Exploit That IP, My Lord… Discreetly!

Where’s the sweaty women in the ads, EA?

They’ll let people in China make a new MMO: http://ir.netdragon.us/content/2009-07-21/20090721211510467.shtml

They’ll let a company in Germany make it a browser based RTS…

If it’s such a damn good property to do all this with, why the hell do they refuse to create a proper sequel to UO?

As someone who worked on both the original UO and one of the canceled “sequels” I have to agree with Athryn.

On the one hand it’s nice to see EA give Ultima some attention, it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, they see some value in it still…but on the other hand, one can’t help but wish they were doing something more with it.

As I’ve posted elsewhere, I’m pretty sure the Guardian is behind this somehow.

(PS ‘Sup Calandryll!)

Ardanna :
Why is it when you click on Wiki you get a 403 error and then told you must be playing a game?
*blink*

Presumably because the game is so very early in development that their webmaster hasn’t gotten around to adding that page yet.

I thought it sounded interesting untill I read it was browserbased, since that likely mean it is a clone of the numerous other browserbased empire managing games. It would be fun to see what a fullblown mmorpg could do with that concept.

Browser based, huh? Reminds me of another game from the people who will soon revolutionize the MMO industry. Any day now. Stop laughing.

…feathers.

“You need more l33t ore to build those PKs!”

Vargen :
Maybe if enough people show an interest in the brand they’ll have Bioware give us a proper Ultima X…

Lol. EA missed their chance of extending the life of the Ultima IP when they canned all of those Ultima Online derrivatives (UO2, UOX) and left the world with the sad rubble of UO. The brand/IP has no real value to the current generation of gamers, much less the coming generation so the idea of building any major new games out of it is DOA. The current UO xpac is surely the last one, and this browser game is surely part of a strategy to begin roping into new vehicles the few players UO has left.

Saben :I thought it sounded interesting untill I read it was browserbased, since that likely mean it is a clone of the numerous other browserbased empire managing games. It would be fun to see what a fullblown mmorpg could do with that concept.

*See Darkfall, Mortal Online, AoC etc for the answer…

I think you’re wrong. According to the ESA, the average game player is 35 years old and has been playing games for 12 years.
I think a decent portion of those have at least some memory of the Ultima frachise. EA had previously ruined it, true, but now Bioware is in the house. Perfect time for a franchise relaunch. If it has the Bioware name, people will get excited.
Link: http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp

I think those “statistics” (which don’t seem to indicate any basis or research) were created by the ESA to combat stereotypes about gamers (c’mon look at how they’re written…they’re like a list of talking points).

But anyway, I love Ultima as much as any other 40-something Ultima fan but I would hate to see Bioware’s resources wasted on an Ultima IP game. Ye Olde Rehashe of Vanquishing? The weight of everything that went before? The Godalmighty Lore? The burden of Haloed Yore? Psh. There are better new stories waiting to be told.

I suppose transforming the face of Ultima isn’t new, really.

My first Ultima games were turn-based using iconic graphics.

Ultima VI swapped in a quasi-turn-based mechanic and isometric graphics – things started feeling like they were going downhill.

Ultima VII had an impressively worldly world, but combat was little more than a mildly controlled train wreck.

Ultima IX had more in common with Tomb Raider than the early Ultimas.

So, Ultima Online spawning a RTS spoof? Why not? EverQuest did it, after all. Not to mention how World of Warcraft started as a RTS.

Really, when you get into the design aspect of things, an RPG becomes an RTS pretty quickly once you decide to let players control more than one unit at a time on a mouse click interface. What would be really cool is if they let us build functional Ultima cities comprised of dozens of fully-functional Ultima Online characters. It’d be neat if they did this… but we’re probably looking at something far simpler.

Expanding a brand makes sense when it is a live, active, brand with a strong anchor.

But when you have a brand that has been left to languish like the Ultima brand, you aren’t “expanding” the brand any more. You are engaged in slash & burn marketing. The only point of the “Ultima” label is to hope to trick some poor fools out of their money – purchasers who will, one will note, end up angry at both the Ultima brand and the new game.

This feels like someone was reaching into the IP dustbin to pull out some random IP to slap on the game – a few centimeters to the left and it would have been Lords of Wing Commander instead.

@Geldon

As you said, we don’t have enough evidence to judge whether it will be respectful of the franchise. But so far we have nothing to indicate that it will. First, that it’s a browser game, though that is starting to mean less and less; second, that there is nothing from the short description that could indicate it wouldn’t be a Travian/Tribal Wars/etc clone; third, that there is no guarantee that it will include the staples of the Ultima franchise (the Britannia setting, etc.). Rather, it seems to be a last-ditch effort to milk a franchise that has been inactive for a decade, hoping it might have recovered from its major disappointments (Ultima IX) or cancellations (UO2). At worst, it appears to be a generic browser game EA was planning and had yet to come up with a name, until it remembered it had this intellectual property with an overall respectable pedigree gathering dust in a dark corner.

Ultima IV, by the way, was one of the rare games I owned for the NES. I loved every minute of it.

Are you for real? Please let me assure you that you know absolutely nothing about what you are talking about.
[...]
Please, stop talking about things you have no knowledge of and have obviously done zero research into.

I’m sorry, could you be a little more condescending? Your utilization of something you’ve linked something titled “possibly a Lord of Ultima screenshot” and a bunch of NDA leaked rumor mongering wasn’t applied to adequately to make this completely self-evident.

I know all about glitchless, but I’ve no idea why you think it has anything to do with what I was saying. Are you really so myopic that you think that one company whose exaggerations got it in trouble has any bearing on an entire industry? Are you really so bad at reading that you think that I’m a Lord of Ultima fanboy?

That gave me the idea to apply for beta. Apparently, you just need one EA account and you don’t need to create a new one for this game (I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not). But anyway, “the servers are full, we’ll let you know.”