The Adventuress

Awesome project and sweet interview…

by Amber on October 19th, 2006

As many of you might have guessed, I’m a fan of the Ultima series. I love them all, because of the awesome story line and great just the overall feeling of the game. It makes me happy just thinking about it… except for going into caves. I hate going into caves, no matter what the game. Why is that? Maybe it’s because there are always spiders in the caves… Hmmm. Hey, did you just call me a wussy??

Anyways. A new project was under taken more than 5 years ago to turn Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, from something that looks like this:

I guess it’s better than Ultima I… but not much.

Into something that looks like this:

Yep… just a bit better

Want to read more of my fascinating article? Clicky the link below…

Now, there is something to be said about the original version of Ultima V, it does have it’s old school charm that many people have fallen in love with. However, I do believe the people who decided to re-create Ultima V, Team Lazarus, definitely had an awesome idea re-creating the story onto the oh so popular Dungeon Siege 3d RPG gaming engine.

According to this article found on RPG Watch, the team worked on this massive project for over 5 years before they were able to release the game in full. Team Lazarus worked extremely hard on keeping the story-line and the basic feel for the whole game intact, without taking away the charm and quality the original Ultima V had.

I think this is an awesome way to get more people into playing the great Ultima series. If I had to start playing Ultima on something that looks like the first picture above, I don’t think I would’ve given it more than two minutes of my ever so precious time. It would be awesome if there would be a way to get games 1 through 4 up in the same way Team Lazarus re-did Ultima 5. That, however, would take a lot of work.

The project leader, Ian “Tiberius” Frazier, conducted the interview with RPG Watch, and said that doing a project like this again wouldn’t be worth while, because of how time consuming it was. He does, however, say that it was an awesome experience and he managed to achieve one of his goals because of the project… he wanted to become a game developer and that’s just what he did.

To be honest, I don’t even know how you would go about re-creating a game like that. The scope of the project must have been HUGE. There would be all the dialogue that would have to be documented, the people, and places. Then you would have to take all of that stuff and get the artists, programmers, musicians and all that stuff to actually make a game.

What’s even cooler is that they made improvements on the game, which includes adding new content and dialogue, and tried to make the game not only Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, but instead Utlima V: Lazarus. The improvement on the orginal game make it that much better. They wanted to fill in all the pieces that the team as a whole felt weren’t all there in the original game. This made the story just that much richer.

You know what is also cool? This team got the full support of Richard Garriott, the orginal creator of the Ultima series. He seems to love the game and according to the article, the man keeps a copy of Ultima V on his laptop so that he may play it at will. Pretty sweet deal.

I salute Team Lazarus for their ambitions and for all the balls it must have taken to follow this through. Leave it to a bunch of RPG freaks to actually be nerdy enough to plot something so grand inscale. I LOVE NERDS.

If you’d like to take a look at the Dungeon Siege mod of Ultima V: Lazarus, you can do so by skipping on over to The Ultima 5: Lazarus website. While you’re at it, give those guys a pat on the back. They’re awesome.

Share This

Related Stories

• More TellTale News…
• New Hothead Games Interview
• The Monkey Island 2 Speech Project

POSTED IN: Development, Interviews, RPG, Super Cool