Ultima VIII: Pagan Retrospective Video Interview

Ultima Codex has published another retrospective interview for the Ultima series, which focuses mostly on Ultima VIII: Pagan (understandably, as it’s the game’s 20th anniversary), and this time the man fielding the questions is Mike McShaffry, project director on the title.

Luckily, they also provide a fairly lengthy transcript, from which I’m going to quote a snippet:

UC: Right, because you were the project director for that one. You kind of alluded to this a little bit already, what with the mix of programming and management, but.what did that role entail?

MM: Project director.what’s really funny is that we kind of made it up as we went along. Everybody was trying to figure out how to do big game development back then. I mean, we didn’t know. Nobody did! Those games were about as big as games could have been during those days. It was like.that decade’s Call of Duty: Ghosts. It was a lot of money, a huge team, and we really didn’t know how to do it. But we did know that somebody needed to keep control of our schedule. And we also knew that someone had to interface with a lot of the other departments outside of product development.like QA, like operations, and that kind of thing. And Richard wasn’t the type of person who wanted to do all that minutia, and so we created a structure on the team where you had lead designers, lead artists, lead programmers, and then over all the leads, a project director who was.kind of like a master cat-herder. Or at least thought he was at the time; that’s basically what it was.

UC: Okay, cool. Going on a bit of a tangent now.is there a character in the game based on you? I know that was kind of a thing at Origin.

MM: Not in Ultima 8. I did have a character.oddly enough, in Martian Dreams, in that initial rotoscoped-looking movie, I played the part of Nikola Tesla.

And then in Ultima 7, if I’m not mistaken, I think I played a character named Gordo, who was a casino runner or.the guy that managed the casino. I think that was my character. But in Ultima 8 I did not have a character.

UC: Okay, I remember Gordo.

MM: Really? I just remembered that name.

UC: Yeah.I remember the casino, because that’s.I read.there’s one of the fans DOUG the Eagle Dragon is what he goes by and the casino in Ultima 7 is one of his favourite ways to break the game. Once you become a Fellowship member, it’s actually impossible to lose at the casino. So what you can do is use the casino table.because the game individually creates each gold coin as an object, even within a stack, so you can actually create a game-breakingly large sum of money, that’ll actually just cause it to crash out.

MM: There’s tons of ways to break Ultima; we know that. It was probably one of the more (breakable?) games out there.not by design, of course! But that’s just how it worked out.

UC: Yes, and that’s part of the fun. Fan-related controversies aside, Ultima 8 was known for taking a much darker tone than some of the other Ultima games. It’s depiction of violence was starker, the themes of the game were darker. Do you recall what led up to that decision, which like I say contrasted rather strongly with some of the other games?

MM: Well.I would say there were definitely some dark elements in previous Ultimas. I don’t think the Shadowlords in Ultima 5 were exactly light-hearted. The Fellowship in Ultima 7 was pretty grim in certain places. But that said, I think it’s correct to say that Ultima 8 had some of the grimmest aspects of them all. I mean, the very first thing you say in the game was somebody getting their head chopped off. That was a big deal. Even in Ultima 7, the violence that you saw at the beginning of the game was after-the-fact. In Ultima 8, you actually saw it happen. So yeah, it was definitely darker.

I think the decision to do that was definitely Richard’s, and he entrusted his co-lead designers John Watson and Andrew Morris to make that come to life. He wanted a very different game, he wanted a different setting.and I think they pulled that off, for sure. I mean, it’s a very much darker game, and very different from any Ultimas.

UC: I’ll remember to follow up then; I did actually get ahold of Mr. Morris, so I will be talking with him at some point here.

So anyway, kind of related to the darker tone, Ultima 8 was obviously much more action-oriented; the gameplay style was more like what we would call, in modern times, an ARPG, versus some of the more classical RPGs that were the earlier Ultimas. Again, also a fairly significant departure in style, so.what drove that?

MM: Richard played Prince of Persia somewhere around the time that Ultima 7 was wrapping up, or Martian Dreams was wrapping up, and was really smitted with how much fun it was, and how much action it was, and that it still had a lot of RPG elements. So he took a lot of inspiration from that, and he really wanted to try move the game in that direction. Again, it was.definitely Richard that wanted to do that, and he was inspired by Prince of Persia.