importance and music were all so much more memorable than what we have now. And that may change. Unfortunately I think The POT boom will help keep the towns underpopulated. The towns were designed to be bustling with PC activity, not NPC and I suspect they will stay that way

 

Some people own more than one town apparently. Why does one person need two towns?! lol

 

Well, one can be PvP, while the other is RP, basically creating your very own Tramel & Feluccia.