🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <bmartin.2...@origin.ea.com>, bma...@origin.ea.com (Brian Martin) writes:
>>Hello There,
>>
>>My name is Brian, and I am one of the many Ultima 9 team members. Right now, 
>>U9 is in the early developemental stage, and we want to know what you, the RPG 
>>fan, would like to see in the next Ultima. 
>>

I honestly think that the Ultima 7 part II was a pretty good character  
interface, and would like to see that in Ultima 9. What I mean is, you could
call up your characters, and actually place the weapons in their hands, put
earrings on them, armour, etc. to see what they actually looked like with all
that on (a big plus over the Black Gate and Ultima 6 where you just had a few
circles). U8 whilst doing it sort of, didn't really do justice to the idea.
Plus of course, the Avatar should be allowed to be female. I enjoyed playing
as both sexed Avatars in both 6 and the 7's (I especially liked 7's multiple
character portraits.)

Plus PLEASE PLEASE bring back the ability to manipulate objects from a   
distance. One of the worst things about U8 was having to get within a few feet
just to read those #@#@ signs which you should be able to read from distance
away, or trying to open a chest. While admittedly it did make for more realism
(such as areas which have chests, but have the floor trapped, but I think the
annoyance far outways it's usefullness as a construct.

I'll pass on the graphics of U8. They were pretty decent, although I agree
that the orhogonal view could do with some rethinking. Also IMHO it would be
better if the world become 'reconnected' again, rather that just joing 
segments. Although I honestly don't know how you could achieve the rapid
load ins of new sections that U7 did in such high detail continously. Certainly
just going from CD would make the game very annoying if were to pause on you
every twenty steps. Although that's probably a programming problem, you might
want to consider at least installing some of the necessities to hard disk
(such as the graphic representation of the objects, leaving the world map on
the CD).

And finally, I really can't understand why the U8 team went to all the trouble
of disabling the cheat mode and removing the subdirectory that contained the
debugging files (some people who found the cheat said that there was some 
directory it was looking for). Why dont you accept at the start that people
will eventually want to cheat to see all the hidden areas of the world, and
sell the cheat / debugging code as an add-on? (Sorta like how Silver Seed added
on all those macro keys). You'd definitely get tons of people buying it just so
they can warp and around and stuff around with the world. Makes more sense then
just trying to get rid of it, and it'd be a sure way to get extra revenue.



--
Paul Gilbert           | s940...@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au
Bach App Sci, Bach Eng | The opinions expressed are my own, all my own, and
Year 1, RMIT Melbourne | as such will contain no references to small furry
Australia	       | creatures from Alpha Centauri.