The Gameplay

Close your eyes and picture yourself playing your Paladin from a third-person perspective, with the camera behind his back. This may be hard to do, since you can't close your eyes and read this at the same time (that was a joke). Now, place him in an Unreal FPS game engine, and give him all of the equipment and skills he has from Diablo II. Have him walk out onto the Bloody Foothills of Act V and start bashing monster heads.

This is Ultima X: Odyssey.

The developers reminded us again and again that what we were playing was a pre-alpha version. Everything that I will discuss here could change wildly by the time the beta is released. Keep that in mind...

The Graphics

There's not much to say about the graphics other than they are incredibly superb. In a forest environment, you see shadows along the ground that wave around, simulating the swaying of the tree leaves above. Water effects are awesome; the monsters and characters highly defined and detailed. That's what you get when you use an FPS engine in a role-playing game. There's no point in even discussing the graphics; they're that good. Just know that the game will look incredible.

Playing your Character

If you wanted to play Diablo II from the third-person perspective, targeting could be a little difficult. In a truly 3D environment, the action is going on all over the place, and using the mouse to target a monster is unwieldy. You're already using the mouse to look around and aim where you're going. Thus, UXO characters utilize an auto-targeting system. When you pull within attack range of a monster, it is highlighted with a ring underneath it. You can lock that target if you wish with a push of a button, or else switch to another target with other buttons.

UXO features an attack/defense system. Left-clicking will attack with a weapon, while right-clicking manages your defense. If you attack *all* the time, your defense falls and you become easier to hit. This makes the combat system a little less passive than in Diablo II and MMORPGs in general. Many massively multiplayer games will have you ordering your character to attack while you sit back and read War and Peace. Not so here. This is, like the Diablo series, an action game at heart. You will be battling creatures in a fast-paced sequence. With such an emphasis on action, this game could really pull in the Diablo crowd - you can log on to the server and within 60 seconds you're bashing heads.

Your characters will possess skills that are used via hotkeys and selected by you. So, for example, in the PvP tournament I bound Fireball to my F2 key. Melee classes will have melee-based skills, some of which had pretty slick animations during the gaming sessions. One of which would smash the characters arms down on the ground, causing rocks to fly up in the air and rain down on the bad guys, causing area-of-effect damage. I can picture groups of players in incredibly chaotic battles casting all kinds of skills.

Configuring your Character

UXO will feature a number of races. For the EA event, five races were available. According to the Lead Designer of UXO, the race you choose will have zero impact on what abilities your character has. This is good and bad - good, because now not every fighter in the realm will play the same race, but bad, because there's simply no way to tell what someone is by their appearance. It would be hilarious to see a pixie (yes, they have plans for a pixie) beat the snot out of a mean, tough Orc in a battle. Even still, you possess the freedom to have your character look ANY way you want without worrying that you're screwing yourself over in the abilities department.

So, the abilities come down to your class. There are various classes, and listing them here probably wouldn't be useful anyway because they'll change. Besides, I forgot them. The class you choose determines which of three skill trees you can select from. You can then specialize in one of the trees, or spread out. UXO features a skill tree system somewhat like Diablo II, but without the prerequisites. You open up a tier of skills by placing points in the tier above it. After a specific number of points are spent in at least one of the three skills of a tier, the next one down becomes available. While this forces you to use skill points up, you aren't as restricted as in Diablo II. Also, Every stat and skill had a down-arrow button to unassign points placed there. The developers stated that there would be a way to reassign your stats and skills in the game, but they hadn't decided on how that would be implemented.

Your stats are divided between Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity, and Constitution. Each of these stats has some general impact on your character, so that even fighter classes will have a need to develop Intelligence some. Likewise, mages can't ignore Dexterity. The details of these were pretty hidden; this pre-alpha release didn't have much in the way of stats or how they will impact your character. For instance, you have a Power rating based on your stats, and Power will determine how quickly you can raise your defense and attack. However, in this demo we played, raising your defense only cost you 1 Power point.

The equipment found in Origin's demo consisted of some armor, swords, bows, staves, rings, and amulets. No belts - no potions! Stats were rare - the weapons had some details on the damage they dealt, but the armors did not have any information on defense provided. Obviously chain mail was better than leather, though. Everything you wear changes your character's appearance. You can strip right down to thongs and bikinis, which some players discovered (and played in) with gusto.

Finally, you can configure your character with the Virtue system. You gain virtue points by completing quests. This wasn't really implemented yet and was still in the design/planning phase. I'll get more into that below.

Storyline

As I mentioned at the start of my report, I'm not very familiar with the Ultima universe. But the storyline goes like this: UXO is a continuation of Ultima IX. Avatar, aka The Good Guy, is locked in a battle against the Guardian, aka The Bad Guy. They are fighting on another plane of existence, from what I gather - and Avatar is losing. He needs help, so he created a world for heroes to test their mettle and gain in the Virtues so that they can join him in battle. Thus, this game does not take place in Britannia, although a number of locations in the game will be familiar to long-time Ultima fans. Oh, and Lord British is off somewhere sulking. Or maybe rolling over in his figurative grave as an Ultima game is made without him...

Throughout the event, and especially in the question and answer session, I got the distinct sense that storyline and plot for this game will be weak. Most of the focus has been placed on the quests and not the overall story arc. Your goal, as a hardcore player, will be to play one character through each of the Virtues (i.e. Valor, Compassion, Spirituality, Justice, etc). If you complete a character who followed Valor, you could then start a new character who would be a "disciple" of the first character, and would have bonuses to start with that normal characters would not have. Once you have a completed character for each of the Virtues, you ascend and fight with Avatar. Of course, that sounds like an end-game, which is a bad thing for any MMORPG. However, I also got the sense throughout that this will not be your typical MMORPG. One thing they were going for was to be different from the other massively multiplayer games out there, and I think they'll accomplish that. We'll have to wait for the beta, however, to see if it will actually be successful.

Quests

After dissing the potential plot and depth of the game, let me praise the actual quests. Those of you familiar with Diablo's quest system know that it's pretty constrained. You're forced to do this or that, there's no choice in the matter. UXO's quest system is tied into its Virtue system. When you play a quest, you make choices that determine what Virtue you follow. You can play the game quite a bit without taking on any quests; however, if you don't actively find a quest, the developers claim that a quest will come to you - i.e. someone will run up to you and ask for help, etc. This makes the UXO quest system far superior to that of Diablo II. A nice feature if they can get that to work. As an example, I'll use the demo quest that the developers showed off on Friday.

Five players met in a forest and grouped together (more on parties below). They met up with a man who was dying and asked the party to help him by taking a necklace he had. They took the necklace and the man keeled over. Suddenly the necklace spoke to the party leader, saying that it was a soul trapped inside the charm, and the only way to be free would be for the party to slay some undead skeletons nearby. The party leader had two choices. Either she accepts the desire of the soul in the necklace, or she decides to check in with the local Healer first.

The party leader chose to ask the Healer nearby about the necklace. The group ran over to the Healer (about 1/4 a mile away), fighting a few monsters while in transit. The Healer told them that the necklace housed a demon, and the necklace must be destroyed. A wizard nearby informed them that the only way to destroy the necklace would be to either help him out by getting him something, or to go kill the person who made the necklace. That would be a bandit leader in a camp nearby. The group slaughtered the bandit and his minions, and the necklace was destroyed - releasing the demon! They defeated the demon and returned to the Healer to complete the quest. Upon completion, they scored Valor points. Valor was awarded for their bravery during the quest.

The developers stressed that there's no wrong way to perform a quest. For example, if they agreed to help the necklace from the start, they would still complete the quest (and probably fight the demon anyhow), but score Compassion points instead. Or, they could have declined to help the dying man to begin with, and not accepted the quest. All quests will be declinable.

Another example they told us was that you are asked to find a stolen sword. You meet the man who stole the sword, and he explains that he only stole it because he was being chased by a creature that could only be killed by that sword. He would be happy to return it once the creature is dead. You could choose to follow the path of Justice and kill him for the sword to return it to its owner, or follow Compassion and help him kill the creature.

When TPJ and I played a group quest together, we needed to stop a Frost Giant who was sending waves of ice monsters down the mountain to attack the people. When you're given a quest, a blue marker is placed on your compass in the lower-left hand corner of the screen, and you can follow that marker to go where you need to. It's very handy, but unfortunately it doesn't give an indication vertically where you need to go. So, if you need to get to a spot two floors beneath you, it can be very difficult to find - so much so that our party was giving up (remember, we were short on time) and using codes to warp around to the quest goal areas. That's something the dev team will work on, of course. The quest itself was very fun!

Zones

We played in three different zones. I found the mountain zone to be the most impressive, but graphically they were all incredible. There was nothing tying the zones together, so we didn't really get a sense of the "world" per se. Not much else to say here, other than the zones were *very* large.

Party Management

It's Party Time! Want someone to join your party? Click on their character on your screen, and drag their image to the right side of your screen. They pop up as an icon and are invited. Parties are managed by a leader. When performing quests, if the quester stops to talk to someone, everyone in the party also stops to see the conversation. This way you truly can complete a quest as a group. Party experience is shared, but the details of that were not revealed.

When you defeat a monster, loot it drops shows up as a treasure chest. It can be party-configurable that the loot is only available: A) to the person who scored the kill, B) to anyone in the party, or C) to the party leader only, who determines how the loot is divided! Very cool.

The Interface

The development team liked to show off some of the neat interface features in the game. It's all designed to be unobtrusive and intuitive. Drag-and-drop is king. For instance, open up a chat window (for zone, party, guild, whatever), and type "hey, check this out." Drag an item from your inventory onto the chat box. Press Enter. The item appears as a hyperlink in the players' chat windows, so they can click on it and see the item. Items cannot be dropped; they disappear forever. So you need to trade, and they had an interface for that as well.

One of their design goals is flat-out: "No /slash commands." You can do anything but actually type a message via the mouse. Want to assign a skill to a hotkey? Drag it from your skill window to the bottom of your screen, and it gets placed in a hotkey slot.

Player vs Player

You probably got a general gist of PvP from my description of the Tournament on page one. PvP is consensual in UXO, and separate areas can be spawned specifically to fight in. Supposedly there will be an interface to make bets with - so you can make the fight mean something - but otherwise, a PvP death shouldn't punish you. Death in general won't punish you, I was told by the lead designer - the harshest penalty might be a 60-second wait or something. Guild battles will also be something they'll try to have in the game.

Final Thoughts

Every time I heard the team discuss a feature, I thought "just like Diablo II." Moon gates: a system of teleportation through the world, activated when you locate one. Just like waypoints (but better)! Skill development, stat development - just like Diablo II's (but better). Battle system - like Diablo II's (but better). So yes, I saw that in most every feature that was similar to Diablo II's, UXO was better - that the team saw what was good with Diablo and Diablo II, and decided to improve on that. You could argue that they're copying, but it's not like Diablo or Diablo II were original game concepts either. Blizzard's strategy has always been to take a game concept and try to perfect it. The key is in the execution and polish, and what I saw executed very well.

On the negative side, I do have some concerns regarding the longevity of the game. Crafting, the making of items by players, will not be in this game. Guild support seemed very minimal, with no guild structures and only the smallest amount of actual guild management built-in. Everything was designed to be simplified to fit the action theme - which can work very well, like Diablo - but hardcore MMORPG fans may find the game lacking depth. What the developers said quite a few times was that they'd rather get 100 features running very well than have 500 features that are mediocre. It's probably not fair for me to be making that harsh an evaluation so early, either. We did not get to see any of the underlying massively multiplayer game structure. Thus, it's anyone's guess how this will all meld together. Since all players can spawn their own mini-worlds to quest in, what exactly makes the game massively multiplayer? This is the same question I ask of other upcoming MMORPGs that will feature this system, including UXO's main competitor - Blizzard's World of Warcraft. If everyone plays (even solo) in their own spawned server areas, the only places that will be "massively multiplayer" will be the towns. Well, if you took Diablo II's Battle.Net chat interface and made it a town in the game, you'd have the exact same thing.

And, as we all know, there's no monthly fee to that game. :-)

Bottom line: I believe that if you like Diablo, you're going to like this game. If you love Diablo, you're going to love this game. That said, I'll be waiting for the beta to see how it has progressed between now and then. Who knows, this could be the Lounge's third covered game. It fits the theme of the site well - this is a game that's simple and easy on the surface, but may have much "lurking" underneath for us die-hards to explore.

See you in the beta!