Dhruin
SasqWatch
Ultima Aiera has more Ultima design docs with 26 pages of documentation on "Ed del Castillo’s revisions to the plot of Ultima 9".
More information.
More information.
At least according to the Wikipedia entry on Ultima 9, it was del Castillo that wanted to fully exploit the possibilities of the new 3D engine that Origin were working with; the third-person perspective of the game can evidently be traced back to him.
It reads like it was written by a ten year old. It's also pretty thin on plot for a plot document.
At one point when fans expressed dismay that a lot of the little interactive features with the world like baking bread were being removed he said 'Ultima is not about baking bread, it's about rescuing the princess and slaying a dragon'.
At one point when fans expressed dismay that a lot of the little interactive features with the world like baking bread were being removed he said 'Ultima is not about baking bread, it's about rescuing the princess and slaying a dragon'.
Yeah, that was awful. In the Bob White plot, it wasn't that way.
It may seem like only minor differences but endings can make or break a story for me.
Oh the ending IS a major difference - but I just don't see anything particularily bad about the whole "Avatar sacrifices his life to destroy the Guardian" bit. It's all a matter of execution in the end - and it's hardly something we can judge from short summaries.
And truly there is no way in hell the original ending would have sited well with many fans - it basically ended by destroying Britannia and killing both Lord British and the Avatar. This would have lead to fan outrage just as much as the final game did.
That being said I do find somewhat ironic that the original apolyptic ending was made at a time where there was little doubt there would have been a game after that. THe Ultima X that would have been made about this version would really have been a new beginning in every sense of the world.
-Sergorn
As I said above I thought Ultima IX had always been billed as the final installment. What Ultima X are you talking about?
IIRC, it got axed because they were paranoid about cannibalizing their UO player base.