So, How Big is Ultima Forever’s World, Actually?

Apropos of this article discussing the potential scale of the Ultima Forever game world, Mark writes:

I saw an old post where you crunched the numbers on the size of Ultima Forever’s wall-sized map. Now that we have more info released, I did a little math myself.

The original U4 had a 4096×4096 map. With a 16 pixel tile size, thats 256×256 tiles. 11 tiles to a screen makes a 23×23 screen map.

If you look at the leaked overworld screen shot of Castle Britannia, Cove, etc, and compare it to the hand-drawn U4ever map, you get about a 10×13.5 screen map…so a hair under 4x smaller for Ultima Forever (though apparently it has many more town maps).

Here is the screenshot he’s talking about (I think), just for reference:

And here is the map of Britannia released for Ultima Forever:

I’ll even take the step of roughly overlaying the two:

Thoughts, Dragons and Dragonettes? Is Mark’s rough estimation of the scale of the world correct?

9 Responses to "So, How Big is Ultima Forever’s World, Actually?"

Ultima Forever: So, How Big Is Britannia? : The Ultima Codex says:

October 17, 2012 at 3:01 am

[…] an interesting follow-up question from a reader regarding the size of Britannia in Ultima Forever based on some earlier speculative calculations I had […]

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LoneStranger says:

October 17, 2012 at 3:13 am

Looks like a strong possibility. If so, it seems to me that the world might be a little small. But then again, with the way the multiplayer/social aspects are explained (or at least interpreted by me), it makes sense because a smaller world is easier to navigate and explore in a four player party system, especially if it’s not being overrun by hundreds and thousands of players.

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Sanctimonia says:

October 17, 2012 at 3:41 am

The unit size being compared is “screens”, which isn’t a common (and certainly not standardized) unit and is otherwise somewhat arbitrary. Something as simple as changing screen resolution or camera zoom would dramatically alter the comparison, unless you’re talking about a 1:1 native texture size comparison.

A more useful comparison could be drawn if a standard unit such as foot or meter could be derived from the two representations of Britannia.

On the subject of non standardized size comparison, some other factors could be used such as real-world traversal speed, game-world traversal speed, density of interactive content and the scale of the town/castle maps relative to their iconic representation on the overworld map.

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WtF Dragon says:

October 17, 2012 at 5:01 am

What’s nice to see, and the inverted overlay I use in the header image illustrates this rather well, is that the map actually quite closely comports with the screenshot. The alignment of terrain and objects is almost spot-on between the two.

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Shadow of Light Dragon says:

October 17, 2012 at 9:27 am

The size of the map isn’t the only thing that affects the player perception of the world size, however. In U4, for instance, you could travel anywhere on the overmap except mountains, provided you had a ship to go over water. The lack of physical obstacles to travelling made the map feel very open and large.

From the screenshot it’s hard to tell whether U4E will have a similar freedom of movement. Can you walk through forests and bogs and fields? Are you restricted to the roads (of which, judging from the map, there are many more than even existed in U5)?

Linearity can have a *huge* effect on how big a world seems, regardless of how many tiles are used.

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mark says:

October 17, 2012 at 10:24 am

Small….
That’s what I thought too.
Good luck trying to measure a foot or meter when a simple bridge is the size of a castle in u4ever. Actually screens is a pretty good eat to bridge the gap between 320-200 and high res. I suspect that the art is scaled so everyone has the same amount showing across different resolutions

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darren says:

October 17, 2012 at 8:07 pm

Yeah, it’s a small world after all. A really small one.
It’s a design choice; just like 2D, online, virtue stuff.

It’s easy to fill up a lot of empty space with 8 different land types of tiles on a map.
And while it’s fun to wander the landscape, listen to the music and encounter random monsters while you travel to your next destination, that’s not why U4 was groundbreaking for its time.

Kind of reminds me of the map in Chrono Trigger. Small world map; great game.

For what it’s worth, I like that there are airships.

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iceblade says:

October 19, 2012 at 3:10 am

Looks like there are more towns around the map. Check out the structures just north of the opening the trees north of the castle.

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Shadow of Light Dragon says:

October 22, 2012 at 2:38 am

There are, iceblade. The devs have said there will be lots of explorable areas like dungeons and forest ruins that weren’t in the original.

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