BREAKING NEWS: Worlds of Ultima Free on GOG (June 18, 2012)

[Bandit LOAF]

GOG today announced the surprise release of both games in Origin's Worlds of Ultima (aka Ultima Worlds of Adventure) series. Both titles are available free. The idea behind both "Worlds" games was that Origin could re-use the existing Ultima VI engine to create lower budget games between 'numbered' releases. A second team of developers would focus on spinoffs while others continued work on Ultima VII.

Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire (1990) transports the Avatar to a jungle world full of dinosaurs and stone-age people. Much of the development team would go on to work on Wing Commander II, including Stephen Beeman who directed both games. An SNES port was developed by Billy Cain, lead designer of Wing Commaner Prophecy.

Ultima Worlds of Adventure: Martian Dreams (1991) is a significantly more complex game set in the Victorian era and featuring a trip to Mars and a cast of familiar historical characters (including Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla.) Oft-forgotten is that much of the game is not spent on Mars but in fact in the various characters' dreams. Martian Dreams was championed by Wing Commander produced Warren Spector. Spector was clearly enamored of the possibilities offered by the Worlds platform; his papers at the University of Texas include dozens of concepts for further spinoff adventures.

Lower than expected sales doomed the series and the lack of a retail CD-ROM release has left it an obscure footnate for most gamers. Development of a tangential third title, Arthurian Legends, began after Martian Dreams but ultimately came to naught as the development team was slowly transferred away for other projects. Origin did continue to develop spinoff projects based on existing engines, including Serpent Isle, Crusader, System Shock and a host of RealSpace games.

These releases are not part of GOG's 25-title Electronic Arts deal and were instead provided as part of the disjointed promotion for the yet-to-be-announced Ultima Forever social game.

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Original update published on June 18, 2012

 

[Dondragmer]

Savage Empire came with a map? Years ago I bought a CD-ROM compilation that contained Savage Empire, but it came with almost no supporting documentation. I attempted to map it myself, but gave up given the repetitiveness of the terrain. Maybe I can finally complete the thing.

I've seen this multiple times on GOG - they have games I already own, but the manuals made available for download are more comprehensive than what was in the box I bought years ago. That's before you get to the nifty bonus materials GOG often digs up. Hmmm, I see they also threw in the cluebooks. For those of us who never completed these games the first time, should we take that as a warning, or a challenge?

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Yup, the Ultima games were famous for always coming with maps. There's a nice archive of them here: http://www.dengler.net/xedragon/hrump/#maps

 

[Quarto]

Long before I had ever heard of Wing Commander (...in spite of the fact that Wing Commander was released first), I was playing Martian Dreams. "Playing" may not be the right word. I was absolutely blown away by Martian Dreams. To me, it remains one of the greatest RPGs ever developed. It is a game that manages to create a convincing Victorian world, filled with real characters and great concepts inspired by the era's own science fiction literature. You could argue that the game is actually hugely derivative (I mean, it's H.G. Wells, Verne, and a couple of others mashed together), but it's derivative in the most creative way possible.

Martian Dreams is one of those games that I still come back to every couple of years, and I play it through to the end. Anyone who loves RPGs and hasn't played Martian Dreams absolutely should.

Savage Empires, in my subjective opinion, was a bit worse (it was also the only Origin game ever where I had to restart because a bug made it impossible to finish the game), but then again, this may depend on personal taste. I love Verne and Wells, but if someone is into the 1930s-50s pulp sci-fi, they will probably love Savage Empires all the more. Also, it's worth checking out just for history's sake - long before crafting items became all the rage (approximately in 2011?), Savage Empires had you digging up clay, collecting sticks and burning them into ash, and performing a couple of other activities I don't recall, in order to put together low-tech firearms, munitions and grenades.

So yeah, this is awesome stuff. The whole Worlds of Ultima concept was fantastic - by recycling the engine, the graphics and sounds, they were able to cut costs enough to try out these fantastically creative games. Deep down, I think I still bear a grudge towards the general public for not buying enough of these titles to warrant more sequels...