![]() Megaman wasn’t a complicated protagonist – in the first nine or so games, he did exactly the same thing. (If you want something a little more RvR combat-oriented, check out Camelot Unchained, the Dark Age of Camelot remake.) Oh, and you can use coconut shells in the game to pretend to be a horse. It’s raised over $4,800,000 at the time of writing and is creeping closer to release, with regular alpha events. Garriott and his lead designer Starr Long know their MMOs and they’re rethinking this from the bottom up, with some truly innovative player-friendly mechanics. With a plot written by Dragonlance’s Tracy Hickman, it aims to combine the offline solo story of the singleplayer Ultimas with the PvP and world-building of the MMO. So Shroud of the Avatar is Garriott’s attempt to reclaim his Ultima franchise in all but name, after EA misused the brand awfully (despite the best efforts of some at Mythic to revive it). Garriott can also fairly claim that his team created the modern MMO with Ultima Online. It really was the Skyrim of its day, when Bethesda were just in small pants. The Ultima series, if you missed it, was around from the very beginning of modern RPGs, starting from 1979’s Akalabeth: World of Doom, and peaking with Ultima 7, a game so huge and twisty it came in two parts. He left his genre-defining Ultima series in the hands of Electronic Arts, following the debacle that was the cutting edge but sadly awful Ultima 9, and then resurfaced at NCSoft to preside over Tabula Rasa, an innovative and fun MMO, which would have survived nicely in today’s F2P world. If anyone deserved a second (or possibly third) chance, it was Richard Garriott. Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues / Ultima Online Despite this, PA still has a respectable average score, implying that most punters are pretty happy with what they’ve got. (And TA’s campaign, whisper it, was much better than the PA’s more modern take.) Admittedly, there have been complaints about PA – the game has been released unfinished, according to many kickstarter backers, and they’ve flooded the public reviews with that. ![]() Like TA, PA is better in skirmish than in the confusing and limited campaign mode. But the scale and variety of troops – from scuttling infantry and light trikes to nukes and carpet bombers to giant tanks and (one day) death stars – makes it more tactically interesting, even if it’s still very much an APM (actions-per-minute) game at heart. The game has you take control of a robot faction, building factories and harvesting resources across the surface of several planetoids. Though strictly speaking ‘planetary’ is smaller than ‘total’. But another segment of the team claimed that their vision was what they’d always wanted to do with TA, way back in 1998, and their pitch for ‘Planetary Annihilation‘ won a lot of Kickstarter backers. Planetary Annihilation / Total AnnihilationĪ portion of the team behind Total Annihilation (led by Chris Taylor) went onto make the more commercial Supreme Commander. Moreover, many of these games deserve to be on ShowMeTheGames because they’re mostly sold directly, after successful kickstarter campaigns. SimCity, Syndicate, Monkey Island, Carrier Command and Thief have all had so-so remakes. I hear repeated quibbles over Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen, mainly because Elite: Dangerous has proved so good. There are some spiritual successors that didn’t make the cut here: Godus might be a spiritual sequel to Populous, but it’s learned too much from mobile games to be much fun. The others that kept going – Mario, Sonic and the like – don’t merit a mention here. And many of our favourite franchises died in the multiple videogame market crashes of the mid -80s, or were tangled up in ownership disputes, like anything associated with Interplay, or even were bought up by big corporations who liked owning IP (Infogrames, Activision, EA). We’re happy to pay through the nose for that experience again, brought up to modern standards. Many older gamers want to recapture the first moments of their youthful gaming or to evangelise the games that started them gaming to a new generation. ![]() The only thing that still costs a bunch is the hardware to play on, and once you’ve got that, most games turn up in a Steam sale or Humble bundle eventually. These days gamers are an astoundingly lucky bunch, with high disposable incomes and easy access to cheap games. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, as the old joke goes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |