Computer Graphics Memory Disk Space
Minimum 486/33 VGA 4 MB 25 MB
Max/Rec. 486/50 8 MB +10MB saved games
Control: Mouse (required) + Keyboard
Sound: Sound Blaster, General MIDI, Adlib
Notes: Supports simultaneous sound effects card and music card.
Physically possible to run on a 386 but not desirable...
SETUP
486DX/33
16M (8M disk cache)
1M Trident video card
DR-DOS (superpck for disk cache)
Soundblaster Pro
An ok game. Differences from U7, but similar enough to claim that you'll probably like it if you liked U7, although the gameplay is a bit different (some arcade elements).
Not a great game, however. Too many nit-picking flaws for it to be a great game. Even if it didn't have the gameplay aspects which I dislike, it would still be too flawed to be a great game.
Which is really too bad... I'm a bit tired of coming home from Babbage's, $60 down the drain, and finding in the box a good game which could easily have been great.
Funny, this seems to happen all the time.
In the full review, you will see more complaints than you will see positive comments. But remember, overall, my feeling for it is positive, but tinged with a large amount of frustration. I'm not quite to the point where I'm only playing it because I feel obligated since I spent the money, but there have been times when I was tempted to feel that way.
If you have to have numbers, then I will give it numbers. I will compare it to other games so you will know how to judge my numbers:
9-10 still waiting
8 first impression of Ultima 8
8 Ultima 7
7 second impression of Ultima 8 (because of gameplay)
7 DOOM (effective mindless arcade game)
7 Galaga (effective mindless arcade game)
5-6 Return To Zork (a good idea, but horrible scriptwriting,
major user-interface flaws)
3-5 Wolfenstein 3D (a boring mindless arcade game)
The Ultima Underworlds probably come in somewhere between 7 and 9. Note that DOOM is close to the Ultimas only because the Ultimas had flaws that pulled their scores down; a DOOM-style game would never go above about 7.5 or 8 in my book.
Pretty speedy. Eight disks, about 25 M of disk space plus 10 M for saved games. I spent more time trying to free up space than I did "installing" (goodbye unfinished Ultima Underworld II), but see below.
The first recent Origin game to not die a horrible death if you type
A:INSTALL instead of A: The installer ran in a 43- or 50- line text mode. I don't know why,
there were generally only 10-15 lines of text at once, most of it static.
No progress display, but not slow enough to be a big deal.
A cheesy multi-pitch beep signaled the end of each disk, I'm not sure
why Origin thinks this is "better" than a "normal" beep...
But wait... it wasn't really done installing after all! The first time
you run the game, you will wait "about 10 minutes" while files are
decompressed. A percentage timer shows progress. Ten minutes is long
enough that Origin shouldn't have thought you'd sit there watching it, but
they did. After the ten minutes are up, the game runs the intro, whether
you are in the room watching or not. First major nit-pickable stupid flaw.
As an aside, this isn't really about installation, but... Origin's
trying to avoid taking flak on this game. On the first page of the "Ultima
VIII Pagan Playguide", we have:
| ON PAGANS AND PENTAGRAMS Oddly, they omitted the definition of "paranoid".
Seriously, they want to have their cake and eat it too. How is "pentagram"
"relevant to the storyline and setting" if the story is based around
classic mythology, when Webster's definition of "pentagram" shows no such
connection?
Additionally, the whole text is set over a "pentagram" in the background,
the kind with a the "starlike figure" embedded in a circle. No mention of
that concept from Webster.
I wish they'd just call a spade a spade. The pentagram has certain
connotations, and the impact of the pentagram in the story is dependent on
those connotations. (Hint-- the pentagram in U8 is associated with fire.)
This was a good back of the box for Origin. None of the pictures are of
cut scenes (well, one is a scene you don't control, but it is of the game
engine, not some statically generated picture--in fact, don't look too
closely at that first picture, or you might ruin that "cut scene"), not
counting the big picture that's obviously not a screenshot (it appears to
be a higher-resolution image of a frame from the intro, implying that, yes,
the intro really is just 3D rendered graphics.)
There are a few "hype"ish statements on the back, but no obvious mistruths:
We've had mod players and demos and now DOOM doing this forlong enough
that I'd prefer to think this is a given. It does beat those cheesy
adlib sound effects, though (meow!), so maybe it was smart to mention it.
It's not as smooth as, say, Flashback. But it's good enough.
I don't know whether they counted the "mirror image" frames twice or not,
but, once again, every character in Pagan is ambidextrous... even the guy
with the pegleg can't decide whether he wants it on his left leg or his
right leg, depending which way he's facing. Divide all those frames by 8
for the number of facings to compute how many "interesting" frames there
are.
I'll say a lot more about these when I discuss the game play. But let's
face it, letting objects move with velocity and come to rest... that's
pretty weak to call "physics". Also, they make the error of trying to
claim they're more realistic, when their new "realism" introduces new
"unrealisms".
See gameplay discussion. Anyway, it's not as bad as the Ultima Under-
world hype "Every object behaves as you'd expect it to." As to the
combat--it doesn't seem particularly strategic to me, so I don't know
what "decisions" they mean.
Well, there you have it. Nothing else on the box says anything about
"role-playing realism", so apparently Origin thinks the general realism
(physics) is "role-playing realism". For those following the debate on
what makes a game "role-playing", now we know.
Concerned Citizens Against Abuse of the Back of the Box have presented this
analysis of the back of the Ultima VIII box for the purpose of improving
your knowledge of the game. CCAABB understand the marketing necessity of
the Back of the Box, but wish manufacturers would stick to truths and
claims that aren't misleading.
Readers of this section are reminded that it is crucially a criticism of
the back of the box, not of the game itself. It also presents useful
information about the game itself to those interested in buying the game,
but as criticism it is solely directed at the back of the box. DON'T
BELIEVE THE HYPE.
Runs under DR-DOS with superpck fine on my system, first try. (Unlike
Wing Commander II, Strike Commander (which wouldn't even install under DR-
DOS), Ultima 7... but 7.5 did work.) The default IRQ for the Soundblaster
Pro is not what my factory-setting IRQ is, but I believe this is because
the factory setting changed with later versions of the SBP.
Basically, when you come right down to it, there's gameplay, graphics,
and sound. I'm going to ignore the sound, and I want to get the graphics
out of the way, because they're not the most important thing.
Ultima 8 uses a different perspective than 7. Let me save my thousand
words for gameplay, and just show it. Where 7 looked like this:
Ultima 8 instead makes verticals be vertical on screen, and n-w and s-e
diagonal:
They call this "a more natural perspective" on the back of the box. I
agree; the graphics do look more natural this way. Unfortunately, I find
it quite unnatural from a user-interface perspective, and I think that's
more important. Also, they never define which way "north" is in the game,
but people are constantly telling you that stuff is "on the west side of
town" etc.
Another stupid oversight.
Anyway, the graphics themselves are in a slightly more realistic vein than
U7, especially for characters. Characters no longer have eyes, since there
aren't enough pixels for them to show up realistically. They look heavily
anti-aliased, if not rendered. They do still have black outlines, though;
this leads to some odd visual effects. For example, one character wearing
a tan outfit gestures with a brown staff. The staff is outlined in black,
and stands out strongly. However, when he swings it in front of himself,
so the staff overlaps him, the staff becomes nearly invisible since it's a
similar color as his clothing (in fact, I suspect it's anti-aliased as
well, which further blurs the two together). Because they don't want to go
flat-out no-outlining (which is probably wise because some things are hard
enough to see as it is), but because they don't do "interior" outlining,
things look odd.
Additionally, I've died several times thinking that I was stepping off from
a ledge onto a lower platform, when I in fact was supposed to jump across a
chasm which I just couldn't see. Another problem with this perspective.
Character portraits for conversations are gone. This is a shame, since the
"realistic" characters don't have much in the way of faces. You're left
with the expressiveness of the body movements (and their 400 frames of
art). Characters now face in 8 directions instead of 4. However, three of
the eight facings are mirror-images of other art, which introduces the old
right-handed facing left, left-handed facing right "bug". I know people
think that's overly nitpicking (I should be suspending my disbelief, right
B.?), but if Origin insists on shouting from the top of a mountain about
how realistic their game is, I think they're just asking for me to nitpick
them to death.
Although I could be wrong.
The Avatar is shown in full armor, now; there are no visible skin tones. I
thought this was to allow them to have their 1200 frames of art regardless
of your gender and race. However, you cannot pick a gender or race, and
your "paper doll" character is a white male. I have no idea why they did
that. Maybe they had intended to do it, and had to cut some things out to
meet deadlines... But you'd think there'd be a reason, given that there's
no reason why the Avatar should look so different when he arrived in Pagan
than he did at the end of Serpent Isle.
The main font (for conversations and such) is hard to read. I personally
find it harder to read then the book font used in U7, even though it's
slightly bigger. The problem is that it's not a simple font, it's a wiggly
font, but at an extremely low resolution. So some of the characters bear
only the faintest resemblance to a "normal" one.
You get used to it, though... but I still find it annoying.
Annoyingness reminds me of the user interface. But, no I'll save the user
interface comments for the appropriate section. But how about the game,
anyway?
Ok, the game.
Quick summary:
It seems to run in pretty much the same way that U7 and U7.5 did, as far
as I can tell. It's still surprisingly slow for what it's doing, given the
8M disk cache, but I guess that's just life. Saves and restores are just
as hideously slow as they were in U7 and U7.5, which never saved or
restored in just a few seconds on my system, despite other people's
experiences.
Unfortunately, updating is jerky. Not just slow, but jerky, irregular.
This looks extremely ugly (IMHO) when the screen changes centerings to
center around the person you're talking to.
The map is divided into sections. When you go through certain portals,
the screen fades into black, and the new section is loaded. This is
sometimes annoying, since it really slows down the gameflow. Hopefully they
did it because it speeds up the game overall. I don't think
characters/creatures will follow you through portals.
Open containers, get objects out of them, put them in. Wander around
talking to people. Explore. It's U7. At least, that's what it seems like
at first. Unfortunately, Origin seems to have decided that with the new
engine, some arcade action elements would be good. A bit into the game,
there is a section which you have to jump from platform to platform to get
past. This is tedious with a 30-second restore time and a difficult first
jump--I died 8 times getting through it. (Those who have played the game
may think me extremely incompetent. It took me four tries to make the
first jump the first time, twice because I wasn't lined up correctly left-
right. Once I made the first jump, I was "home free", but I actually
managed to miss one of the "easy" jumps, and had to restart--then missed
the first jump several more times.) This is immediately followed by an area
where you have to carefully time your motion past certain traps. Nice
visual effects, but annoying.
By the time you get to the catacombs, however, the game falls apart, in
this sense. First you notice that the game gets very slow with multiple
creatures on the screen. (As a programmer, I'm not clear on why this is.
It shouldn't be due to the graphics, since they often have multiple
animated things on screen at once. On the other hand, it shouldn't be due
to monster "intelligence" routines, since the monsters aren't.) Then the
game gets very very linear, to the extent of teleporting you from area to
area as you complete each goal. Furthermore, the game becomes mostly an
exercise in running from monsters (or fighting them, if you insist), and
getting past traps. Expect to die a lot, especially when the floor caves
in under your feet with no warning.
It wouldn't be so bad if the game played at 30 frames/second, gave you
three lives, and restored in half a second. I sometimes enjoy games like
that, and have even been known to be good at them. But it doesn't make any
sense to play it this way, with slow, jerky updating, an extremely
difficult to control character (mouse-ahead problems, and the "delayed
reaction time" after you're hit--see the discussion of combat), utter
death, and slow restore times.
A friend of mine tells me that next up are some areas where you have to
jump onto moving platforms. I expect my valuation of the game will drop by
another half point when I get there.
One flaw with the plot is that you can spend far too long wandering
around having no clue what you're supposed to be doing until you find the
right person to give you a mission, at the very beginning. I think Origin
shoots themselves in the foot by not giving you a clearly defined initial
task to draw you into the game.
In fact, I encountered one character who asked me to pass a message to
another character, but when I talked to the latter, I wasn't given the
option to pass the message along. Bug? Or was I not really supposed to
ask? I don't know.
I'm not very far through it. (The Guardian hasn't taunted me yet--I
don't have the speech pack, though. Don't know if he only taunts you if
you have the speech pack, or if you'll get a written version of it.) So
maybe I shouldn't talk, but so far, all the missions are "retrieve such and
such an item" or "get to the next place".
So it looks like the overall game-following will be very U7ish. It
doesn't feel like (but I'm really not far enough through to know yet) the
overall plot is going to be either as... interesting as U7's nor as
dramatic as Serpent Isle.
On the other hand, this game seems to be the death of interesting
characterizations. When the ruler of the town you start in has as a
favorite phrase "Off with her head" you have to wonder. Without
companions, the witty side-exchanges found in U7 are missing. The Avatar
himself has become an utter dope, given to repeating exactly whatever the
other person said in an effort to sustain the conversation. This is the
worst at the times when you have no control over the conversation.
Not only is the Avatar a bit of a moron, but it seems necessary in this
game to give up on the virtues. Maybe I'm wrong, and when I get to the end
of the game, the Guardian will say, "Oh, ha ha ha! Avatar, Avatar. See
how the mighty have fallen? Not so virtuous now, Avatar. Just what do you
think the people of Britainnia will think when they hear of your exploits
on Pagan, Avatar? You've played right into my hands, ha ha ha!" (fade to
black, and bring in text reading "You Lose! Try again (y/n)?")...
But I doubt it.
One gets the feeling that a lot of effort was spent on the area where you
start, and less so elsewhere. The initial area has a lot of "side"
conversations that aren't really important. The characters away from the
town are more unembellished and to the point. For the people who want
"just the facts, ma'am", it's probably just the thing, but as a text
adventure fan myself, I would've liked to see much more exciting dialogue.
Take U7 conversations. Let other characters keep moving while you're
having them. Make it a bit more directed (you can't always go back and ask
everything).
It's a bit nice, because it integrates barking with conversations, pretty
much. On the other hand, given the slow save/restore time, it's a bit
annoying to have to restore to "refreshen" a character so you can check
alternate speech paths.
No clue whether you can screw up your game by doing a wrong speech, nor
whether the game will let you save it if you've done so, or if the save
restriction is only when an object or character no longer exists (i.e. is
dead).
Nothing particularly novel here. You can throw objects, and they move
etc. (like in Ultima Underworld). If something explodes, nearby objects
will move or even catch on fire.
A nice concept, but a flawed implementation.
One problem is that you can knock things behind a wall where you can't
ever get to them. You can even get trapped by an object you can't see.
But there are more major problems. Sometimes you come on a screen and an
object nowhere near you decides that it's "unbalanced" and it "falls" (see
below). Maybe this was intended as a feature but it looks silly.
Finally, the world model itself has some serious flaws. Objects do not
obey conservation of momentum. Large objects in particular, when thrown or
dropped, may not be able to "find" a place to come to rest. The world
model will move the object around in an extremely unrealistic manner,
looking for a place for the object to come to rest. In certain situations
(easily set up, I wasn't trying to test this at all), objects will simply
move without end until you pick them back up. Even more noticeable are
objects which you try to move a short distance to a spot which the game
thinks is "unstable", resulting in the object spontaneously across the
entire room until the game finds a place the object can come to rest.
Again, shooting for "realism" is a dangerous game, and it looks like Origin
held the target right over their feet.
Speaking of feet, consider how the Avatar gets around.
The Avatar moves at three different speeds. So if you're moving fast,
you're really running, and the animation (and sounds) are different,
showing you actually sprinting from place to place. (Oddly, nobody seems
to think you running through the palace is suspicious.)
You can now climb, jump, or even jump up and grab an overhang and pull
yourself up. The upshot is "greater realism" about where you can go. It
also means they had to add new ways to keep you from going where you
shouldn't. I've heard any number of people on the net say that in U8 you
can go "more places" because of climbing and jumping. Poppycock. The
things that really block are just different visually, now. There are three
"new" ways:
I haven't yet found places which require climbing or jumping in real
time, but I've been warned that I'm fast approaching some. And, speaking
of real time, there's always combat...
If you enter combat mode, you move much more slowly. You explicitly
move, turn, and swing your weapon. That could be a description of Ultima
Underworld combat, but note the distinctions: it's not first person, so
it's harder to aim (at least starting out). More importantly, it's more
"realistic" in that if you get hit, you can be knocked over or knocked off
balance, and unable to complete your action until you recover. This
basically spells automatic death against some opponents, unfortunately, as
they just knock you back over before you get on your feet.
Hopefully I'll get better at it, but so far, I have to say that I really
don't like this style of combat. It's ok in first person. (I didn't like
the combat in Alone in the Dark either... it was somewhat similar.) It
looks like combat against multiple creatures will be instant death, though.
Too many books and chests are trapped. If save/restore were faster, I
wouldn't mind. I'm not clear on whether this is intended to dissuade you
from bothering to ransack all the chests or not. (For now, I've stopped
opening chests unless I have a good reason to think one is important.)
Additionally, I've gotten at least one unfair surprise. A floor caved out
from under me, and I fell to my death. [Sorry if you consider that a
spoiler. Forewarned is foresaved.] I felt like I was playing a Sierra
game or AITD again. Sure, the place where it happened was realistic, but
it was unfair, because nothing in the game tells you that they've added
"weight sensitivity" to the world model.
If Origin wants to make the world more realistic, that's fine, but they
should come out and say in which ways it's more realistic, instead of
leaving us to guess. I don't mind discovering the realisms in general, but
I do mind it when it comes at the cost of getting killed, and sitting
through a restore cycle. I really hope Origin doesn't follow the Sierra
path any further.
Later in the the game, there are areas filled with traps of various
sorts. There it's not surprising when the floor caves in underneath you,
but it's just as stupid. For one thing, if you imagine this as an ongoing
storyline, how is this guy supposed to actually be able to get through it
without the foreknowledge of trap locations we get by saving and restoring?
I mean, if you want to talk about unrealistic, throw in the fact that
there's no way in heaven your character could actually get through it
without meta-knowledge.
The game crashed on me once, when I was moving stuff from a chest into my
backpack... wasn't doing anything obviously out of ordinary.
It also crashed when I quit, once, but that may have been the fault of
the beta-version of some game I had run just before it.
I've also seen a pretty silly bug. In the first town, you come across
two characters having a conversation. Once I came in, and there was only
one of the pair. He carried out his side of it, even though there was
nobody else there.
There were some other "USECODE" (UEICODE? UEGCODE?) bugs. There's a key
you really really shouldn't pick up in front of a particular person, or bad
things happen. If you manage to get your hands on it, and then blatantly
in front of that person open the door that the key went to, nothing is
said. The person doesn't notice in the slightest as you enter an area that
person really doesn't want you to enter.
I've seen a lot of grammar errors, mostly in the books. In the first hour
of play, I noticed a missing comma, "to" instead of "too", and once there
was a quotation where the book split the closing quote mark onto the next
page, e.g.
page 1: He said, "I hate you. Of course, this review will no doubt get out there with a typo or two.
But I didn't pay anyone to look over it, nor am I charging you money for
the review.
Or maybe they were just being realistic by having the book intentionally
have errors? Yeah, that's the ticket.
It *appears* from my limited playing experience that characters do not
follow their schedules as rigidly as in U7. It appears that they will only
"teleport to the next location" in their schedule if you're not in the same
map section as them. In other words, if you're waiting for a particular
time for someone to show up, you have to wait for that time, then go
through a portal, wait for the new section to load, then go back through
the portal, waiting for the old section to load, before the person will be
able to show up. This happened to me explicitly with one character when I
slept on a bedroll relatively close to where she currently was... she
stayed where she was, even though she was missing her "appointed rounds".
It looks like U8's beta-testers concentrated on making sure it was
possible to get through the game, not making sure that anything you tried
would work ok. It may not be surprising that climbing up on top of the
mountains would crash the game, but how are we supposed to know that that's
NOT the right thing to try? Why didn't any beta-testers try it? Is Origin
continuing to consider a game beta-tested if the beta-testers can get
through it using a walk-through (e.g. their memory of how they did it
during alpha-testing), without bothering to have testers explicitly try to
break things? I don't know. But you have to wonder, when for many people
the game crashes in the first 10 hours of play.
And apparently the beta-testers took a cue from the Return to Zork beta-
testers when it came to user interfaces...
Lots of major and minor flaws in the user interface.
Major peeve: they took out the feature from U7 that you could double-click
on things from a distance, and the Avatar would walk over to the object
first. You have to explicitly move within range of the object to use it.
Very annoying, especially in combination with two of the other flaws
discussed below. (And sometimes unrealistic--you can't read the clocks
from a distance, even.) They apparently just took out auto-navigation
entirely, as you also can't double-right-click to walk somewhere.
During conversations, your cursor remains the same as in normal play--an
arrow pointing in one of the eight directions, and of one of three
different lengths. But you can't move that way. Origin, get a grip. The
changing icon is supposed to be there to communicate something to the
player. You're miscommunicating by making it still change to all those
different shapes.
Also, during conversation, if you want to click past a message, you have
to click the pointer on the message, not just anywhere on the screen. Very
annoying, because you have to chase the mouse back and forth between the
area where you ask questions and where you get your replies. Noticeably
annoying when the thing you have to click on is "No." Like many other
games, the text now automatically advances after a certain amount of time.
You can set the "rate" from 0-9, where 9 is the fastest. Unfortunately, 0
does not mean it never advances, it just goes slowly. I find this sort of
thing to be a serious user-interface flaw. There are two major annoying
consequences. One, every once in a while you try to click past a message,
but the timer expires just before you do, and a new message appears, but
you click past that one without ever seeing it. Second, you can't stop and
grab a piece of paper and write something down if you need to. Hopefully
they solved the latter by making anything important repeatable, but so far
it doesn't look like it--you often can't get a character to repeat
important information.
I've always had a problem with "automatic" text advancement systems.
They're never geared to real reading speeds (I think they must just use
number of characters), and so what makes a good speed for longer messages
won't make a good one for shorter messages. I'd prefer to just click
through them, but the lack of a "never advance automatically" mode leads to
some missed messages.
If you try to hold down the right mouse button to move too soon after a
conversation or after going through a portal (loading a new map section),
you won't move. You have to wait until the fade-in is done, or until
you're sure the scrolling to recenter on you after the conversation is
done, before you can press the right mouse button. This should never have
gotten past beta-testers. It's a trivial annoyance, a trivial thing to fix,
and it happens to me about 80% of the time. Maybe Origin doesn't ask beta-
testers to comment on the user interface? Or perhaps they forbid it?
The human eye/brain combination is very good at lining things up
horizontally and vertically. It's really not very good at lining things up
along arbitrary diagonal lines. This makes the new perspective a pain to
navigate in. This is the most noticeably flaw about the new perspective.
Additionally, if you're walking along a wall that has an open door, and
you want to go through that door, you can't always just aim "diagonally"
and have it work. An example:
Note (it's not clear from the picture), the Avatar is going to run into
wall #1, not go right through the door. Depending on exactly how he's
positioned, if you continue to try to move in the same direction, sometimes
he will go through the doorway, and sometimes he will step past it, walking
down and to the right, and continue moving along wall #2. (What happens is
that he only changes directions at the "end" of a stride, and if he's just
above the doorway, his diagonal stride will carry him just past it, to #2.)
This is the part of controlling the Avatar in U8 that I find annoying.
The user interface for jumping and climbing are fine. It's not the new
features that mess up the user interface. It's the new perspective, the
"realistic animation" that makes him only change direction at the end of
strides, the fact that you can't double-click from a distance and auto-
navigate, and the fact that you can't walk right over cushions and other
miscellaneous debris. All of it adds up to annoyance while controlling the
Avatar.
Another flaw in movement is changing directions when you're running. If
you change from one direction to either of the two adjacent (e.g. from
north to either north-east or north-west), the Avatar continues running.
If you change by two (from north to east or west), the Avatar stops and
turns--which slows you down quite a bit. You have to make sure he goes
through the intermediate direction. Again, the problem is that he only
changes directions at the end of a stride, so you can move the mouse
through the intermediate direction at a pretty slow rate and still get to
the new direction too soon. You have to explicitly wait to see him take a
stride in the intermediate direction before you finish moving the mouse.
In general, you spend too much time waiting for the Avatar to turn around
and maneuver. If you open an inward-opening door, he has to turn around,
walk away, turn around again, and then the door opens. You can generally
find just the right place to stand to open it without being in its way, but
I find that the former happens more often. If you're moving at a normal
(walking or running) rate, and you get to a wall or something where you can
only move a little further, you take the final step using the slow
"baby/careful" step, which eats up extra time. It also looks very silly,
since you had no intention of the Avatar being so careful.
The regions of the screen that determine arrow facing are not symmetric
top-to-bottom. If the cursor is flush left, only a small area at the
bottom will result in the down-and-left diagonal arrow. A much larger area
gives the top-and-left arrow. Not a major annoyance, just an oddity. I
think this is because the regions are determined relative to your feet, but
the centering is not; but this is only a guess. This comes up because
while running it's best to watch the Avatar, not the mouse pointer, and so
you have to rely on peripheral vision, which can't tell the difference
between the arrows.
I also find it very confusing to control the Avatar when only his head or
head&shoulders are visible; I keep trying to position the mouse relative to
his head.
You now double-click windows to close them, instead of clicking on check
boxes. I like this, except that with inventory windows, sometimes when you
try to double-click on an object, you close the window instead. It'd've
been nice if they let you miss objects by a bit more when clicking.
The "close all windows" key is now backspace, while the "close the 'main
menu'" key is ESC. This makes the main menu DOOM-esque, since it's also
brought up using ESC. But I think I prefer a consistent way to always close
all windows. And it doesn't help than backspace is at the other end of the
keyboard from ESC. I think Origin would be better off providing a tiny
hotspot in the corner for bringing up the main menu and for closing all
windows (i.e. be fully mouse-based for all commands), or else they should
try to put all the keyboard commands near each other--since we're obviously
only typing with one hand most of the time.
The inventory displays seem to be a step backwards from Ultima 7. With
multiple windows open, the relative priority (which ones are on top of
others) changes somewhat randomly as you interact with them (actually, it's
systematic, just not useful). For example, sometimes you can double-click
on a container inside your backpack, such that the new container display
will open overlapping the backpack. The backpack will come out on top,
because you just clicked in it. Even worse, if you click on an object in
your backpack to get its name, and then click on another, the backpack is
brought in front of the text naming the first object, obscuring it (if you
move the backpack to one side you will see the text was under it).
Maybe the problem isn't with beta-testing the interface so much as it is
that they don't have a user interface expert on their team. (There really
is such a thing... don't look at me, I just use them.)
Well, I had a few more things about the user interface which annoyed me,
but I didn't take notes, and I'm on a deadline here, so I guess I'll let
Origin off the hook for the rest of them.
Here's my old wrap-up, before I encountered the "arcade" aspects of
Ultima 8:
| Ultima 8 is good enough that I expect I'll buy Ultima 9 I am no longer willing to make such a polite closing comment. If they
hadn't put in the stupid jumping puzzles and traps and such, I'd stand by
the above comment.
Sean Barrett never let a game programmer write a review...
|
| pentacle - n., a five-pointed figure, composed of five
| straight lines interlacing to form a starlike shape.
| It was a popular design in medieval art, and was given
| a mystic significance by astrologers and magicians.
|
| pentagram - n., a pentacle; also, any figure of five lines.
|
| pagan - n., a follower of a polytheistic religion (as in
| ancient Rome).
|
| Ultima VIII Pagan is a fantasy role-playing game designed
| solely for entertainment purposes. The game's setting
| involves a confrontation with the classic mythological
| Elemental Titans and their polytheistic worshippers.
| In the game, the terms pentagram and pagan were selected for
| their relevance to the storyline and setting. ORIGIN wishes
| to imply no additional connotations for the words and concepts
| defined above.
|
| (Definitions from Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary
| and Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary.)
THE BACK OF THE BOX
(by Concerned Citizens Against Abuse of the Back of the Box)
THE GAME
+----------
| \\
| \\ north wall
| \\
| +----------
|
west |
wall | floor
__---__
__-- | --__
__-- | --__
west | north
wall __-|-__ wall
__-- --__
__-- --__
floor
speed: acceptable, but slow
gameplay: feels like U7 at first, but becomes an arcade game
plot: looks like U7 / U7.5
characterizations: lousy
conversations: evolutionary over U7, not revolutionary
object interactions: basically the U7 engine, plus more "physics"
movement: with jumping/climbing, you can reach "more" places
combat: Think Ultima Underworld. Turn to face, deal every blow.
But not as easy to control.
realism: addressed on a point by point basis only
traps: too many
- speed
- gameplay
- plot/character development
CONVERSATIONS
OBJECT INTERACTION
MOVEMENT
Chasms/Water: fall in and meet an instant death. If you
move at the slowest speed, you won't fall in.
Double-height walls: some walls are just too tall for you to grab
the top, so you can't climb them. A friend
of mine built himself stairs up over a
mountain, and, "realistically", the game let
him get up on top, after which it promptly,
realistically, crashed.
Things you realistically These include a lot of objects (like the darts
should be able to get over: scattered around many of the dart boards--you
have to walk around them), walls with big
holes in them which ought to be just like
railings, but aren't, etc. There are plenty
of places you "ought" to be able to climb or
jump, but can't (i.e. railings that look
identical to the other railings in the game,
but which you aren't allowed to climb onto).
COMBAT
TRAPS
MISCELLANEOUS
page 2: " She nodded.
CHARACTERS SEE YOU DO THINGS THROUGH SOME WALLS.
USER-INTERFACE RANT
--__
/\\ --__
_\\/_ || --->
/ || \\ || __ mouse pointer
|| 1 || | --__
|/\\|-__ || | --__
| | --_|| | 2
|
Avatar |_
--__
WRAP-UP
| (or Ultima 8 part II? hmm...), but I really wish Origin
| would spend more money on beta-testing and user-interfaces.
|
| Bugs and difficult user interfaces make suspension of
| disbelief extremely hard to maintain, and that's one crucial
| factor in making a game great instead of good.
|
| Good work, Origin, but can you do great?