RPG Codex caught up with Ian 'Tiberius' Frazier to chat about his work on the Ultima V remake, Lazarus:

- Lazarus features far more text than the original Ultima V, much of it in the form of comments made by party members at appropriate times throughout the game, but all of it slotting in seamlessly with the original material. What steps were taken to ensure this, and was it a challenge to write for characters with a long history and an established fan base?

There were a few keys to making this work. The first was that we started with a strong foundation of preproduction—before we made any quests or anything, Michael "New Breed" Hilborn (a writer of spectacular Ultima fanfic) crafted a couple of documents that helped set the mood, tone, and themes for the world of Britannia in the Ultima V time frame. He brilliantly articulated the "feel" of the world, the roles of the Oppression and Resistance, and how the common people of Britannia would react to the major events afoot in the world. After that, I handed out the original U5’s full transcript to the team and using that as a base, I had a handful of our best writers create Region Profiles, documents that defined the general mood, feel, and major characters of each major location in the game. Mike and I then reviewed and critiqued these region profiles until all of our various planning documents were rock solid. These documents then served as our "bible" as we started to create actual game content. [Note: Many of these documents are now available online—we released them to the public a few months ago. http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/new-gallery-ultima-v-lazarus-regional-profiles/

The next key was editing. As individual writers started writing dialogue and books for the game, Mike and I performed review/edit passes on every single piece of dialogue that was created, helping to keep up the general quality bar of the writing (and correcting Elizabethan grammar, haha), but also ensuring that all the dialogue in the game supported the general fiction of the world and did a good job of exhibiting the Ultima spirit, which is frankly rather hard to quantify.

The final key was the writing staff itself. We managed to get some truly amazing writers on board with the talent to create compelling characters, the drive to put in an obscene amount of time working on this project simply for the joy of seeing it completed, and the passion to rewrite the same dialogue half a dozen times over if that’s what it took to end up with a top-quality result.

The German translation of the Ultima V remake U5: Lazarus has been finished and you can download it from the official site.

Thanks, Alrik!

In our second exclusive article, we speak to Team Lazarus in a huge interview about the trials and tribulations of bringing Ultima V to life using the Dungeon Siege engine.  This massive article delves deep into the development and provides new insight into the project:

RPGWatch: Certain aspects of the game were quite noticeably changed from the original game. One example of this was Captain Johne's underworld abode. In the original game he lived in a keep whereas in Lazarus, he dwelled in a meager tent. These changes add a lot more realism into the game, however, some purists may contend this, and other changes made, may change the game too much from its original concept. How difficult was it for the team to determine when changes such as this were needed vs. changing too much of the game itself?

Team Lazarus: For the most part, I don’t feel that we particularly changed anything that was intentional in the original game, but rather rebuilt the game “as they would have if they could have.” Take your Captain Johne example: in the original game, his abode (the wreck of his ship, The Ararat) looked like a keep when viewed on the underworld map, but when you entered into it, it looked like a ship (which is also backed up by Johne’s dialogue). Clearly this wasn’t supposed to be a boat hiding inside a small building, but was simply a case of not having enough graphics to convey a shipwreck on the main map.

In the end, most important decisions in terms of purism vs. new content were effectively determined by committee—there were certain members of our team who I considered to be the most rabid of purists, and by gauging their response to specific proposed design elements, I could generally determine what was safe to toy with and what wasn’t.