If Ultima VII were made today...

[Infinitron]

Every town in Britannia would have the local Fellowship branch directly involved in some blatantly nefarious scheme which the Avatar would have to stop, with an EPIC BATTLE against the branch leader and his horde of minions at the end.

There would be typed Fellowship mobs you would fight against constantly:

Fellowship Cultists, weak trash mobs
Fellowship Enforcers, with big swords
Fellowship Archers
Fellowship Infilitrators, rogues who can disappear in a puff of smoke and then backstab you
Fellowship Preachers, who cast Guardian spells

After defeating the Fellowship's schemes in all eight towns and gathering the eight Guardian Anti-Virtue Runes, the Isle of the Avatar would appear on your world map, where'd you go for the EPIC FINAL BATTLE against Batlin. The Guardian would send some of his essence through the Black Gate before the battle, and you'd have to fight a Guardian-mutated Batlin, who'd transform into various forms as you whittled down his gigantic HP bar.


Feel free to flesh this out more. Companion romances, betrayals, achievements! Let's make U7 next-gen.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Is there any scope for adding Quick Time Events in an Ultima game?

 

[Peter]

scope

Call of Britannia: Majestic Warfare

 

[Excidium]

Fuck yeah, this time the Avatar is back to Britannia, and he's brought some toys!

Exclusive Ultima VII reborn pre-order weapon pack!

also TF2 hats.

 

[Jaesun]

Call of Britannia: Majestic Warfare

 

[Menckenstein]

Shamino crossdressing romance subplot.

 

[felipepepe]

@Infinitron Please replace all EPIC with MAJESTIC, we are talking about making a glorious 2011 Ultima VII remake, not an shitty 2010 remake.

Also, add an Cinematic Mode and a Combat Mode, half of the gamers just want to kill stuff and the other half just want to watch gay alien avatar soap-opera. Ignore the RPG Mode, there are no such gamers anymore.

 

[made]

...it might have more than three stats. /mondblut xD

 

[Bruticis]

Iolo duel wields crossbows, each with an autoloader containing explosive bolts. When you build up your bad ass meter high enough, Gwenno does a running flip off his back and kicks the fuck out the bad guys. POW!

 

[Jaesun]

Iolo duel wields crossbows, each with an autoloader containing explosive bolts. When you build up your bad ass meter high enough, Gwenno does a running flip off his back and kicks the fuck out the bad guys. POW!

I just sprayed coffee all over my monitor. Thanks!

 

[Excidium]

...it might have more than three stats. /mondblut xD

 

[Azalin]

Shamino crossdressing romance subplot.

Don't forget the Gargoyle romance DLC pack,Hard as Stone,only 19,99$

 

[MMXI]

 

[Giauz Ragnacock]

No, seriously, what would Ultima 7 look like today?

Let's assume it's just one of those great concepts that goes against the grain (kinda like From Software's two Souls games). We can bet that it would at least have Dragon Age: Origins level graphics.

Could anything in the interface be made tighter (I am currently playing Baldur's Gate 1 and Planescape: Torment, and I much prefer PST's UI to BG1's mainly because all menu options are presented together neatly at the bottom of the screen vs. all over the place in BG1 and right clicking gives me a very useful quick menu that BG1 lacks)?

Has AI and pathfinding (at least in combat) been done better in other games?

Any superfluous annoyances that could be changed?

I have no experience playing the game and am foggy on many of its features (I'll least give gameplay a look on Wikipedia and youtube), but there's no reason we have to take the bad and cliched and say, "This is how it would be made today."

So, really, what would Ultima 7 look like today with hindsight concerning it's real world past version taken into consideration?

 

[Tel Prydain]

It would look like Skyrim

Seriously, I'm actually struck by how much Skyrim is like U7
* Big, diverse world for you to explore
* Dialogue that makes you cringe
* LARPy crafting and cooking
* Minimalistic stats
* Terrible UI
* Heavy focus on NPC scheduling/AI
* Graphically fairly solid for their time
* Two central 'main' plots that intersect
* Fairly linear dungeons
* Shitty combat

Rather than make me like Skyrim more, it's making me reevaluate how good U7 actually was.

I mean, to try and pick one over the other:
U7 clearly has a better quest structure, side quests and plot, but even Skyrim's LMB-of-death combat is better than U7's cluster-fuck combat. Seriously, in U7 you press a button and it's like those cartoons where there's a giant dust cloud with the odd foot or fist that peeks out for a moment.
U7 has better (and more diverse) magic. Stealth is better (or rather, is possible) in Skyrim.
U7 has a smaller world, Skyrim's main quests don't intersect as well
In U7's favor, it has the eight companions. To U7's detriment it has Spark.
Hell, U7 even had a dumbed down console port.

I've always had U7 as my go-to example of what an ideal RPG should look like, but the crushing realization that U7 and Skyrim are so alike leads me to believe that 14-year old me might just have had terrible taste in games.

 

[Wunderpurps]

Every town in Britannia would have the local Fellowship branch directly involved in some blatantly nefarious scheme which the Avatar would have to stop, with an EPIC BATTLE against the branch leader and his horde of minions at the end.

There would be typed Fellowship mobs you would fight against constantly:

Fellowship Cultists, weak trash mobs
Fellowship Enforcers, with big swords
Fellowship Archers
Fellowship Infilitrators, rogues who can disappear in a puff of smoke and then backstab you
Fellowship Preachers, who cast Guardian spells

After defeating the Fellowship's schemes in all eight towns and gathering the eight Guardian Anti-Virtue Runes, the Isle of the Avatar would appear on your world map, where'd you go for the EPIC FINAL BATTLE against Batlin. The Guardian would send some of his essence through the Black Gate before the battle, and you'd have to fight a Guardian-mutated Batlin, who'd transform into various forms as you whittled down his gigantic HP bar.


Feel free to flesh this out more. Companion romances, betrayals, achievements! Let's make U7 next-gen.

All of these existed before the real ultima 7 in other games.

in fact a while back I was googling to download ultima 7 and what pops up but a bunch of people complaining that in U7 you already know who the bad guys are but you don't immediately start fighting them. A thread righ on this here codex.

 

[Infinitron]

It really is incredible how subtle a foe the Fellowship was, by any standard. They were almost always more of a malign social influence than actual instigators of evil.
Well, except for that bit in the final dungeon where you find an underground Fellowship Hall and get mob-attacked by the entire congegration. I think that was put in as a joke.

I think there's been a sort of "militarization" of roleplaying game themes. It seems you're always up against a force that has its own private army, or mercenary force, or something like that. And they all have a distinctive Badass Dark Uniform, and are divided into subtypes (like the one I described in OP).

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think RPGs used to be like that. It was more about wandering the countryside and fighting monsters. Human foes generally consisted of various relatively non-descript guards.
I think Call of Duty and similar games may be an influence here.

 

[SCO]

still makes me laugh

a bit different from the jaana in this:
http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/The_T ... the_Goblin

 

[Unkillable Cat]

This thread confirms what I've been thinking for a week now. So many people around me, that I had no idea were gamers in any sense or form, can barely hold their bodily fluids over Skyrim.

In a sense, I envy them. They're experiencing what I experienced back in 1993: Playing a game like Ultima 7 for the first time. It presents a world that's so life-like you can almost feel it breathing, it's massively open-ended, almost bursting at the seams with possibilities.

Example? A friend of mine played Ultima 7 back in the day and when he finally grasped just how HUGE the game world was, he kinda snapped in-game. He started killing everyone he ever met. He likened his "quest" to a improvised "one at a time"-casting of the Armageddon spell. He'd stack dead townspeople up on tables and other places where they were plainly visible, mostly as a warning to anyone still not dead, but also to keep track of where he'd been. The respawning guards were a bitch, but I was surprised how far he got with his mad plan before he got bored and gave up.

Anyways, back to U7. Playing a game like it is an experience. It'll either turn you into a genuine gamer for life, or shy you away from games for the rest of your life. For many years I've been trying to find a game as enjoyable, as deep and rich as U7 was.

To me, a cycle of sorts has completed. There's a game out there that equals U7 in many ways, and people are experiencing something awesome in a game for the first time. But seeing the Kodex reaction makes me wonder... there MUST have been a group of seasoned tabletop roleplayers who scoffed and ridiculed these new-fangled "computer ROLE-playing games" and talked about for hours how things had become infinetly worse since D&D 1.0 was released in their Golden Age. Moaning about how a computer can never replace a real Dungeon Master, how some pixels on a computer screen can never resemble an Orc, etc.

And my only reaction is to smile. History repeats itself, and we can't seem to learn from it.

 

[Infinitron]

Example? A friend of mine played Ultima 7 back in the day and when he finally grasped just how HUGE the game world was, he kinda snapped in-game. He started killing everyone he ever met. He likened his "quest" to a improvised "one at a time"-casting of the Armageddon spell. He'd stack dead townspeople up on tables and other places where they were plainly visible, mostly as a warning to anyone still not dead, but also to keep track of where he'd been. The respawning guards were a bitch, but I was surprised how far he got with his mad plan before he got bored and gave up.

That's an interesting reaction, and probably fairly common. It's the product of that feeling of uncanny alienation some people will get when they realize they're being drawn into something that's more than just a game. They'll deliberately engage in acts that try to tear down the facade of the eerily realistic virtual world...like killing critical NPCs or trying to go beyond the borders of the map. Or, like your friend, just killing everybody.

Call it Immersion Rejection Syndrome.

 

[Jaesun]

And my only reaction is to smile. History repeats itself, and we can't seem to learn from it.

The video game industry (from AAA Publishers) are only concerned about making profits. Not good games.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I can't play Ultima VII as I almost always start killing everyone. I love killing civilians, especially when they have a "personality".

 

[someone else]

If Ultima 7 were made today NPCs won't react to bodies of townsfolk lying around. trolololol

 

[hanssolo]

Call of Britannia: Majestic Warfare

 

[made]

Seriously, I'm actually struck by how much Skyrim is like U7

Y'know, people said the same about Oblivion. Ofc they are similar on many levels - there's not exactly a lot of modern open-world RPGs to compare to Ultima. But the devil's in the detail, and it's those details that make Ultima's main strengths - exploration and NPC interaction - still genuinely fun today, while in Bethesda's latest offering I find them... lacking, to put it mildly.