Ultima Forever: Graphical Evolution

As revealed by Paul Barnett in his GDC Online presentation, Ultima Forever went through a number of iterations, as far as its graphics were concerned. The game began as — get this — a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel with its cells filled in with different colours:

That was Mythic’s initial toolset for the game: Microsoft productivity software. The earliest prototype of the game looked a bit better, and in fact was a very Ultima 4-like, browser-based tiled RPG framework, with a slightly higher-resolution texture set than Ultima 4 proper:

From there, the team made some excellent early progress, producing a game that looked…well, in plain point of fact, it looks kind of like what Ultima Forever looks like today, albeit not quite as nice. The engine is obviously 2D, and the characters and scenery aren’t as detailed:

And in fact, as Paul Barnett explains in his presentation, there was a fundamental issue with the game when it was presented to BioWare in this state. Its other art looked phenomenal, and really didn’t fit the look and feel of the gameplay at all. As such, much of the work that had been done on Ultima Forever was scrapped, and the team went back to the drawing board.

Some months later, EA subjected the project to its first “death march”, which in essence is a meeting in which a project is presented in its current state along with an argument for why it should be allowed to continue, after which EA decides whether the project matches the company’s aims and either grants it permission to continue or orders its cancellation. Having essentially gone back to the drawing board with the game, Mythic didn’t have a lot to present:

But EA gave the project one more month, after which it planned to kill it and move the team on to other work. In the course of that month, Paul and the rest of the Ultima Forever team managed to pull off nothing short of a miracle, and whipped the game into this state:

This suitably impressed EA Labels president Frank Gibeau, who allowed the project to continue its development. Of course, further shakeups were ahead, in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic (which robbed the Ultima Forever team of many of its development team for a while) and the transition away from browser-based gaming to mobile gaming. The team doggedly threw themselves at all these challenges, however, and brought the game to the state it’s at today:

So there you have it: a brief look at the graphical evolution of Ultima Forever, from its humble beginnings in Microsoft Excel to its current, iPad-ready form.