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Vapourware Corven: Path of Redemption - reboot of cancelled Ultima IX fan game
- Thread starter Taka-Haradin puolipeikko
- Start date
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This is what happened to the Ultima IX: Redemption project: http://ultimacodex.com/2016/12/tita...of-redemption-being-built-with-unreal-engine/
Modders gonna mod.
Some posts from the comments, including one from our own taxalot:
Modders gonna mod.
Some posts from the comments, including one from our own taxalot:
taxalot said:
- Joined
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http://www.titansofether.com/new-team-members/
New team members, future news and a little something for Ultima fans
I wanted to create the prototype with as few people as possible to avoid any complications that come from managing a team. Now that we go into full production mode our team grows as planned. I am happy to announce our 2 newest members:
I am very very happy about our 2 new guys!
- Patrig “Sicabol” Droumaguet will compose music for us. He is hard at work already and as soon as there are results I will post them for you.
- Daniel Kiechl has gathered quite some experience with the Unreal Engine and will be helping with quest implementation and with testing
Over the next few months you will first get a few landscape updates and then game feature updates. First features will be the quest system, dialogue system and inventory system. Stay tuned!
Ultima fans might remember the early Ultima 9 screenshots, back when U9 was still planned as an ISO game. I recreated a scene from one of those shots (minus the Avatar and the pigs). Maybe you enjoy it:
Original early U9 screenshot:
recreation in Corven:
Aenra
Guest
The camera mode alone makes me wary. Ultima my ass. Still, will be watching.. thanks for the heads up Taka-Haradin puolipeikko
Corv
Lycantic
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- Jan 8, 2017
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- 6
Nope it's from a motion cap animation pack. There is sneaking and running too, but not shown. The problem is the model itself, not the animation It's a placeholder.
Corv
Lycantic
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2017
- Messages
- 6
It's the prototype. Dialogue system and object interaction are also implemented and btw: no asset untouched to create a streamlined look (textures, colors etc...). I see many projects just using assets as they come and it looks thrown together. There is a lot of work in what you see in the video, but of course it's also easy to dismiss in a sentence. Future videos will show more gameplay, we are at the beginning of the project.
From what animation pack? Don't tell me it's from Kubold's movement animset. If it is, you set up the blendspace somehow incorrectly to make it look this bad.
If you're using their standard blendspace, consider using WalkForward 0.70 for normal walking.
Most likely the dialogue system is a marketplace solution, so takes about half an hour to set it up. (and if it's not a marketplace solution, it should be)
Object interaction is just an interface class and a linetrace, which is one more hour of work if you never did this before.
Your prototype is 2 hours of coding, and tens of hours of asset triage and tweaking. It should be the other way around.
Last edited:
Corv
Lycantic
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- Jan 8, 2017
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- 6
Wow, getting a little hateful there hm?
The pack by motion capture online, the Kubold animations looked like he pooped his pants.
No, not a single line of code is from a store solution.
Everything we did so far took 6 hours work every day for two people for 5 months if you want to know. No triage, very detailled work. But I am sure you can judge everything way better from where you are stitting. Thanks for you interest.
Corv
Lycantic
- Joined
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Thank you! We appreaciate it.
Corv
Lycantic
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2017
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- 6
Got a message saying that you are the local troll, not to be taken serious, but I wonder could you link your releases so we can learn from you?
After all this heavyweight hardcore trolling, my life would clearly be in danger if I revealed my games and identity.
Jazz_
Arcane
That octopus swimming in what appears to be a lake broke my immersion. Joking aside, looks very good but as someone else pointed out the artstyle seems a bit too generic.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
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http://ultimacodex.com/2017/01/tita...on-landscape-story-and-music-assets-released/
http://www.titansofether.com/uix/
taxalot
Titans of Ether: Ultima IX Redemption Landscape, Story, and Music Assets Released
BY WTF DRAGON · JANUARY 10, 2017
The Titans of Ether have released a large archive of assets from the now-cancelled Ultima IX: Redemption remake project:
This is the release of a Morrowind mod the team did before Corven. So for all of you who are here for “Corven – Path of Redemption”, don’t be confused, this is not part of that game and it has nothing to do with the Unreal Engine. You can ignore this post without missing anything.
For all of you who ARE here because of the Morrowind mod UIX Redemption:
This is the 1,8 GB file with all of Britannia, all our models, all our music, the story file and a readme with instructions.
I also left the game start in (gypsy character creation and starting quest) and a few other NPCs and features. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s everything anyone needs to continue UIX development or create your own Ultima in Morrowind. If you do not try to create features Morrowind did not have you will have no problem finishing the game within a year. Everything beyond that is deleted because it would confuse most people (half implemented features/quests or features only present in the CS but not in the game…).
This however IS the promised landscape release and more!
You can use all our files without further permission. Continue to create UIX, use them in your own mod, whatever you like. This is our present to you. (more about the files in the readme).
Accompanying this, they’ve also published a lengthy explanation of the troubled history of the project, and the considerations that informed the decision to cancel it in favour of working on Corven – Path of Redemption. It’s far too lengthy and detailed to excerpt here, so I’ll suggest that you click on through and give it a read for yourself.
I’ve finally updated the Ultima IX: Redemption project entry to reflect the project’s cancellation. A link to the asset download can be found there, although at present this just points to the Titans of Ether website. I’ll add a proper mirror of their download to the Codex when I can, hopefully this evening.
http://www.titansofether.com/uix/
taxalot
Interesting how Eriadain isn't mentioned at all in the history of development.
Here goes nothing.
Before all, do not misinterpret the following post. This is NOT an attempt at saying "You know, I'm the guy behind it all.". I was a bit saddened not to see mention of 'that thing I worked on', but one could say from the point of the view of the narrative exposed it makes sense not to mention it. Still, since the "history of Ultima IX redemption" is mentioned, would not it be nice to get the entire story out there ?
The root of Ultima IX : Redemption starts around 15 years ago (a bit more, I was still in high school). You can actually pretty much time it to the release of Ultima IX. I think the entire idea started a few days after Ultima IX got released, and just a few days before my copy arrived in the mail.
Back then, it was pretty clear that Ultima IX was not going to be the game Ultima fans hoped for, even before release. The game development was chaotic. It was clear it had gone through several rewrites and the Ultima commmunity, which was mostly hanging out on usenet (rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons) was on fire. A couple of days after release, Bob White leaked a synopsis of the game that wasn't. It was just a text file, a long post he wrote summing up the story as it was once was intended. It shared common points with the final product, but it was also vastly different and much much more developed. It was a story of politics, betrayal, and I think overall it did a pretty good job. I had not even played Ultima IX and I knew that I wanted to play Bob White's plot.
The bitterness of seeing how little of that plot actually made it in the final game, which only has a skeleton of a story, made it even harder to bear.
Back then, I was toying with a thing called "RPG Maker 95", the first widely available on the Internet of RPGMakers. Keep in mind that it was way before this tool earned the reputation of being the tool of shitty made RPGs, and weeaboos games. Within three days, I quickly made a small thing, a demo really, of a thing called "Alter U9" which was basically a proposal to remake Ultima IX in that engine. The demo contained the intro, the Stonegate tutorial, and a final cutscene, which I believed were stills captured from the Pyros cutscene of Ultima IX, which was actually part of the original story, but reused in the final game absurdly out of context.
Much to my surprise, the reaction I got was overwhelmingly positive. Much to my surprise, because there wasn't much to it yet. Some people offered to help with the project. One guy, nicknamed Chlorthos, offered to make music for the game. This is the same Chlorthos mentioned in that "history of Ultima IX redemption" thing.
I cannot emphasize how overwhelmingly positive the reaction to this was, and would like to point that it was following this reaction that another team started a project called "Ultima V : Lazarus.". I am not saying they did it because of Alter U9. That would be presomptuous. But Alter U9 was at the right at the right time : discontent with Electronic Arts and OSI was so strong that people were posting on the official boards and emailing EA in anger basically telling them "Look at all the shit you made, this one guy is doing a project that is more promising than yours." . I distinctly remember being pissed at this because EA was sending cease & desists left and right to anyone, including Aquamarine Dragon who had merely released a harmless tool to extract the music from the game.
Alter U9 never received a C&D. I know for a fact that Richard Garriott was aware of the project at some point. Whether he didn't share the info with EA, whether EA ignored it, or whether they didn't dare to piss off more the Ultima community than it was at that point I have no idea. Alter U9 went on, or rather, turned into Eriadain after someone sent me an email, noting the title was temporary and suggested the name. I'm actually quite sad I lost the name of that person. The explanation was this : Ultima started with an "unofficial" game called Akalabeth referencing the Fall of Numenor in Tolkien's mythology. Eriadain, in elfish, means the "Rising One", aka "Ascension". It's a throwback to the origin of the series, a literal translation of U9's subtitle, and a hint that yes, this is unofficial.
I thought it was brilliant and immediately went with it.
The game development went on. Here are things I remember I did in the RM95 engine : Britain, Ambrosia, Despise... Hythloth (maybe ?). As I built the game, as Chlorthos contributed music, and as Orm-Riva Dragon contributed dialog and writing (English wasn't, and still isn't, my main language), I looked more and more at the ressources available for Ultima IX. In the end, I was able to guess a lot of the gaps in Bob White's plot, thanks to a frame by frame analysis of the old trailers, looking at old concept arts, and reading old interview. I remember the RM95 version used, which I think was a mistake, a part of the Ed Del Castillo version of the story featuring a solo segment of Shamino. Terrible idea, but I was more interested in story fidelity than good ideas at that point it seemed.
With that last iteration (the aforementioned Despise/Ambrosia/Britain demo .... did it also have Buccaneer's Den ? ) of Eriadain, quickly approached a dilemma. More people joined the team (more on that later), and the thing had to become more ambitious. RPGMAKER 2K was just around the corner and was a much, much better product than RM95.
While Chlorthos was still submitting music, Orm dialog, other graphics, and while we were talking a lot over IRC on how to make Eriadain better, I tried to make a demo of Eriadain in RM2K. It involved restarting everything. Keep in mind that RM2K was not like modern day game engines and it was very, very difficult for several people to be working on the same game. There was a way of working on your own "iteration" of the game and just sending some files exported from the SDK, but it was more of a hack and no-one ever contributed this way. I was basically doing all the mapmaking, and the coding. I think it was around this time that this Avatus guy joined the project or didn't join the project (I don't remember if it was clear).
But it was worth it. RM2K made a lot more things possible. While the game was still using an "anime" look, it was not intended to stay that way and all the graphics could, and would, have been replaced to something more Ultima like. But here is something that eventually went in the RM2K demo which contained Britain, Despise, Stonegate and maybe a few other things : night and day cycle, weather system, embryo of a custom magic system, hope for a customizable battle engine, keeping track of Virtues, basic schedules, and a much better way to handle cutscenes which were proeminent in that version the story. It was clearly, clearly, a huge step above the RM95 version.
But this is where the trouble started.
It quickly became apparent that I would not have been able to finish the project. The build of Britain took FOREVER to build and was still buggy as crazy, however improved it was on the original version. Making the towns more alive required a lot more NPCs, and dialogs to be written. The damn thing would take years and years to complete and... well, it would have been difficult to finish the game.
Enters, at around the time of this difficulty, Gothrak Dragon. Friend of Chlorthos IIRC. And thus began the engine war.
As the expectations for Eriadain became stronger, as the team grew in size, and as the difficulties arrived, it became clear we had to change engines, again. And it is now important to mention how the team worked.
I was doing all the work. Other people were doing submissions.
It sounds arrogant, but that's pretty much how it worked. As I mentioned, the previous iterations of the game didn't allow for coding collaboration. Whatever possibilities were offered were ignored by the other team members. I am not blaming them. We were kids with a limited amount of free time. It was a voluntary project. But the fact is : I was doing all the maps, and in-engine coding. Others were sending dialog as text files, Chlorthos was sending MIDIs, some dudes were submitting art, and we all gathered on IRC to chat about the damn thing. The more people were contributing, the more concessions I was willing to make to the game design. Yes. It's a terrible idea, but the only one I knew to work considering engine, and ressources offered.
When the choice came of an engine switch, there were lengthy discussions.
Gothrak, I think, wanted to make the game polygonal 2D. It was something akin to Another World/Out of this world. I was thinking this would be awesome, but let's face it, we're just a bunch of 20 something doing this on our free time. This was not going to happen. The VERGE engine was also considered, but I was pondering support of that DOS based thing and the actual amount of work required to do it.
The three contenders for the engines were :
- Neverwinter Nights, which had my preference. The view point was similar to the early Ultima IX screenshots. Videos showed the toolset and showed that it was easy to build maps, and that it had some powerful scripting. No huge continuous world, but we could break it into maps and have it single scaled still. A minor concession. Everything seemed awesome, and it was easy to test the game in Multiplayer. Clearly, I thought (and still think), the smartest choice in terms of quality/chance of seeing the product completed.
- Dungeon Siege : It would also have been a smart move. Lazarus showed that. I, however, was skeptical of the capacity of the engine to correctly handle the game, but was also very skeptical of our team's ability to have delivered a final product that was in quality comparable to what we would have achieved in NWN. While I agreed that Dungeon Siege was a superior option, I thought us little guys couldn't make it. I think I remember someone of the team contacted the U5 Lazarus guys and asked them if they were willing to share assets. They said they would, but only if our team proved to be more serious. Something I considered a dick move (but time somehow proved them right).
The third engine considered had the favors of the team.
Ultima Online.
I shit you not.
The idea was to take Ultima Online's server emulators which were, I think, open source, and made extensive use of scripting at impressive levels and use that same engine to recreate something that was like a modern day version of Ultima VII, feature wise.
An idea that was bold but, I believed, foolish, considering the current pool of talents inside the team, and how primitive were still the UO server emulators. Nobody had ever attempted something like this. Nobody ever made UO into a single player game. Nobody even made (back then) a decent quest system, nor a fucking dialog system. It was simply too much work.
Also, it wouldn't have worked at all with the game we were working on. Lots of sequences in the Bob White story were unfeasible in the Ultima Online engine. This is were it became apparent there were different visions. A lot of the team wanted another Ultima VII. I wanted Eriadain to be its own game. I wanted it to be the Bob White version, with compromises made according to our pool of talent.
So considering I did all the shit, I decided that fuck it, we're going Neverwinter Nights.
This didn't go well.
Everybody left. Because clearly, the Ultima Online engine was the only hope of making that great single player game !
I worked on Eriadain alone, from this point, basically making it a NWN mod. When I finally gave up, a few years into it, here is what was made :
-Demo of Britain/Stonegate.
-Around 80% of the maps, including dungeons, cities, overworld.
-Scripting for 80% of the mainquest, untested.
-Lots of dialogs, including some placeholder stuff.
I like to say the game was 80% done, and 80% left to do. But eventually I gave up because real life caught up with me, I was going through a pretty dark period of my life, and I simply had played the game too much inside my head to even bother making it "for real". I also had the feeling the Ultima craze was dying out and that should it be completed and even be great, nobody would even care to play it.
In the meantime...
Chlorthos and others founded another team and announced Ultima IX : Redemption (called another name back then, IIRC) which, much to my surprise, used... the Dungeon Siege engine. But they quickly gave up on that and then restarted on the Morrowind engine.
So much for that hassle with the UO engine. It was their own project, with their own storyline, built at their own frustration of my ineptitude.
Well it turns out that 15 years down the line, they still do not have a game.
And now they're promising another one.
I do not want to sound bitter. People grow up. But following development of U9R from afar, it was pretty obvious that this game was not ever going to be completed, which makes me skeptical that this one will ever be. I sincerely hope it will be. The peoples involved have grown up, some other persons joined the team, but it clearly not has the strongest of basis to start with.
I, for one, am kinda happy to have jumped from the ship I built just in time to not waste even more working hours on that. I did make another attempt, a few years ago, to "get the ball rolling again", and restarted very preliminary development in the NWN2 engine. But I had never intended to finish it. The idea was to get people interested again in the project and for someone to pick it up, with me contributing casually as much as I could. Nobody seemed interested, which is maybe because the Bob White lost part of its appeal when it leaked fully.
I remember the day I announced I gave up the project, initially. I did a post somewhere on the Internet. A couple of hours later, I received an email pointing me to a URL of interest : that thing had full scripts of the Bob White's plot cutscenes. Finding, just a few hours after canceling it, that one of the major character I had in the game was actually female and not male like I intended got me into some kind of hilarious rage. Years later when the Bob WHite plot was released, I read it with nostalgia, was happy at things I guessed correctly, and shocked at ... other things... (the "Ultimas").
I believe Eriadain would have been a good game. I had mixed the linearity of the Bob White storyline with some non linearity of my own. The game would have followed two main quests, one linear, and one absolutely open ended (the columns and virtues subsection of the story). It could have been good, but it was not meant to be.
I can only congratulate the Redemption team for their perseverance and will buy a finished product if it's good. But I don't think I'm to blame or to be called bitter if I refuse to back a kickstarter should it come to that. The team, sadly, has a lot to prove after the last 15 years and not delivering anything.
Before all, do not misinterpret the following post. This is NOT an attempt at saying "You know, I'm the guy behind it all.". I was a bit saddened not to see mention of 'that thing I worked on', but one could say from the point of the view of the narrative exposed it makes sense not to mention it. Still, since the "history of Ultima IX redemption" is mentioned, would not it be nice to get the entire story out there ?
The root of Ultima IX : Redemption starts around 15 years ago (a bit more, I was still in high school). You can actually pretty much time it to the release of Ultima IX. I think the entire idea started a few days after Ultima IX got released, and just a few days before my copy arrived in the mail.
Back then, it was pretty clear that Ultima IX was not going to be the game Ultima fans hoped for, even before release. The game development was chaotic. It was clear it had gone through several rewrites and the Ultima commmunity, which was mostly hanging out on usenet (rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons) was on fire. A couple of days after release, Bob White leaked a synopsis of the game that wasn't. It was just a text file, a long post he wrote summing up the story as it was once was intended. It shared common points with the final product, but it was also vastly different and much much more developed. It was a story of politics, betrayal, and I think overall it did a pretty good job. I had not even played Ultima IX and I knew that I wanted to play Bob White's plot.
The bitterness of seeing how little of that plot actually made it in the final game, which only has a skeleton of a story, made it even harder to bear.
Back then, I was toying with a thing called "RPG Maker 95", the first widely available on the Internet of RPGMakers. Keep in mind that it was way before this tool earned the reputation of being the tool of shitty made RPGs, and weeaboos games. Within three days, I quickly made a small thing, a demo really, of a thing called "Alter U9" which was basically a proposal to remake Ultima IX in that engine. The demo contained the intro, the Stonegate tutorial, and a final cutscene, which I believed were stills captured from the Pyros cutscene of Ultima IX, which was actually part of the original story, but reused in the final game absurdly out of context.
Much to my surprise, the reaction I got was overwhelmingly positive. Much to my surprise, because there wasn't much to it yet. Some people offered to help with the project. One guy, nicknamed Chlorthos, offered to make music for the game. This is the same Chlorthos mentioned in that "history of Ultima IX redemption" thing.
I cannot emphasize how overwhelmingly positive the reaction to this was, and would like to point that it was following this reaction that another team started a project called "Ultima V : Lazarus.". I am not saying they did it because of Alter U9. That would be presomptuous. But Alter U9 was at the right at the right time : discontent with Electronic Arts and OSI was so strong that people were posting on the official boards and emailing EA in anger basically telling them "Look at all the shit you made, this one guy is doing a project that is more promising than yours." . I distinctly remember being pissed at this because EA was sending cease & desists left and right to anyone, including Aquamarine Dragon who had merely released a harmless tool to extract the music from the game.
Alter U9 never received a C&D. I know for a fact that Richard Garriott was aware of the project at some point. Whether he didn't share the info with EA, whether EA ignored it, or whether they didn't dare to piss off more the Ultima community than it was at that point I have no idea. Alter U9 went on, or rather, turned into Eriadain after someone sent me an email, noting the title was temporary and suggested the name. I'm actually quite sad I lost the name of that person. The explanation was this : Ultima started with an "unofficial" game called Akalabeth referencing the Fall of Numenor in Tolkien's mythology. Eriadain, in elfish, means the "Rising One", aka "Ascension". It's a throwback to the origin of the series, a literal translation of U9's subtitle, and a hint that yes, this is unofficial.
I thought it was brilliant and immediately went with it.
The game development went on. Here are things I remember I did in the RM95 engine : Britain, Ambrosia, Despise... Hythloth (maybe ?). As I built the game, as Chlorthos contributed music, and as Orm-Riva Dragon contributed dialog and writing (English wasn't, and still isn't, my main language), I looked more and more at the ressources available for Ultima IX. In the end, I was able to guess a lot of the gaps in Bob White's plot, thanks to a frame by frame analysis of the old trailers, looking at old concept arts, and reading old interview. I remember the RM95 version used, which I think was a mistake, a part of the Ed Del Castillo version of the story featuring a solo segment of Shamino. Terrible idea, but I was more interested in story fidelity than good ideas at that point it seemed.
With that last iteration (the aforementioned Despise/Ambrosia/Britain demo .... did it also have Buccaneer's Den ? ) of Eriadain, quickly approached a dilemma. More people joined the team (more on that later), and the thing had to become more ambitious. RPGMAKER 2K was just around the corner and was a much, much better product than RM95.
While Chlorthos was still submitting music, Orm dialog, other graphics, and while we were talking a lot over IRC on how to make Eriadain better, I tried to make a demo of Eriadain in RM2K. It involved restarting everything. Keep in mind that RM2K was not like modern day game engines and it was very, very difficult for several people to be working on the same game. There was a way of working on your own "iteration" of the game and just sending some files exported from the SDK, but it was more of a hack and no-one ever contributed this way. I was basically doing all the mapmaking, and the coding. I think it was around this time that this Avatus guy joined the project or didn't join the project (I don't remember if it was clear).
But it was worth it. RM2K made a lot more things possible. While the game was still using an "anime" look, it was not intended to stay that way and all the graphics could, and would, have been replaced to something more Ultima like. But here is something that eventually went in the RM2K demo which contained Britain, Despise, Stonegate and maybe a few other things : night and day cycle, weather system, embryo of a custom magic system, hope for a customizable battle engine, keeping track of Virtues, basic schedules, and a much better way to handle cutscenes which were proeminent in that version the story. It was clearly, clearly, a huge step above the RM95 version.
But this is where the trouble started.
It quickly became apparent that I would not have been able to finish the project. The build of Britain took FOREVER to build and was still buggy as crazy, however improved it was on the original version. Making the towns more alive required a lot more NPCs, and dialogs to be written. The damn thing would take years and years to complete and... well, it would have been difficult to finish the game.
Enters, at around the time of this difficulty, Gothrak Dragon. Friend of Chlorthos IIRC. And thus began the engine war.
As the expectations for Eriadain became stronger, as the team grew in size, and as the difficulties arrived, it became clear we had to change engines, again. And it is now important to mention how the team worked.
I was doing all the work. Other people were doing submissions.
It sounds arrogant, but that's pretty much how it worked. As I mentioned, the previous iterations of the game didn't allow for coding collaboration. Whatever possibilities were offered were ignored by the other team members. I am not blaming them. We were kids with a limited amount of free time. It was a voluntary project. But the fact is : I was doing all the maps, and in-engine coding. Others were sending dialog as text files, Chlorthos was sending MIDIs, some dudes were submitting art, and we all gathered on IRC to chat about the damn thing. The more people were contributing, the more concessions I was willing to make to the game design. Yes. It's a terrible idea, but the only one I knew to work considering engine, and ressources offered.
When the choice came of an engine switch, there were lengthy discussions.
Gothrak, I think, wanted to make the game polygonal 2D. It was something akin to Another World/Out of this world. I was thinking this would be awesome, but let's face it, we're just a bunch of 20 something doing this on our free time. This was not going to happen. The VERGE engine was also considered, but I was pondering support of that DOS based thing and the actual amount of work required to do it.
The three contenders for the engines were :
- Neverwinter Nights, which had my preference. The view point was similar to the early Ultima IX screenshots. Videos showed the toolset and showed that it was easy to build maps, and that it had some powerful scripting. No huge continuous world, but we could break it into maps and have it single scaled still. A minor concession. Everything seemed awesome, and it was easy to test the game in Multiplayer. Clearly, I thought (and still think), the smartest choice in terms of quality/chance of seeing the product completed.
- Dungeon Siege : It would also have been a smart move. Lazarus showed that. I, however, was skeptical of the capacity of the engine to correctly handle the game, but was also very skeptical of our team's ability to have delivered a final product that was in quality comparable to what we would have achieved in NWN. While I agreed that Dungeon Siege was a superior option, I thought us little guys couldn't make it. I think I remember someone of the team contacted the U5 Lazarus guys and asked them if they were willing to share assets. They said they would, but only if our team proved to be more serious. Something I considered a dick move (but time somehow proved them right).
The third engine considered had the favors of the team.
Ultima Online.
I shit you not.
The idea was to take Ultima Online's server emulators which were, I think, open source, and made extensive use of scripting at impressive levels and use that same engine to recreate something that was like a modern day version of Ultima VII, feature wise.
An idea that was bold but, I believed, foolish, considering the current pool of talents inside the team, and how primitive were still the UO server emulators. Nobody had ever attempted something like this. Nobody ever made UO into a single player game. Nobody even made (back then) a decent quest system, nor a fucking dialog system. It was simply too much work.
Also, it wouldn't have worked at all with the game we were working on. Lots of sequences in the Bob White story were unfeasible in the Ultima Online engine. This is were it became apparent there were different visions. A lot of the team wanted another Ultima VII. I wanted Eriadain to be its own game. I wanted it to be the Bob White version, with compromises made according to our pool of talent.
So considering I did all the shit, I decided that fuck it, we're going Neverwinter Nights.
This didn't go well.
Everybody left. Because clearly, the Ultima Online engine was the only hope of making that great single player game !
I worked on Eriadain alone, from this point, basically making it a NWN mod. When I finally gave up, a few years into it, here is what was made :
-Demo of Britain/Stonegate.
-Around 80% of the maps, including dungeons, cities, overworld.
-Scripting for 80% of the mainquest, untested.
-Lots of dialogs, including some placeholder stuff.
I like to say the game was 80% done, and 80% left to do. But eventually I gave up because real life caught up with me, I was going through a pretty dark period of my life, and I simply had played the game too much inside my head to even bother making it "for real". I also had the feeling the Ultima craze was dying out and that should it be completed and even be great, nobody would even care to play it.
In the meantime...
Chlorthos and others founded another team and announced Ultima IX : Redemption (called another name back then, IIRC) which, much to my surprise, used... the Dungeon Siege engine. But they quickly gave up on that and then restarted on the Morrowind engine.
So much for that hassle with the UO engine. It was their own project, with their own storyline, built at their own frustration of my ineptitude.
Well it turns out that 15 years down the line, they still do not have a game.
And now they're promising another one.
I do not want to sound bitter. People grow up. But following development of U9R from afar, it was pretty obvious that this game was not ever going to be completed, which makes me skeptical that this one will ever be. I sincerely hope it will be. The peoples involved have grown up, some other persons joined the team, but it clearly not has the strongest of basis to start with.
I, for one, am kinda happy to have jumped from the ship I built just in time to not waste even more working hours on that. I did make another attempt, a few years ago, to "get the ball rolling again", and restarted very preliminary development in the NWN2 engine. But I had never intended to finish it. The idea was to get people interested again in the project and for someone to pick it up, with me contributing casually as much as I could. Nobody seemed interested, which is maybe because the Bob White lost part of its appeal when it leaked fully.
I remember the day I announced I gave up the project, initially. I did a post somewhere on the Internet. A couple of hours later, I received an email pointing me to a URL of interest : that thing had full scripts of the Bob White's plot cutscenes. Finding, just a few hours after canceling it, that one of the major character I had in the game was actually female and not male like I intended got me into some kind of hilarious rage. Years later when the Bob WHite plot was released, I read it with nostalgia, was happy at things I guessed correctly, and shocked at ... other things... (the "Ultimas").
I believe Eriadain would have been a good game. I had mixed the linearity of the Bob White storyline with some non linearity of my own. The game would have followed two main quests, one linear, and one absolutely open ended (the columns and virtues subsection of the story). It could have been good, but it was not meant to be.
I can only congratulate the Redemption team for their perseverance and will buy a finished product if it's good. But I don't think I'm to blame or to be called bitter if I refuse to back a kickstarter should it come to that. The team, sadly, has a lot to prove after the last 15 years and not delivering anything.
The entire irony of the story of the Eriadain dev ?
THe idea was to make a game that could not be made anymore because of "current" AAA trends, focusing on technology.
Ultima IX failed because there was internal struggles about technological choices and team politics.
Eriadain failed... for the very same reason. With an indie flavour.
THe idea was to make a game that could not be made anymore because of "current" AAA trends, focusing on technology.
Ultima IX failed because there was internal struggles about technological choices and team politics.
Eriadain failed... for the very same reason. With an indie flavour.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,433
Wow. Well, at least Corv doesn't appear to be directly tied to Eriadain's fall since it seems he only encountered the project after it became known as Redemption.
Absolutely. The above post was not an attempt at pointing fingers.
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