Lord British
Speaks at DragonCon 1996
(part 4)
By f15 Dragon,
Transcript by : Brewmeister Dragon aka Mark Carlson (bashar@sundial.net)
(Ultima Underworld 3)
(Joye adds) That is hopefully what I'm going to be doing after this one. Richard is going to want to re-tool for Ultima 10 and Underworld is what sort of dragged me into Ultima for the first time. I started playing that even before we released it because they couldn't find anything else for me to do when I fist started. I'm just dying to do an Underworld 3. Apparently I'm not speaking loud enough! Underworld 3.. Yeah! Go! Yes! We're going to do it
(She gives a nice Thumbs up here, drawing smiles from Richard and the crowd )
In fact I think we'll literally start that right after Ultima 9. First thing that the Ultima 9 core team goes to work on.
Is it going to be a Looking Glass project?
Let me describe Looking glass who they are what there not at this point. Origin's corporate history is, we started in a garage, full of roaches. Then we moved up to North East which is where my painfully over educated brother was living. And I hated it because it was way too cold, so I moved the Ultima development team to Austin Texas which was where I went to school and I really loved it there. We were the only software company there for a long time so tons of people glommed on to us and Austin grew very rapidly, the North East office eventually said, well, we have no choice we have to go join those mean guys down south. So they begrudgingly came down south, all but a few. And so the few that stayed behind became Looking Glass. And so Looking Glass is really Origin North East, or was Origin North East remnants. So to speak. They did a number of projects with us, they did Space Rogue earlier on. The Underworlds later on. Since then Looking Glass has kind of evolved relationships with Virgin and some other folks. And so we're parted company slowly but surly over time. Actually we still do some work together, there still doing some Mac stuff for us. But the next Underworld we sort of want to develop ourselves, in house at Origin.
(Even more Questions ).
For Ultima 9 how deep do the dungeons go, can you say, and can you tell me anything about the spell system.
If I knew I could tell you how deep the dungeons could go but I don't know the answer.
(Joye answers ): I don't know, about three levels. But, hypothetically we cold go any depth. We could go much deeper but just for map loading speed and technical reasons we only go about three levels deep, but the way we design them it can feel like they go much deeper than that and we can have half levels and so on.
What was the other half of your question? "The spell system." Ah..Yeah... the spell system is interesting. First of all there will be a spell book. And there will be both regular spells and what we call rituals. And regular spells are things in your spell book you can prepare in advance, click on, and it goes. Rituals which I'll consider non-combat things, for example resurrecting a character you don't need to do quickly. In fact resurrecting will feel better from a player perspective in my mind if you actually have a ritual you perform. In the sense that you take the body over to an alter, throw it on the slab, light some candles, jump up and down and poof the guy comes to life. You get the idea. Those rituals will also be represented in your spell book but instead of being able to click it and make it happen you'll actually have to read it and do it. And so there'll be a combination of spells and rituals. We will have reagents although reagents are one of those kind of love hate things, at least I know I have with them, and I think some few others do in the sense that, I think it is cool to have the reagents and I like the logic of them in the sense of components that you need to cast spells, but after a while it kind of becomes tedious and painful to have to go back and kind of maintain that. OK?
(That was the end of my blank tapes. From here on I had to take notes by hand so you will get more facts without the fluff, I know, I know 10 pages of fluff it's about time I started giving you straight facts. )
Will you use things like DVD and Intel's MMX instructions?
Not in Ultima 9 but the creators of those kinds of things pay companies to use them and they can make games better so yes, we will most likely use them in the future.
Will the Blackrock sword be in Ultima 9?
In some fashion, yes.
How many CDs?
We are up to 11/2 but since we're adding in full digital music and sound it will be 2 or 3 when finished. There will be two or three lead voice actors for the game but they have not finished negotiations and contracting so they can't say who they are. Richard Allen Garriott will not be doing the voice of Lord Cantabridgean British (from the city of Cambridge)
For Ultima X there will be a new Player character, the avatar may be in books or even someone you could meet but you won't play him/her.
Richard wants to do a project in the vain of Worlds of Ultima called MYTHOS, a Ultima perspective game with legendary fantasy settings, think Hobbit or Disney Cartoon fantasy with a 3/4th view.
That is all I have on Ultima 9, I want to thank Joye McBurnett (Associate Producer) and Richard Garriott (Producer and creator) of Origin for allowing me to record them and post this report