Majuular - RPG And Old Odd/Forgotten Game Reviewer

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Asian tech support said:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iaXdD9gJFKg
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Finally finished the video. I'd say the argument about EA is not too justified. The game had clear feature creep without the gameplay and engine to keep those in check. Having a few more months in the oven would have MAYBE improved the late game and removed some bugs, but the item juggling, shit combat and flag hunting are issues that go hand in hand with the engine.

It didn't need a polish, it needed a hatchet. It also makes no sense design wise, if they have game flags why the need to still have item based progression, while also removing the danger of ruining your savefile by dropping the wrong item.

And having a strong beginning to a game with a late game was always a favourite tactic of devs to appeal to gane reviewers. No real reason to have that much difference in quality besides lack of vision.

I don't know why he brought up a female game reviewer thoughts on the game. I wouldn't be surprised if (s)he was a tranny even back then.
 
Majuular.jpg
 
Starman John said:
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Utter truth, but do you blame the poor bastard? Ultima 8 was the original franchise cancer. One of the first times a major game franchise degenerated so quickly from previous highs with a sequel so divisive it almost never recovered to bless the world with Ultima Online.

Having to finish and do an in-depth review of this utterly broken in both design and coding piece of acidic dribbling feces is a special kind of hell that very few people would volunteer for.
 
30+GameOvers said:
But enough about Ultima 9
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Ironically, Ultima 9 the early milestone (can't even call it alpha) product rushed out by EA as a completed game that was utterly broken and incomplete, was more fun and a far better design (what there was of it) then U8. The fact that you could actually complete Ultima 8 was the ONLY reason it's ranked higher in most cases.
 
The Un-Clit said:
Ironically, Ultima 9 the early milestone (can't even call it alpha) product rushed out by EA as a completed game that was utterly broken and incomplete, was more fun and a far better design (what there was of it) then U8. The fact that you could actually complete Ultima 8 was the ONLY reason it's ranked higher in most cases.
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That's harsh, Ultima 8 is incomplete to high heaven and janky, but at least it's a game. Also, it's Ultima, not some weird game wearing it's skin but not understanding anything about it("what's a paladin?").
 
Starman John said:
It's here.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=W4h1GIw32UU
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Oh man, this should be good. And it is.

Okay, so far Maj has done a great job highlighting the severe paring down of elements that separated the earlier "late" Ultima games, (6, 7 and their related spin-offs) from 8, and also how Pagan's introduced new platforming elements were hot garbage, severely changing the gameplay feel for the worse. I felt this entirely when playing it myself. Moving the Avatar around in such a clunky, barely controllable manner was utterly painful, and I am sure stood as a great example of what not to do for Blizzard North in developing Diablo which absolutely nailed isometric gameplay movement. (except for speed)

More importantly he highlights the terrible disconnect that the play path the Avatar has in this game with his previous games. Painting it as 'something he must do to survive in this strange world' feels extremely weak when you've spent so many previous adventures upholding and being the literal "Avatar of Virtue". In this game, one of the first major actions you take is becoming a necromancer, participating in a blood sacrifice and kneeling to the Titan of Earth, I mean WTF! and it's far from the last terribly un-Avatar thing you will do.

And nowhere in the game itself does your character ever seem to express he finds these things distasteful or against his moral code, he just happily plunders the innocent and kills shit left and right for selfish gain. It goes deeply against it's past. Even in the earliest Ultima games which didn't have a moral code and allowed you to do whatever you wanted good or evil, it wasn't required of you to be evil. You COULD kill everyone in the druid city without guards for easy XP and loot in Ultima III but you never had to. Here you will be stealing, killing and back-stabbing people left and right with no other options. It's the anti-Ultima in it's overall design.

The movement system was so utterly unfit for an RPG, even an action RPG (which Ultima never should have been) that it's hard to believe it shipped this way, even with EA breathing down Lord B's neck as they were to get this shit out the door. I played 'pre patch' U8 and hated it so much I refused to even bother going back to try it out when a few years later I found out it even WAS patched when I got Internet access in 97. Why bother with THAT shit when I had Final Fantasy 7? I had been turned to the JRPG side by Chrono Trigger, which showed me how interesting a story-driven RPG could be despite my previous hard-core love of the open worlds of CRPGs. U8 was the worst possible mix of both systems. A jank as fuck locked linear story progression story that told an un-enjoyable story totally at odds with what had come before. It was the "The Last Jedi" or "Star Trek Discovery" of the Ultima series. A chapter that tried to 'break free' of the bounds of what came before it instead of expanding on it. It wasn't what people wanted. Majuular picks up well on this fact with a thoughtful critique that really can be summed up by his words close to the end of the video:

"It wasn't just a bad Ultima, it was a bad game."
 
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Starman John said:
It's here.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=W4h1GIw32UU
Click to expand...
Finally got to the part about the gameplay. As much as EA is blamed on the shit quality, it's pretty clear that without it then the studio would have gone bankrupt due to atrocious mismanagement. And the fact the game still had insane feature creep despite less time to develop shows that the upper management were completely disconnected.

And I can't see how the end product could have been that good from the skeleton of a game they released.

Edit: Finished watching. He does say that EA didn't make the team do retarded design decisions, but still have the copium of "just more time". I can't see a full year of dev time fixing anything. Even the plot is atrocious despite running parallel to game development, both gameplay and progression make no sense and the more intricate ideas they did put in are shit, like casting spells being a pain in the ass or puzzles without any indicator to the player. I can't see how so much time was wasted developing the game and it looking like an early alpha for a Diablo clone (though granted it released before it).

In the end it just doesn't really advance the genre in any meaningful way, just an uglier version of Ultima 7 with pizza slicer edginess and complexity masking innovation. It's ironic Maj talks about the game wanting to simplify things but still doubles down on retarded shit like inventory management.
 
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Starman John said:
It's here.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=W4h1GIw32UU
Click to expand...
Finally caught up with the retrospectives.

One thing jumps out to me overall and another about Ultima VIII specifically.
First, to me the Ultima series was always ahead of it's time. 3 - 5 years give or take. Ultima Underworld was groundbreaking in 1992 and was a template for the Immersive Sims that would come out later. System Shock 1994, Thief 1998, Deus Ex 2000. Ultima VII's engine being adopted into Ultima Online was 1997. The big wave of online RPGs were in the early 2000s from Runescape 2001 and WoW in 2004. Ultima as a series was always at that bleeding edge of tech that just hadn't matured yet but people still took inspiration from and then made their own games with because the game development scene in Austin back then was small.
This leads to my second point of Ultima VIII is if you look at it closely enough, you see the template for Diablo there. Pagan was 1994 and Diablo was 1996. The isometric camera, the lone warrior with lots of sprites for combat, the dungeon crawling through locations. Throw in leveled gear and a grid based inventory and you have Diablo. I'm not the only one who's noticed this pattern either.

This retrospective really does make me appreciate how influential the series is to other games that have gone on to become iconic. It's influence is undeniable. That Vested Interests skit at the end probably inspired someone at Channel Awesome.
 
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Rockzo said:
you see the template for Diablo there
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The genetics of Diablo and Ultima are quite different. Methinks it's simply that you get a similar ambience from "going satanic" and of course the action-focused gameplay. The center of the Ultima VIII experience is in some deranged way the platforming of all things, for once Garriott lost his bet with the future. And the Ultimas never had good gameplay even in their better incarnations: combat is tactically limited while creative. I do maintain that there was a chance to make Ultima VIII good in some way I can't fathom, after all, the greatest gift VIII gave to players was a great game using its engine.


(THE CONTROLS ARE PERFECTLY FINE)
 
Rockzo said:
First, to me the Ultima series was always ahead of it's time. 3 - 5 years give or take. Ultima Underworld was groundbreaking in 1992 and was a template for the Immersive Sims that would come out later. System Shock 1994, Thief 1998, Deus Ex 2000. Ultima VII's engine being adopted into Ultima Online was 1997. The big wave of online RPGs were in the early 2000s from Runescape 2001 and WoW in 2004. Ultima as a series was always at that bleeding edge of tech that just hadn't matured yet but people still took inspiration from and then made their own games with because the game development scene in Austin back then was small.
This leads to my second point of Ultima VIII is if you look at it closely enough, you see the template for Diablo there. Pagan was 1994 and Diablo was 1996. The isometric camera, the lone warrior with lots of sprites for combat, the dungeon crawling through locations. Throw in leveled gear and a grid based inventory and you have Diablo. I'm not the only one who's noticed this pattern either.

This retrospective really does make me appreciate how influential the series is to other games that have gone on to become iconic. It's influence is undeniable. That Vested Interests skit at the end probably inspired someone at Channel Awesome.
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It's amazing how much influence Ultima had as a whole despite its highs and lows. In an ideal world, the series would at least deserve to get some remasters for its more popular titles rather then being confined to Ultima Online and silent re-releases of the old games, the most recent of which came out in the last millennium.
 
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Great video, also happy he shouted out Crusader: No Remorse, one of my favorite games to play on the computer as a kid and a super underrated classic to this day.
Pro tip: If you're gonna play it from GOG or something use Joy2Key and play it with a controller because that keyboard layout is whack.
 
Dan of Steel said:
Great video, also happy he shouted out Crusader: No Remorse, one of my favorite games to play on the computer as a kid and a super underrated classic to this day.
Pro tip: If you're gonna play it from GOG or something use Joy2Key and play it with a controller because that keyboard layout is whack.
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I have tried to play the crusader games and maybe I am just a pleb, but I can't get over the controls.
The keyboard layout is archacie.
Kick ass music however.
 
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