The Vineyards

Aside from Nexus and Dark Ages, both online, the game I spent the most time playing was Ultima VIII: Pagan. It was the first game from the series I played, and I confess, the only one I played with any seriousness. Ultima VII is considered the best in the series, and I did play it extensively for some time, but for some reason I stopped long before getting very far into it. Perhaps because the quest system was confusing for someone so used to Pagan's style of holding one quest at a time, all equally contributing to the main storyline, perhaps I hit a glitch caused by running the game on a system ten years too advanced for it, or perhaps I just screwed up and got my whole party killed and the last savegame was from six hours before. All things considered, I fully accept U7 is the best Ultima game, but my heart is in Pagan. This is the reason Ultima Online never appealed much to me: for me, Ultima was supposed to happen in Pagan, with the Guardian mocking the Avatar at every corner and the Titans governing everyday life; Earth and Britannia (where U7 takes place, along with most of the other games in the series) were just other worlds that got mentioned now and then by the Guardian.

The great hype raised recently over The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion picked my interest. This is one game I would be quite happy to buy, but the "official" release has all manual and in-game text in Spanish. I do not speak Spanish. Fewer people in this country know Spanish than English. "Spanish is closer to Portuguese than English is", is the obvious argument, but the amount of knowledge of a language needed to play a long RPG in it goes far beyond that of "the language is similar". I could bet my copy of Loom the number of people who bought the game because it was "comprehensible" with Spanish subtitles is far lower than of people who would have bought it in pure English but were completely put off by this language mix-up. Amazon will not ship games here, Play Asia is out of copies, and my recent experience with eBay is slightly sour.

I manage to play Oblivion, however, despite it not running all too well on my little Valhalla and it being hard to see with an eyepatch and hard to control with a hook. It is a great game, after one spends a whole day downloading and setting up "mods" and another day resolving conflicts between them - "vanilla" Oblivion is so full of bugs and problems, it is painful to play (and not only because it comes absolutely unoptimized out-of-the-box). I pity all XBox360 owners who are limited to official, commercial mods.

It dawned on me recently, then, that a full-conversion mod could be made to port Pagan into Oblivion. A non-official Ultima IX running on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind show similar things have been done, and it would probably not be very different in TESIV - there are plans to make a sequel to the unofficial U9 on Oblivion, in fact. An Oblivion U8 mod could not only encapsulate the entire Pagan storyline, it could go beyond and include The Lost Vale storyline, an add-on to Pagan that never got released, as well as many side-stories that went unexplored in Pagan's linearity.

While I have next to no experience in making game-mods, I would be willing to give this a try, if my life was in a more stable position. My biggest concern in this matter is not the making of the mod per se, but the likely complications that would arise from the minor fact Electronic Arts holds the rights to the Ultima series, which prevents even Richard Garriot, original creator of the Ultima games, from creating another one. Automatic defeat. But it would be awesome.

Posted by Etienne at April 12, 2007 10:16 PM