From rgregg@scott.net Thu Jul 11 18:49:47 1996 Newsgroups: rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons Subject: Ultima IX report from DragonCon From: "Robert S. Gregg" Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 20:49:47 -0500 The following is the transcript of videotapes made of the Ultima sessions Origin held at DragonCon. Many, many kudos to Brewmeister Dragon (Mark Carlson) for taking the time to write all this stuff down for us. There are references to a lot of screenshots in this transcript; some of these are available via Atticus and Canuck's pages, the rest you're going to have to imagine for yourselves for now. And now, enjoy the show. ------------------ I recently went to Dragon Con in Atlanta and recorded a couple of speeches on Ultima 9, I though you fans may want a transcript, and screen shots. So without further ado. (Richard Garriott) To Create a game these days, of course, is a pretty big event in the sense of person power, the team is about now what...(he turns to Joye), "30, if you count the sound guys." So what we're here to talk about today, for this session, is we're gunna talk about Ultima 9, which is one we have in development now and will be shipping next spring. So what I'll do is first actually turn this over to Joye and try not to interrupt too much but I'm sure I will interject a fair bit along the way. (Joye McBurnett.) All right Ultima 9 is ahh, We took a long time after Ultima 8 shipped to talk to customers, players who have played forever , asked them what they wanted to see in the next Ultima. So as a result we are going kind of back to the old Ultimas of your past: Ultima 6, 7, Serpent Isle. And recapturing that kind of vast world, heavily populated, dense story, dense item World . Lots of stuff to do that is not necessarily right on the Plot track. You can play for days without ever stumbling across the plot. If you like. Or you can just arrow straight along to the end. Muck like they have always been. Technology wise it is a full 3D world where every item in the world is rendered polygonal object. (She glances over to Richard) Stop me if I go into too much technical detail. We are using LightWave to make our game items. They're textured in photo shop. The designers can then put them together. There are some screen Shots over there (I will try to include these screen shots in GIF or JPG format, but I may only be able to scan them in)The ones that don't look like flicks are the game shots. Those are completely polygonal, the camera is able to rotate around so your not always in that Ultima 7 Ultima 8 Orthogonal looking view. We've got some screen shots that show several different shots of the same scene to illustrate that. Story Wise it's a vast plot, I'm gunna turn it over to Richard, he talks about it much more effectively than I. (Richard) In fact, let me throw in a few more things about Technology if I can. If you look up at the screen shots over on the wall, starting with the first one. (1) That one is an Avatar figure standing outside of a mine shaft entrance and we have a binder we brought with some of the early concept sketches and screen shots in it to show how exactly the concept sketches match the game. And since we've got it 3D what the artists do is actually build the model of what the people sketched out and that becomes part of the game. And so it is very true to the high concept. Again another hard fact of being in 3D, as she mentioned, the orthogonal walls ah one of the big problems we used to have was things falling behind walls. Since your always facing from the north the north side and back side become this big dead space that you could not do anything with. We always had this big fear or the physics of the game, have it be something that exploded or collapsed, go behind there and you would never be able to click on it again to access it. Now in a true 3D engine the camera can just rotate around to show you what is behind that wall, thus eliminating that problem. The second screen shot down I think is a neat one for another reason. It is a little hedge maze outside Lord British's castle. Obviously when you go over to a 3D game and every thing goes polygonal one of the real risks is that every thing becomes real angular and blocky in return. Now if you look at those hedge mazes is you will notice how nice and smooth and curvy they are. And I like that on because it shows how physically real the world is and kind of how non-angular it has become in the sense that is does not just become square rectangular blocks. If you look at the next one down it as actually one or the character shots out of one of the flicks, who is that Morwin? (Joye answers), "That's actually the Avatar." So that's the avatar character as you see him in the flicks. Right below that is a picture of a house and the city... That's Cove I think. The interesting thing about the cities is, I'll talk about briefly. Unlike previous Ultimas where they were made out of tile graphics, one of the side effects of using tile graphics is your world is only an diverse as your tile set. In the sense that of there were only five, as there generally have been. In the earlier Ultimas it was either 0 or 1 as your basic wall set, by Ultima 8 I think we had 3 or 4 basic wall types we could build things out of. Interestingly in Ultima 9 what we did was say we wanted every city to have its own character. For example the city of Moonglow where the wizards live we wanted to have floating houses with individual floating steps so as you step on each step the step would sink down under your weight. Ah and recover as you stepped off of it. And floating lanterns that at night would all come pouring out of a lantern house and would position themselves around the city. And in the city of Yew where the people live in the deep forest we wanted the houses to be actually be built into the trees, Cove is very much that way too, in the sense of a sort of back to nature theme. In one case a massive tree had fallen down and someone had actually carved their home in the log itself. In the one screen shot you see there it's kind of a thatched exterior house you can see a little bit of the roof still on, and there is a bench inside there that is actually carved out of the root of the tree that the house is actually built abound and you can see the actual wood texture of the root. But anyway you get the idea that every city has its own architectural character and every dwelling is in fact a custom built 3d object. So no longer were things build out of building blocks, it's just start and build. What ever the artists envision is exactly what shows up in the game. So the audio visual variety is, we think, way beyond what has been in previous Ultimas. Next screen shot around is a picture of Lord British's bedroom, also out of a flick, in the sense of the cinematics. Normally Ultimas have cinematics in the intro or the endgame and maybe character creation as well were all types of Flick movie type things. We have some additional ones in Ultima 9 where throughout the game you receive what we call sendings. Sendings an important kind plot development aspect of the game where periodically when you are sleeping you will get these dream sequences and these dream sequences are messages that Guardian, the primary antagonist of the game are sending to Lord British, My character, the good guy about what you, the Avatar, are doing in ways that are trying to convince Lord British that your actions are in fact deeds of evil that are against Lord British. So as you see these both the sendings themselves are interesting but also I think that the way we present the sendings is interesting. I'm not sure how familiar with an early 1900's comic strip called 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' Anybody? So anyone who is familiar with it at all knows that one of the cool things about Little Nemo in Slumberland was how you got from falling asleep into Slumberland. It was always things like the bedroom slowly turns into a forest, or the bet would get up on its legs and walk out the window into Slumberland. That screen shot is the beginning of a transformation where we start in Lord British's bed chamber. The wind picks up, the tapestries eventually blow out of the room, those brashers begin to rattle around and eventually begin to fly up off the floor. The entire back brick wall slowly ripped away brick by brick and tares off into the sky. What is revealed beyond is the first sending. Actually that's the forth sending in this particular case. Where the bed is basically revealed on this battlefield where piece of the plot elements takes place. So it is a really cool transition and a very important sort of a plot step. In movies you always get to see what the bad guy is doing because they just cut to, ah ha and in the bad guys place this is what's going on. But in a first person role playing game it is a little harder to do that, so this is what these sendings represent. Sort of a behind the scenes backdrop. It is a rational way for you to hear what is going on, because of the way the guardian is tormenting Lord British. (Joye interjects here), "It's what going on back at the castle while the Avatar is out saving the world." Exactly. The next screen shot is a forested scene. It shows the Avatar walking through the forest. Not much to say there other than it looks nice, I think. Again it adds to the realism just how detailed everything is. Again, lots of games, I'll pick on Doom here for a second. Lots of 3D games have a very basic 3D environment and then most objects are 2D things that face you. Usually all the monsters and things are 2D. This is almost entirely polygonal. We are actually debating on having a couple things the are in fact flat, like a goblet. Because a goblet is completely 360 degrees symmetrical so there is no need for it to be polygonal, though right now it is completely polygonal but we'll probably save some polygons, cheat a bit. But, every tree, every branch, everything is completely modeled correctly in 3D and I think you'll be very impressed with the visuals we get out of that. Above that one going around is the, unfortunently getting very old, Lord British. Who, also interestingly enough, is going to take a major role in this game. Lord British usually is the all but useless character. The benevolent but ineffective ruler of Britannia, but this time around, fairly late in the game, he takes on a much more active role and in fact... well in fact I ought to just leave it at that. He takes a much more active role. (From the crowd someone says), "He aged about 100 years in one day didn't he? He aged so fast, because last time we saw him he looked like you." Well, ah, yeah, that is part of the story actually is the aging verity of some of the companions, including Lord British. Above that is a Dragon. Obviously. The cool things about the dragons is that not only are the Dragons used in the flicks but that same model or actually the same texture put on a smaller... (Joye adds),"It started with that model and just cut down the polygon pieces." It actually in the game as monsters and also as steeds. So you get to use those in the game. The last screen shot that I can hardly see is another woods scene with a cart and some food. (Joye smiles, adds), "and polygonal pigs, they're my favorite." Ahh and the little polygonal pigs, yeah, over there, I was looking at that. So anyway I think you'll agree the look where getting out of this I think is a major step forward for Ultimas. The kind of interactive detail is also a major aspect. So let me talk about some of the game design aspects of the game that aren't plot, if I may. As Joye was mentioning we have a sort of back to basics attitude. One if the ways we mean that is, where as one of the things we liked about Ultima 8 was kind of the audio visual detail, one of the things that we didn't intend and one of the things that people really didn't like about Ultima 8 was what I call its arcadeness. And so by no means do we want to include or repeat or enhance the arcadeness but we are gunna keep the audio visual detail. One of the things we lost in Ultima 8 was the epic scale of the world. One of the things that Ultima 9 is, by the way, Ultima 9 is the most epic of the Ultimas by far, to date. Its Land mass, well actually Ultima Online, the one Starr is working on there in the back, is actually the largest of the Ultimas. Its land mass is actually larger than all the other Ultimas combined. But that is because it has to have thousands of people playing on it forever. But Ultima 9 is I think the largest in the sense of scope, and places to travel. It also has the most NPCs to talk to, so in the sense of populating the world, and it's again a completely interactive world, in the sense of everything that you can see can be touched and interacted with; every knife, plate, cup, bowl, spoon, that sort of thing. Every lever can be operated. Doors can be opened or broken, furniture can be knocked over or stacked and used in pretty much any way you can imagine. Things like the physics system are way better too. When things used to be tile graphics one of the problems with tile graphics, of course, is every different orientation you want it to show up in is a new piece of art, and so if you want to make it fall over that's a new piece or art, and if you want to show it animating between those two pieces... that's a new piece of art! And so when your in tile graphics you learn to be very efficient in the way you generate art. And so when you like set off a powder keg in a room and things would go flying everything is nicely oriented you know, as it flew across the room. Now, with things being polygonal, you build a table and a table is a table in any orientation and so you don't (I ran out of tape here and had to switch tapes... but he was just talking about the ease of creating in a 3D environment...) TAPE 2. Object and so when you double click on the drawer the drawer actually slides out. Again in the old way of tile graphics you have to draw individual frames of animation for every state you wanted it to have now you can actually slide out every drawer and slide back in the ones you don't want to have open. If you know what I mean. So the physics of the world the tangibility, the reality of the world become much improved when we move to this 3D model. It also, by the way, became painful more complicated to code, which is something we're finding out as well. Now lets talk about plot for a minuet too. Oh and by the way, anyone can just step in and ask questions throughout. Don't hold back. (Hearing that I decided to remind him of something he had said in a speech an hour before.), "You were gunna say something about Blackthorn?" Hmmm, Ahhhh,... Blackthorn continues to be a major character in Ultimas in the future. That's probably all I can say. (someone in the crowed asked), "The blackthorn from Ultima 5?" Yup, same guy. "Can you say if he was the nameless monk on Monk Isle?" (I asked) Was he the nameless monk on Monk Isle, in Serpent Isle? (He asked that to Joye next to him who answered...), "Undecided, possibly." Actually that's a good question, I haven't really given that enough, I don't know. (He may not have know but as he was saying that sentence Joye was giving me a distinct "No" with he head movements.) So here is the Plot low down, and by the way, I have never talked about the plot publicly so if I pause for a minute I'm just debating in my mind what I should be saying. "And I'm reporting back to the team if he gives anything away." (Joye says jokingly) A lot of you who have seen me talk before all know how I pretty much spout all the details and I always get in trouble when I get back home, always, because someone in this group always goes and talks about this stuff on e-mail (evil grin), which of course I expect too. So I get slammed when I get home What in the world are you thinking. So now they've got spies. So she can smack me as I start to ahh deviate. For those of you who have actually played the other Ultimas, or were just in on the discussion we just had, you know. Ultimas 1 2 and 3 were basically go kill the big bad guy games. And otherwise unrelated. 4 5 and 6 were the Goodie goodie two shoes game where you tried to prove you were a person of good virtue and there really weren't any antagonists. And then Ultimas 7 8 and 9 were to be a kind of departure to the dark side. Which I'm kind of enjoying is a sort of sick and twisted way myself. So in 7 we introduce this character the guardian as a sort if true ultamently evil force who tries to come into Britannia, but you stop him by destroying the black gate. And at the end of Ultima 8 he is pissed off enough now, and at the end of Serpent Isle you were left in the ethereal void so he grabs you and drops you in his world Pagan where you end up having to not pay too much attention to the virtues where you fight fire with fire and eventually become the titan of ether and escape the land of Pagan. And that brings us up to Ultima 9. I think it is acceptable to say the Ultima 9 does take place back in Britannia. Which is good news, at least for me, I enjoy Britannia a lot. The game starts with you, let me pause so I can think what I'm gunna say here... Let me sort of give an overview and come back to details later. Over all of course this is going to be the end of the third book and third trilogy of Ultima so therefore it had to be a true epic profound game in the sense of not only did it need to bring what I call the Guardian Trilogy to a close but it is also going to bring the Avatar history and close. While we were doing that we said well we may as well go back to the first one. Of course there really wasn't that much plot in the first three so revised, we added we revised history a little bit for the first three. One of the hardest revisions I have to deal with is how in the world earth got into this (He points to the Ultima 2 map). So we kind of avoid that when we discuss histories in Ultimas. So anyway we got elements the involves, basically, a truly epic story that revolves around and brings to a close story elements out of all 9 Ultimas to date. Which was tricky to engineer and also to present properly. We wanted to be able to use elements out of those games but not even remotely required people to have played those games because you know most of those games aren't even playable on today's machines and a lot of people are too young to have been around to have played those games. When they first came out. So by no means for those of you who have not played Ultimas, don't go back and play them in preparation for Ultima 9. If you want to go back and play them, please do, go buy them, make us money but it's perfectly acceptable to start right off in Ultima 9 and you'll get a good sense of the history and every thing that had gone on before. One of the things I think is really cool about the Ultimas is how rich the history is. In the sense of even if you don't know the story and anecdotes, they are eluded to in such a kind of fond manner that you kind of get a feel that it really isn't something that wasn't made up today. It really has a lot that has gone before. And even little anecdotes like I talked about in the last session how Trip Howkins and Pirt Snikwoh and how much I hate Trip Howkins and how much I make fun of him in the game. So to construct an epic tale of this size, like I said, was sort of a difficult engineering. So we wanted it to be epic in the sense of scope and we also wanted it to be epic in the sort of deeds you performed. So it couldn't just be, you go out and collect puzzle pieces and Ta da, you win! It had to be really profound and so that's why we brought back a number of characters and story elements from the previous Ultimas so that way you have a sort of tangible evil that has a history that therefore has some profoundness for. That is why we brought in the riding of dragons because we said people have always longed to do things on these grander scales that the engine has never had the tools to be able to perform and so the deeds you perform are truly epic deeds with truly epic equipment against truly epic foes. That was really general wasn't it? So it's very epic. It's big big big big big. Some of the details of how big it is, there's literally hundreds of characters. There's 40 characters in what we call the main line, that's plot critical people that you must deal with significantly to get through the game. There's another hundred or so main conversations in the sense of fully developed personalities in the game. (Joye interjects), "They actually have something to say besides Name, Job, Bye." And then beyond that there is a plethora of what we'll call fillers; Beggars, guards, ect, ect, ect... that kind of flesh out the rest of the world. All spread around 12 or the 15 cities, Dungeons and other kinds of environments. So again that's kind of an idea of the scale. So what can I tell about the plot in detail? O.K. what I can say is that as the final battle, the guardian... ah, o.k. I can say this. Your back in Britannia and the Guardian is here. And the guardian has been here for the whole time you've been gone in Pagan. Or at lease a significant fraction of it, so therefore all the bad things that were immanent in Ultima 7 have come to Fruition, in the sense of his authority is well entrenched. As such his influence in the populous level, like individuals that may be sensitive to or favorable to are now well in place. All the way up to the sendings that are being sent to Lord British, which misrepresenting your deeds within the world. Like I'll go ahead, I'll get in trouble for this tomorrow, I'll describe sending one to you, which kind of sets the pace for this kind of out-of-favorness that you and Lord British will share. The first sending is kind of a re-visiting of what happened in Ultima 8. One of the scenes that you have to do in Ultima 8 is you have to summon a demon. You actually participate, in building the pentagram, lighting the candles, and summoning this great demon Pyros. Well, that's not a very Avatar like thing to do. So one of the first sendings is going to be the Guardian talking to Lord British saying this person you thought was suck a great ethical responsible hero has been out summoning demons. So Lord British gets to watch that scene. Later on in the game one of the first times you get to meet Lord British one of the things he asks you is were you off summoning demons? Were you off doing these kind of Paganistic anti-avatar kind of stuff? Paganistic, I use that loosely. Anyway you get the idea is that the guardian uses things that were truthful and as you play through the game Ultima 9 you actually continues to use actual events against you. Which will be an interesting thing to combat... no, no it wasn't that way really I didn't say that, well I did say that, well... didn't mean that. Well you get the idea, so throughout the beginning of the game you and LB get to be widely separated from mental perspectives. Another thing I can tell you is that the Guardian will now have set up a kind of great Cataclysm for Britannia. A very tangible measurable cataclysm that will be apparent when you first see a map of Britannia. When you look at Britannia, those of you who have seen Britannia will be able to recognize it, and of course in the game there will be old and new maps. When you see the cloth map for Ultima 9 you will see that there are substantial tectonic plate movements taking place. That also of course any time you have a society with massive tectonic plate movements it probable means that a lot of things are going badly. Because things like weather and crops and Plague and famine are gunna be amiss at times like this. This is gunna be a time of great strife which unless the avatar manages to fix things it could leave to really bad results for the populous of Britannia. Boy that's way to vague I know, and I apologize for being Vague but this is the last one we are really trying to hold back some of the detail. Because we really spent a lot of time engineering what we think is a rally cool ending. And a really cool kind of epic puzzle that we don't want to give away too much detail on. (I ask), "Are there Gargoyles?" There are Gargoyles. Any more questions? (someone in the crowd), "Will this be the last Ultima?" It will not be the last Ultima. At the very least there is Ultima Online, actually Ultima Online will come out first. (Joye jumps in here), "It will pretty be the last Ultima with the Avatar as the main protagonist, he will probably be making appearances in the Other Ultimas, but yeah next time around you will have a whole different player character." Yeah, but with Ultima 9, there will be other Ultimas, but we are trying to close this history, if you know what I mean. And do it in a way so that people don't feel like they have to play the other Ultimas first. If I can drive one thing home it's don't go play all the other ones first because you don't need to. If you have not played an Ultima before, start with this one and you will be extremely happy. (another crowd question), "Are you going to have a party?" Yes, you do get to have a party. The party size is being debated right now but it will be pretty small, you and a couple other companions that you can change out. (crowd member), "Will the companions be more useful?" Yes, we are working very hard to make them much more useful. In the sense that not only will they generally feed themselves and arm themselves, but also make much more useful commentary throughout the game. Offer advise. (Crowd), "Will they step in the fire?" I sure hope not. But of course we get a lot of character development as well. Shamino, the character who is the ranger, often helps you find your way through places. We've got this one part of the game where it is really critical that you get through this maze, we'll call it, correctly and Shamino was not in a proper mental state when he previously went through there and so you have an interesting time getting through this maze with his help, because his help is somewhat dubious. There are a variety of cases like that where he really get to expand on the character development of the individual. (Joye adds a bit here), "In fact every one of the traditional companions, in Britannia, has expanded. As well as with you." (I ask a stupid question.), "Dupre's role?" Dupre ah.. (Joye), "Take the 5th." We take the 5th about Dupre. Which is also telling in its self, so... More questions? (me) "Are there any races besides human and Gargoyle?" Oh yeah, well, for main PCs those are the two primary character classes but you know all of the creature monster types all of those could be sentient type things. (me again), "Any traditional Hobbit, Dwarf, Elf type thing?" Definitely no Hobbit no Dwarf, no Elf. So ah, no to those. Something interestingly enough I was 19 when I started Ultima 1 and 14 when I started the ones before that. So like in Ultima 1 not only are there things like Hobbits elves and Dwarves but things like Fuzzies. Which clearly I could have gotten in lots of trouble for and I'm lucky I didn't. One of the guys who was working for me in Ultima 6 put a barmaid named Tika in there which I found out later when I was on a panel was from Dragonlance. All kinds of.. The earlier stuff, I like to write it of as sort of youth and ignorance. As the product line and also the development group matured we've tried to focus on stuff that we have created on our own, which is always a plus. Even though Dwarves and Elves and stuff are basically classic mythology we have been focusing more and more on races and creatures and fiction and history that have been strictly evolved with in our product itself. (Crowd) , "I was wondering what your going to do with character stats. Are you going to have the sort of traditional, you know you kind of pull up the little picture and it has got their stats." (Joye), "Yeah, we're gunna have that, and we're gunna have a skills system. Much like we have in Ultima Online. Very similar to the one in Ultima Online, on purpose. Yes we'll have the full paper dolling, you know, take on your armor and you can see it on your little guy walking around. Take it off, you see him without the armor walking around. Base attributes there's only going to be a few but they can influence your rate of gaining skills how many skills you can remember at one time. That sort of thing." Yeah, the theory of attributes and game mechanics, which have been very minimalist as you have noticed, is in a computer game specifically an attribute that does not get used, that is not a game mechanic is literally, obviously, totally useless. And a attribute that only gets used for one or two things in the game is mostly useless. And I always wanted to make sure that if your tracking points in one area, that it going up is something relevant to you as a player. I think that makes some pretty good sense obviously. That's why I have kept the attributed down to pretty strict minimum of three. In fact as the teams have grown and changed their numbers I have always nixed it and kept it at three. However we do have more variety now with the skills system. For each game like Ultima 9 and Ultima Online will be a different set of skills because there will be a different set of activities you can do within the game. But that gives you individual determination to the exact kind of deeds you can perform within the physical game. (Crowd), "Are there any plans to go back and re-doing the old Ultimas so they can be played on today's systems?" Yeah in fact in fact in Ultima 9 is the game Ankhalabeth, which is the very first Ultima, Ultima 0 is in the game. That game was never converted to any platform beyond its original Apple ][ basic, and so that one is available. In fact, also, all the earliest Ultimas are available for free for download from Origin. Or sites we can steer you to. One thing that I would like to do personally, and I really can't say Origin would do this, is rewrite Ultima 4 from scratch. And the reason why is, out of all the Ultimas, by the way 5 and 7 are my favorites because the plots have a lot more gray area in them in the sense of the plots weren't black and white. And 4 the way I originally wrote 4 was very black and white, the good guys were obviously good and the bad guys were obviously bad and you go around and you act like the good guy and your done. You act like the good guy in very obvious ways. You be honest, OK you go out and do the little honesty quest. OK now there's compassion, OK go give money to beggars OK, do that quest. Valor! OK, go fight some monsters, finish that quest. After these 8 fairly repetitious quests, after you figure out the concept you can sort of just plod through it until your done, but the high concept of kind of proving yourself to be a person of good virtue and obtaining the state of Avatarhood I really still dig that a lot and so I would love to go re-write that sometime in a more modern tool, so maybe we'll take that on in the future. By the way, something nobody asked, is Underworlds. So... Joye... (Joye) "That is hopefully what I'm going to be doing after this one. Richard is gunna want to re-tool for Ultima 10 and Underworld is what sort of dragged me into Ultima for the first time. I started playing that even before we released it because they couldn't find anything else for me to do when I fist started. I'm just dying to do an Underworld 3. Apparently I'm not speaking loud enough! Underworld 3.. Yeah! Go! Yes! We're gunna do it (she gives a nice Thumbs up here, drawing smiles from Richard and the crowd)." In fact I think we'll literally start that right after Ultima 9. First thing that the Ultima 9 core team goes to work on. (Crowd) "Is it going to be a Looking Glass project?" Let me describe Looking glass who they are what there not at this point. Origin's corporate history is, we started in a garage, full of roaches. Then we moved up to North East which is where my painfully over educated brother was living. And I hated it because it was way too cold, so I moved the Ultima development team to Austin Texas which was where I went to school and I really loved it there. We were the only software company there for a long time so tons of people glommed on to us and Austin grew very rapidly, the North East office eventually said, well, we have no choice we have to go join those mean guys down south. So they begrudgingly came down south, all but a few. And so the few that stayed behind became Looking Glass. And so Looking Glass is really Origin North East, or was Origin North East remnants. So to speak. They did a number of projects with us, they did Space Rogue earlier on. The Underworlds later on. Since then Looking Glass has kind of evolved relationships with Virgin and some other folks. And so we're parted company slowly but surly over time. Actually we still do some work together, there still doing some Mac stuff for us. But the next Underworld we sort of want to develop ourselves, in house at Origin. (I ask) "For Ultima 9 how deep do the dungeons go, can you say, and can you tell me anything about the spell system." If I knew I could tell you how deep the dungeons could go but I don't know the answer. (Joye) "I don't know, about three levels. But, hypothetically we cold go any depth. We could go much deeper but just for map loading speed and technical reasons we only go about three levels deep, but the way we design them it can feel like they go much deeper than that and we can have half levels and so on. " What was the other half of your question? "The spell system." Ah.. Yeah... the spell system is interesting. First of all there will be a spell book. And there will be both regular spells and what we call rituals. And regular spells are things in your spell book you can prepare in advance, click on, and it goes. Rituals which I'll consider non-combat things, for example resurrecting a character you don't need to do quickly. In fact resurrecting will feel better from a player perspective in my mind if you actually have a ritual you perform. In the sense that you take the body over to an alter, throw it on the slab, light some candles, jump up and down and poof the guy comes to life. You get the idea. Those rituals will also be represented in your spell book but instead of being able to click it and make it happen you'll actually have to read it and do it. And so there'll be a combination of spells and rituals. We will have reagents although reagents are one of those kind of love hate things, at least I know I have with them, and I think some few others do in the sense that, I think it is cool to have the reagents and I like the logic of them in the sense of components that you need to cast spells, but after a while it kind of becomes tedious and painful to have to go back and kind of maintain that. OK? (That was the end of my blank tapes.) From here on I had to take notes by hand so you will get more facts without the fluff, I know, I know 10 pages of fluff it's about time I started giving you straight facts. Question: Will you use things like DVD and Intel's MMX instructions? Answer: Not in Ultima 9 but the creators of those kinds of things pay companies to use them and they can make games better so yes, we will most likely use them in the future. Question: Will the Blackrock sword be in Ultima 9? Answer: In some fashion, yes. Q: How many CDs? A: We are up to 11/2 but since we're adding in full digital music and sound it will be 2 or 3 when finished. --There will be two or three lead voice actors for the game but they have not finished negotiations and contracting so they can't say who they are. Richard Allen Garriott will not be doing the voice of Lord Cantabridgean British (from the city of Cambridge) --For Ultima X there will be a new Player character, the avatar may be in books or even someone you could meet but you won't play him/her. --Richard wants to do a project in the vain of Worlds of Ultima called MYTHOS, a Ultima perspective game with legendary fantasy settings, think Hobbit or Disney Cartoon fantasy with a 3/4th view. That is all I have on Ultima 9, I want to thank Joye McBurnett (Associate Producer) and Richard Garriott (Producer and creator) of Origin for allowing me to record them and post this report. Mark Carlson udic Brewmeister Dragon bashar@sundial.net