Ultima VIII: Pagan Retrospective Interview

The good folks at Ultima Codex have interviewed Ultima VIII programmer and designer Jason Ely on the project, which offers some interesting insight on the controversial penultimate main Ultima title. Here’s a snippet:

UC: Ultima 8 is notorious for having a lot of cut content Richard Garriott has stated that the game was cut so severely that the cloth map never matched the game world. Do you have any specific recollection of what ended up in the cutting room floor, and what part(s) of your work ended up being cut?

JE: Ultima 8 originally shipped on floppy disks (prior to the speech pack) so we had very limited space for artwork and content. This was the main reason why cuts had to be made.

One example of a cut that we were quite sad about had to do with combat and death animations for all town npcs. In doing this it was no longer possible to fight and kill every townsfolk in the game. It had always been tradition in Ultima to give you the freedom to wreak havoc on a town if you wanted to let out a bit of frustration.

Also, there was one map in particular that we had to cut. It was an underworld map being worked on by Melanie Green. I do not remember the name or how it fit into the storyline, but I do remember it was a cavernous map with deep blue walls.

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UC: While my understanding is that you moved to Crusader after Ultima 8 shipped, you seemed based on Usenet posts to have some knowledge about the first iteration of Ultima 9, which was supposedly using the same engine. Do you have specific recollection about the content of this game, what its world and story would be kind? Was this chapter of the series meant to be as arcade-like as Ultima 8?

JE: Originally Ultima 9 and Crusader were using the same code which was a more refined Ultima 8 engine. I was busy upgrading the old U8 engine to support higher resolutions (640×800, 800×600, 1024×768) and trimming off some of the fat. We made sure that the engine worked for both projects, and it did.

A few months into the development John Watson showed me the Britannia map and he was exploring the map with what we called (Tiny tar). The game was looking like an isometric version of Ultima 3, 4 or 5 where you had a zoomed out version of the world and a smaller avatar. When you came to a town, castle or cave you were teleported to a new map with a normal sized avatar.

At some point they took a very different direction and decided to go with a full 3D game and abandoned the bitmapped version. I am not sure of the reason behind that decision. I have to say I was looking forward to Tinytar.

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UC: Is there any particular aspect of the engine or game that you remember being particularly proud of? Is there anything in the game that you’re particularly proud of, or something you put in that people didn’t notice when playing it?

JE: I added the ability to jump on and squish the bugs. I wrote that code when I had a little downtime. I never meant for it to stay in the game.

I liked the endgame elemental plane maps. I enjoyed making them. Two things in particular I had fun with in the end maps were on the Fire and Air maps. I created the scene where you face Pyros on the Fire map he reanimates the two demon statues. In the final Air map I felt like being an evil bastard and wanted to punish those players who were greedy. The floating island with all the visible shiny items in the Air map that collapsed as you jumped on it and causing you to fall to your death, that was me. *sinister laugh*

Two things that I was actually quite surprised that made it into the game were two of my books. When I was developing the Book gump I needed to test single and multi-page books. The first book I wrote was a parody of the Beverly Hillbilly theme song and was based on a demon named Fred. I hid it somewhere in the world in a chest. Sadly I forgot where in the world it is, but it is in the game. I don’t believe anybody ever found that one. The second book was the Book of Cheese. I wrote that while testing multi-page books. I didn’t give any thought to what I was writing. I simply started typing. The final line in the book is (Eat Cheese and Perspire). That book was originally placed in a chest that was easy to come by early in the game. From what I was told Richard Garriott and John Watson were playing the game and came across it. They thought it would be funny to move it to the Ethereal map behind one of the sinister columns with only a single column of pixels exposed. The Book of Cheese was quickly found.

Spotted on RPGCodex.