🚀 go-pugleaf

No-one seems to have mentioned this so far, so I guess I will.

What do people think of the single-scale map Origin introduced in Ultima 
6? Personally, I think it was a mistake. I _much_ preferred the original 
system, where you had one map for the wilderness, another for towns, and 
another for combat. This meant that objects had roughly the right scale 
relative to each other: a mountain range would dwarf a town, for example. 
In Ultimas 4 and 5, I always had the feeling of exploring a _large_ 
continent, even though in 5 I knew (or had a good idea) where most of the 
locations were already.

I never got that feeling in 6, where a house would look roughly the same 
size as a mountain. It was as if all of a sudden, Britannia had gone from 
being a sizable land mass to a small island. It made it more difficult to 
hold the suspension of disbelief, which is what's essential for a good 
game.

They tweaked the graphics a bit in 7, but to me the underlying problem 
remained. For example Britain takes up most of the middle of the map, 
which just doesn't seem right. In Serpent Isle and Ultima 8, the problem 
was "fixed" by removing the action to totally different locations. Ie, 
"we can't make a big world believable, so we'll just set it in a small 
world instead". But this is probably not going to be an option for Ultima 
9. U9 is going to be set in Britannia, isn't it? Britannia is supposed to 
be _big_, isn't it?

It's not as if using various different scales has to mean lower graphical 
quality, either. Microprose (for one) had a go at it with Darklands, and 
the graphics were fine.

Anyway, that's my contribution.

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Hong Ooi
ho...@magna.com.au
Sydney, Australia