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I want a modern take on Ultima II. Why doesn't anyone make games like Ultima II anymore?

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
It's got literally everything. Magic! Monsters! Swords! Guns! Sea travel! Time travel! Space travel!

Why doesn't anyone make games like this anymore, where everything is mashed up with everything?

It's too bad Ultima II is so archaic, with really simplistic graphics and gameplay. Goddamn, I'd pay 1000 eurobucks for an RPG with 90s to 00s era graphics and... honestly I don't even care about the RPG subgenre, it can be a Fallout-like, a dungeon crawler, an Elder Scrolls-like, a Baldur's Gate-like, whatever.

Just give me a proper complex RPG with decent graphics with a similar setting and story as Ultima II and I'm happy.

But even back in the 80s this kind of absolute clusterfuck of a setting was rare. Guess there's just not that much interest in it. :negative:
 

Glaucon

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It's got literally everything. Magic! Monsters! Swords! Guns! Sea travel! Time travel! Space travel!But even back in the 80s this kind of absolute clusterfuck of a setting was rare. Guess there's just not that much interest in it. :negative:

Marketing. Products need to be produced with a specific demographic in mind, and 'nerd' isn't specific enough.
 
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Ladonna

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Find some fantasy/sci-fi obsessed ultra nerd teenagers that love programming and let them loose on an 8 bit machine. This is the only way this ever happened. No marketing, no editing (except by the constraints of the platform which is severe editing in itself) no oversight from suits. Simple? Not really. Not these days.

See what happens when a few of these Nerds That Never Grew Up are given too much money and computing power; read up on Peter Molyneux and Richard Garriott. They need a tight leash and 64k of memory (well, maybe up to 512kb max) otherwise they get 'wouldn't it be cool if...' overload and screw everything up. As you can see, even giving them a Pentium would lead to a fuckup. They didn't want to create the games they did back in the day, they were forced to by the machines of the day.
 

buffalo bill

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It's not Ultima II, and it might not satisfy your graphical demands, but Caves of Qud is more experimental setting-wise than any recent game I can remember. It might scratch the itch to some degree.
 
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aweigh

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Seriously, what sort of "modern update" does the game play need? Sewer levels with bump mapping perhaps? Controller support?
 

Ladonna

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Modern update? I thought Jarl wanted more similar games with wacky concepts.
 

Junmarko

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I want a modern take on Ultima II.

A modern take that could encapsulate the box-art....why the hell not? :lol:

iu
 

Cael

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It's got literally everything. Magic! Monsters! Swords! Guns! Sea travel! Time travel! Space travel!

Why doesn't anyone make games like this anymore, where everything is mashed up with everything?

It's too bad Ultima II is so archaic, with really simplistic graphics and gameplay. Goddamn, I'd pay 1000 eurobucks for an RPG with 90s to 00s era graphics and... honestly I don't even care about the RPG subgenre, it can be a Fallout-like, a dungeon crawler, an Elder Scrolls-like, a Baldur's Gate-like, whatever.

Just give me a proper complex RPG with decent graphics with a similar setting and story as Ultima II and I'm happy.

But even back in the 80s this kind of absolute clusterfuck of a setting was rare. Guess there's just not that much interest in it. :negative:
You won't get it from a Western RPG any more. Try the JRPGs. You'll have a better chance.

Back in the 90s and 00s, there was a movement amongst the sci-fi/fantasy enthusiasts to separate the two. I am not sure of the exact cause, but cries of "that belongs to Star Trek, not DnD!" became quite common. Even today, I know idiots who think that psionics shouldn't be in DnD because psionics is a sci-fi thing, especially with all the crystals. DnD is magic not psi.

Western cRPGs evolved with the thinking and so now it is strictly swords and sorcery or Star Trek/Wars style games. At BEST, you will get elements of steampunk a la Eberron, and even then, you had a strident group crying about the steampunk-ness of it all. The objection there is that if there is widespread technology, then magic will be left behind and wiped out because everyone can use technology, not just the gifted few.

JRPGs, though, still do some blend of swords and airships and magitek, and so might be your best bet.
 

Beastro

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Ultima 2 always felt like something a kid would make up for a game given how it bounces around frenetically with ideas (no surprise, Garriot was like 20 when it was made). I don't think things like that are made because most developers aren't that young and mature into more consistant story telling and such by the time they do, like how Ultima as a series did.

Why doesn't anyone make games like this anymore, where everything is mashed up with everything?

I know this site has a loathing for JRPGs, and as much as I ultimately agree over the underlying reasons why they're loathed, they are a good example of that kind of mashing up.

Been replaying through FF2(IV) and have been mulling over how much FF as a series did that while retaining a core of conventional "Tolkien" RPG within it like how conventional the Dwarves are in it that never hit me as a kid, since the game was so different (and I was so ignorant of fantasy back then) I never took them as being Tolkien-like dwarves. That was what, to me, made them so appealing, but now so much of Japanese games have become the exact opposite going from inventive to being static in so many ways, Nintendo's big three are a good example of that.

Back in the 90s and 00s, there was a movement amongst the sci-fi/fantasy enthusiasts to separate the two. I am not sure of the exact cause, but cries of "that belongs to Star Trek, not DnD!" became quite common. Even today, I know idiots who think that psionics shouldn't be in DnD because psionics is a sci-fi thing, especially with all the crystals. DnD is magic not psi.

Sounds to me like try hard people who want Sci-Fi to be more Hard Sci-Fi and don't realize the fantastical roots of the genre.

The objection there is that if there is widespread technology, then magic will be left behind and wiped out because everyone can use technology, not just the gifted few.

This speaks more of a modernist mentality in many than anything else given how magic is so typically associated with religion in a way that it never was. Even such an anti-industrial work like LOTR never went into that dichotomy.

JRPGs, though, still do some blend of swords and airships and magitek, and so might be your best bet.

Many JRPGs and Japanese games have become stagnant in their own ways like I said above.

Take that big three, how they began and how they went into their sequels, Mario 2, Metroid 2 and Link's Adventure were all very different from their predecessors in ways they never will be. Now today certain things HAVE to be in them with time effectively frozen in place.

Recently I've mulled over replaying Mario RPG, and I realized that it was, intentional or not, a satire and swan song of not only Mario but also of Square Soft with Square making fun of not only Mario for it's own series' rigidity.
 
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Cael

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JF doesn't trust himself to change anything about U2 aside from making it a point that Minax walks barefoot everywhere and has a lesbian cohort for licking her soles clean at all times.
Dude, if U2 were to be made today, Minax won't exist. Don't forget, Minax was a child lover to Mondain. She was like 14 when Mondain got himself killed.

Can you imagine the sjw storm if she was a character in a RPG released today???
 

Dzupakazul

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Dude, if U2 were to be made today, Minax won't exist. Don't forget, Minax was a child lover to Mondain. She was like 14 when Mondain got himself killed.

Can you imagine the sjw storm if she was a character in a RPG released today???
If we're concerned about bad PR, we just quietly age her to 18 and absolutely no one notices or cares.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
JF doesn't trust himself to change anything about U2 aside from making it a point that Minax walks barefoot everywhere and has a lesbian cohort for licking her soles clean at all times.

I'd totally make that game but I'm doing something less insane right now. Maybe one day.

Point still is, even if I make that game one day, nobody else is doing it!

People these days are just putting too much importance on making sense!
 

Cael

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Dude, if U2 were to be made today, Minax won't exist. Don't forget, Minax was a child lover to Mondain. She was like 14 when Mondain got himself killed.

Can you imagine the sjw storm if she was a character in a RPG released today???
If we're concerned about bad PR, we just quietly age her to 18 and absolutely no one notices or cares.
Then we run into the patriarchy keeping the wymmyn down nonsense :D

 

Machocruz

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People these days are just putting too much importance on making sense!

I think these super random/abstract games were always rare. Super Mario comes to mind for me. Beanstalks hidden in blocks, mushrooms that make you big, feathers that give you flying power, skipping levels as an intended feature, etc. All kinds of wacky stuff. There was really no attempt at being logically consistent, just what they thought was fun or interesting. Most platformers then didn't go that far, but maybe I'm forgetting a lot of games. Metal Gear Solid games majorly break the fourth wall. Kid Chameleon did time and space bending stuff. Otherwise not many games went that far. I haven't seen anything like that in current games, at least not AAA. Even platformers seem to try to be logically or thematically consistent, pretty straightforward. And forget about today's AAA shooters doing anything like having Contra esque floating power ups or teleporters like in Total Carnage. No, you find your new weapon in a locker or laying on a table in a military base, all sensible and shit.
 

Cael

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... this kind of absolute clusterfuck of a setting was rare ...

I think it could be done well - time travel as allows for a lot of freedom, but I suspect you'd need a unifying aesthetic and a decent plot, and a bloody good writer to keep the setting scope in check and make it sing.
Might have some issues with balancing the different eras as well as the character's skill set.

For example, if you start in the past and have skills for swords and spears, how will the character get to a viable guns skill when he finally hits the modern age? Is there a way to prevent the Navarro type thing from happening (i.e., the savvy player beelines to the future to get his ray guns then zip back to the past for a banging good time)? How will you balance a sword with a gun, or will you not bother? Would the player be able to grab a M1 tank and drive it back to the Stone Age, because that would cause all sorts of hilarity...

Time travel shenanigans is a lot of fun, but unless it is a relatively simplistic game like U2 where there is almost zero environmental reactivity, it is going to be a LOT of work in the background to ensure there isn't all sorts of lulz of the wrong sort.
 

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