Paws in Ultima Forever…To Scale

In response to some questions they had received about the scale of town art assets to character models, the Ultima Forever team released a second image of Paws, this time in-game footage taken just as a fighter was leaving the tavern.

You can see it above or in its full glory at the Ultima Forever Facebook page. A few other characters are also visible in the image, and it’s worth noting that the complaint some have given voice to in the past — that characters don’t seem to blend in well with the background — has been addressed somewhat since the last batch of official screenshots was released.

6 Responses to "Paws in Ultima Forever…To Scale"

Ultima Forever: Map of Paws Released (Update: Characters!) : The Ultima Codex says:

December 11, 2012 at 1:19 am

[…] they had received about the scale of town art assets to character models, the Ultima Forever team released a second image of Paws, this time in-game footage taken just as a fighter was leaving the tavern. […]

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Sanctimonia says:

December 11, 2012 at 7:17 am

While it’s slim pickings these days, it will be interesting to see how how far from grace Ultima has fallen since its golden age. In an alternate reality where Pony Canyon and FCI discovered Garriott’s works ten years later this game could have been their vision of Ultima III. Very Japanese (Ys, early-to-mid Final Fantasy).

I know NDA’s have been signed and all, but will anyone share the first clue as to whether this is just a hack’n’slash with some skill trees and shout outs to classic Ultima or if it attempts any world simulation aspects? Hopefully you can manually light and extinguish torches, open doors, search areas, latch and pick locks, fall through trap doors, engage land and sea enemies with cannons from your ship, explore dungeons in first-person mode, flip levers, mix reagents, exchange items between bags and chests, cast unnervingly destructive spells in numerous circles and allow the player to kill or steal from anyone but Lady British without paying the ultimate price.

Hopefully it has some of those things, and maybe a farming aspect where the plants grow on their own and you just kill or use them as necessary. Oh Ultima. So many possibilities.

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1. WtF Dragon says:
  
  December 13, 2012 at 11:56 pm
  
  Well, it definitely has action, as the various screenshots tell the tale.
  
  If you haven’t watched Paul Barnett’s GDC Online talk, I will summarize one part for you: he spoke at one point about how it came down to doing something around the idea of Ultima 7 or around the idea of Ultima 4, which he broadly abstracted as being the distinction between SIMulation (U7) and STIMulation (U4).
  
  He then brought this conundrum to his lead engineer, who asked what resources were available. When Barnett explained that the project had a shoestring budget, the engineer replied “Four it is.”
  
  That’s really the long and short of it; despite the lengthy development of the game, it has been eking by on a proverbial “chicken and spoon” budget, rather than be blessed with any sort of financial largesse. As such, it’s going to be more action-oriented, though it will have more beyond that as well. The Virtues will play a role, for example.
  
  And that’s mostly because world simulation would’ve required a bigger budget to develop and support than the team had access to. Now, if U4E succeeds, the possibility exists that we’ll start to see the level of world simulation increase with successive entries in the series. But that’s in a far-off future, at present.
  
  Reply
  1. Sanctimonia says:
    
    December 14, 2012 at 7:58 am
    
    Thanks. That does shed some light on the project. I wasn’t privy to the alpha/beta and only watched some of the energetic GDC presentation. I understand the budget constraints, though in my experience it’s the audio/visual art assets rather than cleverly implemented mechanics that cost teams more money. A game can integrate new features using the existing asset set rather cheaply.
    
    Hopefully right after hacking people and animals (monsters) up with swords one may board, sail and fire cannons from ships. Few games today have implemented this simple feature of the time-tested Ultima IV. From a programmer’s perspective, there’s really no excuse considering it uses the most basic of mechanics ([un]mount, move, turn, fire ranged weapon). If not I’ll forgive it, as all features are inherently cool and I’m sure it has many.
    
    Hopefully a version will be made for a standards-based web browser or multi-OS installer so it will be available on any and all devices. If not, no biggie there either.
    
    Reply
    1. Duke says:
      
      December 17, 2012 at 5:57 am
      
      Well we do know for sure that there will be ships in the game – don’t know if anything has been said about combat whilst aboard them though.
      
      Reply
      1. Sanctimonia says:
        
        December 18, 2012 at 6:23 am
        
        Even if it has Ultima III ship functionality it will be pretty cool. Hopefully they didn’t underestimate the awesomeness of that ancient feature.

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