Thirith on 15/7/2015 at 06:15
For my money, Ultima VII still does the best job of creating a living, breathing, believable world. Britannia's design, its various towns and communities, the NPC schedules, it all comes together so well. That's also one of the reasons why I didn't really warm to Divinity: Original Sin: they had the world interactivity, but I never once believed in the world, because it's just not coherent.
What I also loved about the Ultima games: how the world developed from U4 to U7, both as a world and in technical terms. Each time it felt like revisiting the same place, but it's a few dozen years later, so it's not entirely the same. Villages grow into towns, towns change to cities, you meet the children and grandchildren of characters you met before. Origin Systems used the tagline "We create worlds!", and they definitely did.
Also, the Ultima spinoff Martian Dreams is the best Jules Vernes-inspired game out there, and its mix of historical characters is inspired.
Starker on 15/7/2015 at 07:29
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Is Ultima VII really that amazing?
Yes.
Quote:
(
http://www.mobygames.com/featured_article/feature,31/section,217/)
"I want Ultima 7 to be rediscovered amongst the RPG crowd - designers and players. When it comes to the social aspect of it, U7's world is the most realistic game world out there. It is not realistic because its lore is so complicated (Morrowind) nor is it realistic because you have NPCs bumping around (Gothic, Oblivion). It is realistic because every NPC is given life through combining writing and scheduling (that put the Gothic series and Oblivion to shame). They were written into human beings. And they were written to affect the persons around them. And thus you see things like conservative rich family making life difficult for the single mom and her son, two beggars spending their days around in bitterness and world-hating, a father killing his daughter's best friend because she was not human, social tensions between the rich and poor, tensions between the poor and poor, outcasts of the society trying to fit into this cruel world, a man cheating on his wife with a young religious girl and so on. Ultima isn't realistic because of its game mechanics, lore or graphics. It is realistic because of its human values, because the game world is filled with humans. They lie, they hurt, they laugh, they do random acts of kindness, they fuck around like animals, they live, they enjoy simple things, etc - Ultima 7 realized the importance of the human heart and used it. It is not perfect, but there is no reason to leave this thing in the 90's and never perfect it. There is a lot to learn from Ultima 7 and much of it could improve current games."
Thirith on 15/7/2015 at 07:38
What was definitely missing was reactive NPCs along the lines of what we get in, say, the Fallout games. If someone brought back the things that Ultima VII did singularly well and combined it with what Obsidian does best, that'd be absolutely amazing.
And hell to bugfix.
Yakoob on 15/7/2015 at 18:44
Quote Posted by henke
Even if they split it up just to get more ad revenue from it, can you really blame them? Look at the amount of writing on just
one of those pages. Disagree with the lists if you will, but you can't deny that a lot of thought and hard work went into compiling them.
I've worked for an ad-based news site for almost a year and can attest the crazy amount of ad-views needed to stay afloat.
Also, to be honest, I like the paging. Given the amount of text I dont always read the whole thing in one go, so it's nice to bookmark a certain page for later than having to remember what number I was on and do a mega-scroll down to find it.
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
RPS gonna RPS
What you mean by that? Genuinely curious as I dont read RPS religiously.
Quote Posted by Starker
Yes.
Quote:
"I want Ultima 7 to be rediscovered amongst the RPG crowd - designers and players. When it comes to the social aspect of it, U7's world is the most realistic game world out there ... It is realistic because every NPC is given life through combining writing and scheduling (that put the Gothic series and Oblivion to shame). They were written into human beings. And they were written to affect the persons around them. And thus you see things like...
Interesting. Sounds a lot like Witcher 3 actually.
Clockface on 15/7/2015 at 21:12
The FPS Top 50 list is called "The 50 Best FPS Ever Made" (whereas the RPG list is called "The 50 Best RPG On PC"), so why is the FPS list limited to only PC games. Some of the best FPSs ever were console only, such as Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters 2, and Timesplitters: Future Perfect, and fully deserve to be on that list, and not at the tail end, either.
I still think that Perfect Dark is the best FPS, and that's not nostalgia, as I still play it regularly.
EvaUnit02 on 15/7/2015 at 22:18
Quote Posted by Clockface
The FPS Top 50 list is called "The 50 Best FPS Ever Made" (whereas the RPG list is called "The 50 Best RPG On
PC"), so why is the FPS list limited to only PC games. Some of the best FPSs ever were console only, such as Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters 2, and Timesplitters: Future Perfect, and fully deserve to be on that list, and not at the tail end, either.
I still think that Perfect Dark is the best FPS, and that's not nostalgia, as I still play it regularly.
You're speaking as if an entirely subjective list was objective.
Jason Moyer on 16/7/2015 at 02:55
Quote Posted by Yakoob
What you mean by that? Genuinely curious as I dont read RPS religiously.
RPS has fairly predictable opinions about most things, especially if you know the specific writer(s) contributing to something. Also, most of the writers there are either too young to remember pre-90's or pre-00's gaming or weren't into gaming before then or were too British so have no gaming references outside of a handful of BBC Micro and Amiga games, so you end up with a significant bias towards stuff from the past 10-15 years except for a handful of random titles that are either universally lauded by everyone or no one played outside of the UK.
They also have a habit of being fairly generic when it comes to their tastes, praising universally lauded AAA blockbusters or indie darlings while being "meh" about everything else. Unless those universally lauded titles are in a genre that they don't understand (like the Wargame series or Assetto Corsa or whatever).
They also tend to jump on every passing controversy train that's even tangentially related to PC gaming, although that's mostly John Walker I think. Oh, and while they've had lots of great writers in the past (Jim Rossignol and Kieron Gillen, after they left they had Nathan Grayson) I think the only person left whose articles I read is Alec Meer.
Jason Moyer on 16/7/2015 at 02:57
Quote Posted by Clockface
so why is the FPS list limited to only PC games
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
PC Gaming Since 1873
N'Al on 16/7/2015 at 09:26
Quote Posted by icemann
, which to me always = their opinion meaning nothing
That's just ridiculous.
henke on 16/7/2015 at 10:07
Indeed. I don't see why someone judging a game on it's own merits, rather than how it stacks up against (sometimes rose-tinted) memories of a predecessor, would be a bad thing.
