Lord British Speaks at DragonCon 1996

By F15 Dragon
Transcript by : Brewmeister Dragon aka Mark Carlson (bashar@sundial.net)

The translators comments:
I recently went to Dragon Con in Atlanta and recorded a couple of speeches on Ultima 9, I though you fans may want a transcript, and screen shots. So without further ado.

Richard Garriott
To Create a game these days, of course, is a pretty big event in the sense of person power, the team is about now what...(he turns to Joye), "30, if you count the sound guys." So what we're here to talk about today, for this session, is we're going to talk about Ultima 9, which is one we have in development now and will be shipping next spring. So what I'll do is first actually turn this over to Joye and try not to interrupt too much but I'm sure I will interject a fair bit along the way.

Joye McBurnett
All right Ultima 9 is ahh, We took a long time after Ultima 8 shipped to talk to customers, players who have played forever , asked them what they wanted to see in the next Ultima. So as a result we are going kind of back to the old Ultimas of your past: Ultima 6, 7, Serpent Isle. And recapturing that kind of vast world, heavily populated, dense story, dense item World . Lots of stuff to do that is not necessarily right on the Plot track. You can play for days without ever stumbling across the plot. If you like. Or you can just arrow straight along to the end. Muck like they have always been. Technology wise it is a full 3D world where every item in the world is rendered polygonal object. (She glances over to Richard) Stop me if I go into too much technical detail. We are using LightWave to make our game items. They're textured in photo shop. The designers can then put them together. There are some screen Shots over there. The ones that don't look like flicks are the game shots. Those are completely polygonal, the camera is able to rotate around so your not always in that Ultima 7 Ultima 8 Orthogonal looking view. We've got some screen shots that show several different shots of the same scene to illustrate that. Story Wise it's a vast plot, I'm going turn it over to Richard, he talks about it much more effectively than I.

Richard Garriott
In fact, let me throw in a few more things about Technology if I can. If you look up at the screen shots over on the wall, starting with the first one. (1) That one is an Avatar figure standing outside of a mine shaft entrance and we have a binder we brought with some of the early concept sketches and screen shots in it to show how exactly the concept sketches match the game.

And since we've got it 3D what the artists do is actually build the model of what the people sketched out and that becomes part of the game. And so it is very true to the high concept. Again another hard fact of being in 3D, as she mentioned, the orthogonal walls ah one of the big problems we used to have was things falling behind walls. Since your always facing from the north the north side and back side become this big dead space that you could not do anything with. We always had this big fear or the physics of the game, have it be something that exploded or collapsed, go behind there and you would never be able to click on it again to access it. Now in a true 3D engine the camera can just rotate around to show you what is behind that wall, thus eliminating that problem.

The second screen shot down I think is a neat one for another reason. It is a little hedge maze outside Lord British's castle. Obviously when you go over to a 3D game and every thing goes polygonal one of the real risks is that every thing becomes real angular and blocky in return. Now if you look at those hedge mazes is you will notice how nice and smooth and curvy they are. And I like that on because it shows how physically real the world is and kind of how non-angular it has become in the sense that is does not just become square rectangular blocks. If you look at the next one down it as actually one or the character shots out of one of the flicks, who is that Morwin?

Joye McBurnett.
(Interjects): That's actually the Avatar.

Richard Garriott
Right below that is a picture of a house and the city... That's Cove I think. The interesting thing about the cities is, I'll talk about briefly. Unlike previous Ultimas where they were made out of tile graphics, one of the side effects of using tile graphics is your world is only an diverse as your tile set. In the sense that of there were only five, as there generally have been. In the earlier Ultimas it was either 0 or 1 as your basic wall set, by Ultima 8 I think we had 3 or 4 basic wall types we could build things out of. Interestingly in Ultima 9 what we did was say we wanted every city to have its own character. For example the city of Moonglow where the wizards live we wanted to have floating houses with individual floating steps so as you step on each step the step would sink down under your weight. Ah and recover as you stepped off of it. And floating lanterns that at night would all come pouring out of a lantern house and would position themselves around the city. And in the city of Yew where the people live in the deep forest we wanted the houses to be actually be built into the trees, Cove is very much that way too, in the sense of a sort of back to nature theme. In one case a massive tree had fallen down and someone had actually carved their home in the log itself. In the one screen shot you see there it's kind of a thatched exterior house you can see a little bit of the roof still on, and there is a bench inside there that is actually carved out of the root of the tree that the house is actually built abound and you can see the actual wood texture of the root. But anyway you get the idea that every city has its own architectural character and every dwelling is in fact a custom built 3d object. So no longer were things build out of building blocks, it's just start and build. What ever the artists envision is exactly what shows up in the game. So the audio visual variety is, we think, way beyond what has been in previous Ultimas.

Next screen shot around is a picture of Lord British's bedroom, also out of a flick, in the sense of the cinematics. Normally Ultimas have cinematics in the intro. or the endgame and maybe character creation as well were all types of Flick movie type things. We have some additional ones in Ultima 9 where throughout the game you receive what we call sendings. Sendings an important kind plot development aspect of the game where periodically when you are sleeping you will get these dream sequences and these dream sequences are messages that Guardian, the primary antagonist of the game are sending to Lord British, My character, the good guy about what you, the Avatar, are doing in ways that are trying to convince Lord British that your actions are in fact deeds of evil that are against Lord British. So as you see these both the sendings themselves are interesting but also I think that the way we present the sendings is interesting. I'm not sure how familiar with an early 1900's comic strip called 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' Anybody? So anyone who is familiar with it at all knows that one of the cool things about Little Nemo in Slumberland was how you got from falling asleep into Slumberland. It was always things like the bedroom slowly turns into a forest, or the bet would get up on its legs and walk out the window into Slumberland. That screen shot is the beginning of a transformation where we start in Lord British's bed chamber. The wind picks up, the tapestries eventually blow out of the room, those brashers begin to rattle around and eventually begin to fly up off the floor. The entire back brick wall slowly ripped away brick by brick and tares off into the sky. What is revealed beyond is the first sending. Actually that's the forth sending in this particular case. Where the bed is basically revealed on this battlefield where piece of the plot elements takes place. So it is a really cool transition and a very important sort of a plot step. In movies you always get to see what the bad guy is doing because they just cut to, ah ha and in the bad guys place this is what's going on. But in a first person role playing game it is a little harder to do that, so this is what these sendings represent. Sort of a behind the scenes backdrop. It is a rational way for you to hear what is going on, because of the way the guardian is tormenting Lord British.

Joye McBurnett
(interjects): It's what going on back at the castle while the Avatar is out saving the world.

Richard Garriott
Exactly. The next screen shot is a forested scene. It shows the Avatar walking through the forest. Not much to say there other than it looks nice, I think. Again it adds to the realism just how detailed everything is. Again, lots of games, I'll pick on Doom here for a second. Lots of 3D games have a very basic 3D environment and then most objects are 2D things that face you. Usually all the monsters and things are 2D. This is almost entirely polygonal. We are actually debating on having a couple things the are in fact flat, like a goblet. Because a goblet is completely 360 degrees symmetrical so there is no need for it to be polygonal, though right now it is completely polygonal but we'll probably save some polygons, cheat a bit. But, every tree, every branch, everything is completely modelled correctly in 3D and I think you'll be very impressed with the visuals we get out of that. Above that one going around is the, unfortunently getting very old, Lord British. Who, also interestingly enough, is going to take a major role in this game. Lord British usually is the all but useless character. The benevolent but ineffective ruler of Britannia, but this time around, fairly late in the game, he takes on a much more active role and in fact... well in fact I ought to just leave it at that. He takes a much more active role.