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Mr. Pickles posted:I know IX is frowned upon by the community, mainly because EA, and also because the Avatar had no memory of his previous adventures, but for kid me it was awesome. Ultima IX was 'frowned upon' because it had a horrible graphics engine, a million bugs, combat was terrible, the voice acting was a joke, and the story was a pale shadow of what had been originally planned. EA is partially to blame for shuffling people around, but mostly it was Garriott who porked himself up the pooper. Despite Spoony's rantings, 'forgetting his previous adventures' is a very minor sin.
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Dec 22, 2017 18:06
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synthetik posted:Ultima IX had a nice box and I still have the included Ankh pendant around here somewhere. Every single Ultima game was packaged very nicely, with a cloth map, full manual, and some other keepsake. One of them had a metal coin with symbols, another a polished moonstone.
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Dec 24, 2017 23:40
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Mr. Pickles posted:Of course I too quit the game because of some bug stonewall that wouldn't let me progress the story, right after I exited the gargoyle city (which was also buggy). If you left the gargoyle city without taking a queen egg, you were hosed and couldn't progress. Not really a bug so much as lovely design. Yes, I remember tiny details about games I played ~20 years ago.
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Dec 27, 2017 02:37
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Mr. Pickles posted:Motherfucker. I always wanted to finish the lighthouse quest and see what happened if I did, owell, tough. ...except it wasn't really an open world game; parts of it would open up as the plot progressed. If you used a glitch to get to areas you weren't supposed to, the game assumed the plot had reached that point. Once you find all four gems, have them polished, and put them in the correct lighthouses, the reward is... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... 100 gold, which was pennies by that time. No karma, no unique magic item, nothing. 100 worthless gold. ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... ... ....... .... ...... .... Yeah, Ultima 9 was really, really Not Playtested.
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Dec 27, 2017 02:58
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lolasaurusrex posted:God drat. How does the guy that made Ultima 7 turn around and make this? I wouldn't even put this monstrosity to my name if I was RG. My opinion is that Garriott is a kickass coder, but fails miserably at managing groups of people. Ultimas 1-5, which LB coded by himself, were incredible. Ultimas 6 and 7 were made by small teams; 6 was decent, 7 was brilliant but flawed. 8 and 9, coded by larger teams, were both pus-oozing sores on the buttocks of gaming.
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Jan 22, 2018 21:15
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Node posted:Play 7, it is legit good. Use Exult, a modern port for U7, to play it. 7 had it's good and bad points. The graphics were amazing for it's time, the plot was interesting, and it may have been the first game ever to have DLC, except you couldn't actually download it because it was 1992 so you had to walk into a software store and buy the box. On the other hand gameplay was 100% FedEx quests, the inventory system was horrible, and it had some bugs. Exult fixes the bugs and makes inventory better, so give it a try.
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Feb 2, 2018 21:23
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It pains me to say this, but it looks like Lord British had his 15 minutes of fame back in the 80's and has been coasting ever since.
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Apr 15, 2018 05:05
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Hra Mormo posted:The guy who posted that Garriott makes good poo poo when working solo but can't manage a project, or generally work well with others, was probably right. The only way he'd get anything done in the modern day is if he went solo again, or teamed up with some personal hero he respects so much he wouldn't go Full Garriott. That was me, and yeah it's probably true. LB is a kickass coder but sucks at managing people. And in TYOOL 2018, even the tiniest indy game is made by a team of 4-8 people, so he's kinda hosed.
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Apr 15, 2018 15:49
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Verbose posted:Wait so is Star Citizen officially dead or are there still people clinging to it? It depends on your definition of "dead" (insert Princess Bride quote here) but I think that nowadays, 99% of people acknowledge that Star Citizen will never see release. And, yeah, I'm kinda sad that Shroud of the Avatar is a flop which will probably kill Lord British's career. He really did put out some groundbreaking stuff back in the 80's and 90's. (of course, you can say the same about Chris Roberts...)
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May 6, 2018 05:48
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For all these decades-old games, I'm envisioning a playerbase of a few thousand, all of whom put in thirty hours a week in high school and college. Now they're all middle managers at Wal-Mart and play a few hours a month, but still pay the $100/yr because they can't stand the thought of their 942 sacks of platinum vanishing.
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Jun 2, 2018 01:41
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Percelus posted:richard garriott was talented at a form of game development that only exists still in the indie scene with games like FTL or stardew valley, he has always been objectively garbage at managing a large team He started out in the early 80's, when one person could sit down and code an entire game by himself.
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Jun 11, 2018 20:00
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Thursday Next posted:He's a very, very, very wealthy man who could have spent ten million making the game he wanted to make. A dude posted:yeah he coulda spent half his wealth on this and made the game they promised and still been rich. or he could've made a modernized ultima online with the money he raised. he just didn't care. In a world where you can hire Full Sail grads for 20K/yr (I am *not* exaggerating) there is absolutely no excuse for using stock Unity assets. It really pains me to say this, because I used to Idolize British, but... there's a very good chance that he siphoned off as much money as possible into a private account, and now plans to live the rest of his life in his $25M castle, with scantily clad wenches pouring him mead.
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Jun 16, 2018 20:13
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Texibus posted:He probably just pays himself an absurd amount to be an officer of the company. Doesn't need to do anything shady. A dude posted:But isnt that in and of itself shady? Nothing shady about having a big salary as long as you're open about it. But... British raised 3 million from Kickstarter alone, and gawd knows how much more from  selling his blood and whatever else... and he refused to spend 25K to hire a 3D modeler, using stock assets instead. There's definitely something shady going on.
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Jun 16, 2018 22:55
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Thursday Next posted:So, where'd it go? Where did the twelve million bucks actually go? Wait what? Twelve million? He raised 3M from Kickstarter, did he really get 9 mil for his blood?
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Jun 17, 2018 18:59
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Thursday Next posted:He got 9 million from the monthly “telethons” that they still do, as well as from whales buying /pukeblood emotes and snowman dances. Their financials are available. We don’t know exactly how much cash was infused by other investors (Travian, Black Sun, etc). Okay, there's definitely something not kosher going on. For a hundredth of what they raised, they could have hired three Full Sail grads as 3D modelers, texture artists, playtesters, whatever. They had more than enough money and time to make a quality game, but chose not to.
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Jun 18, 2018 23:59
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Freakazoid_ posted:He has only one offer. Ooooh look, Elves and Dwarves and Halflings and Clerics and Rangers and Wizards and... They should just call this "Generic MMO #6343" and sell it in a white box with a bar code.
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Jun 20, 2018 02:10
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Frog Act posted:there's a dude named Vladimir_Begemot who is in every single forum imaginable defending SOTA 24/7. My search-fu fails me right now, but I seem to remember that way, waaaaay back in he 80's there was this one guy who was obsessed with Lord British and Ultima. When a new game came out he would write a letter saying how great it was, then more letters picking out flaws, then a letter asking when the next one would come out, then more and more letters pestering him about the new game until finally it came out. I can just imagine this guy ~20 years later, having finally gotten his rear end Burgers under control and gotten a real job and family, then he hears about SotA and flips out and send British his 20K life savings.
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Aug 8, 2018 02:13
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Percelus posted:how is wildstar still running Each year, NCsoft flips a coin for each of it's MMOs to decide whether is gets shut down.
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Aug 19, 2018 00:28
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The most charitable outlook is that Garriott set out to make a legit good MMO, but things went south during the production, so he said 'gently caress it, let's cut costs and push it out the door.' The least charitable is that Garriott is retiring, and decided to milk all the goodwill that he build up over the past 40 years into cash.
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Aug 24, 2018 20:11
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Percelus posted:how is wildstar still running Wildstar go bye-bye. https://massivelyop.com/2018/09/06/wildstar-and-carbine-are-shutting-down/ gently caress NCsoft.
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Sep 29, 2018 07:08
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Azubah posted:Not to really defend NCsoft here, but wildstar has been a dumpster fire since the beginning and should've been poo poo canned years ago. Yeah, I've heard that Wildstar was a train wreck, mostly because they tried to "double dip". (It's free, but you need to 'subscribe' to make it less of a grind, and also there's a cash store.) Still, no one deserves to have the carpet yanked out from under them like that. gently caress NCsoft.
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Sep 30, 2018 00:41
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Byolante posted:You do realise CoH got killed because Paragon took the money they were given to make CoH2 and spent it on some random other game without telling ncsoft right. Uhhhhh no. It's a long, sordid story, but the thrust of it is that CoH was shut down because NCsoft are loving dicks. It's 1:45 AM, I'll go into more detail tomorrow, unless any of the other ex-CoH players would like to chime in.
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Oct 1, 2018 06:47
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Rhymenoserous posted:Why the gently caress do you people back for so goddamn much? One word... reputation. We like to point at Star Citizen as the prime example of throwing money down the shitter. But, let's look back at the nineties. Back then, Chris Roberts came out with the Wing Commander series of games, which were consistently great (albeit with hefty hardware requirements), while our buddy Derek Smart was making GBS threads out terrible games and broken promises. So, when Crobber announced he was giving birth to The Greatest Game Ever, and Smart called him a fraud, people threw money at Roberts and laughed at Smart. Why? Because Roberts had a good reputation and Smart had a lovely one. Lord British hasn't made a good game in a long time, but the ones he made long ago were awesome. Ultima V in particular was so good it ought to be hung on the Smithsonian wall. So when LB unveiled a new Avatar game, thousands of forty year old nerds fondly remembered their childhoods spent slouched in front of the Commodore 64, and sent British their kids' college funds. Reputation.
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Oct 18, 2018 00:59
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I said come in! posted:Basically the game is on its last legs and will shut down soon. Going free to play this quickly is always a bad sign. Generally, shifting quickly through a bunch of payment options means "We're circling the drain".
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Nov 1, 2018 03:49
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I have to admit that's not horrible.
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Mar 2, 2019 05:30
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Givin posted:Ultima games weren't very good except Ultima Online which was only good because it was an rear end in a top hat Simulator and are fondly remembered because there hardly was anything else at the time. Ultimas 1, 2, and 3 were decent for their time, but not amazing. Ultima 4 was awesome. You had a party of eight, but only one was you. It had a complex magic system that actually made sense. You could have actual conversations with NPCs. And, the object of the game was not to kill a random foozle, but to better yourself as a person by following a complex system of virtues, the bring enlightenment to the people. This was absolutely mind-blowing back in 1985. Then, Ultima 5 took all that and make it better: you could have even more in-depth conversation with NPCs, who had their own daily schedules, and not all are on your side. And, 5 had what was probably the first cutscene in an CRPG. It was nuts. Ultima 6 was also quite good, with a player-is-really-the-bad-guy plot twist 2/3 of the way through. Stuff like this is commonplace nowadays, but it came as a big surprise back then. Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 were very good. Pretty sure that 1 was the first 3D RPG with full 360 degree viewing and movement. Ultima 7 swung for the fences but came up short. The graphics were amazing; my first thought was that it was like walking across an oil painting. The storyline was good, gameplay was fun, and it had what was probably the first DLC ever, except that this was 1992 so you had to go into a software store to buy it. On the other hand, the questing was all linear and FedEx, it had some bugs and it ran poorly on anything less than a 25mhz machine, which only the rich kids had when it came out. Ultima 8 was a pus-dripping boil on the buttocks of gaming. The less said about it, the better. Ultima 9 swung for the fences even harder, then tripped and fell halfway down the baseline. It had two firsts; the first RPG that was 100% real 3D (no sprites) and the first to be 100% voice acted. However, the engine they used was horrible, and the voice acting was terrible. On top of all that, it was very buggy, combat stank, the questing was linear, and the story had been gutted. It had another "you're the bad guy" bit, but that was old hat by then. Gynovore fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Mar 22, 2019 |
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Mar 22, 2019 05:30
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CoffeeBooze posted:Didnt the Minecraft guy do this for a while and eventually reemerge as some kind of alt-right weirdo? Im pretty sure nerd fame and fortune pretty much destroys everyone it touches. At least video game nerd stuff. The actual smart nerds who do stuff like start Google and Microsoft seem to do ok. IMHO, money doesn't make you an rear end in a top hat. Money just gives you the freedom to be whom you want to be... which, in some cases, is an rear end in a top hat.
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Jul 11, 2019 03:19
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Bieeanshee posted:I can't stop staring in horror at the figure on the top right. It's like one of her legs is on backwards. Just the word "Adultima" gives me the heebie-jeebies.
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Sep 15, 2019 00:18
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Freakazoid_ posted:Beaten by about 9 years, and at least they were honest in advertising it as a bitcoin casino. ...and that game looks like a lovely knockoff of Entropia Universe, which came out 7 years before.
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Oct 10, 2019 21:31
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So basically an Initial Coin Offering, but even stupider than usual?
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Oct 10, 2019 23:36
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Rotten Red Rod posted:What IS that model, exactly? All joking aside, I can't parse any of this poo poo. Project Entropia is an MMO that came out in '03. The gimmick is that players can at any time convert US dollars into their funbucks and vice versa. Needless to say, the game is rigged so that if, say, you put $50 on mommy's credit card to buy a Flawless +2 Mithril Pickaxe, you can only mine $49 worth of Aspergium before it breaks. The game made news EDIT: I just did a bit of research and found that the most expensive purchase of PE real estate was for $640K... by Neverdie. Gynovore fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Oct 11, 2019 |
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Oct 11, 2019 22:56
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Bieeanshee posted:Garriot was the kind of coder who'd vanish into his office for a month, ignore calls, and emerge with a fully formed game-- which was fine when that was how lots of games were developed, less so after the Apple II stopped being the target market. Yeah basically this. In the eighties, games were made by one guy locking himself in a room for three months. LB did this and the games were great. In the nineties, games were made by a small team; Garriot tried leading teams and didn't do so well. Nowadays games are written by big teams, which apparently he has zero ability to wrangle. A dude posted:So did every Garriot game after Ultima flop? I mean even Ultima games were flopping towards the end there. Tabula Rasa, from what I heard, was decent but not great. Lineage is okay if you're into the Korean grind-like-its-your-job thing. City of Heroes was the best MMO the history of the universe, although LB didn't have any hands-on involvement.
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Oct 13, 2019 01:23
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I said come in! posted:I had heard that his space travel publicity stunt for Tabula Rasa, had left him broke. Yeah, but afterwards he sued NCsoft for a shitload.
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Oct 14, 2019 03:49
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TheAgent posted:with garriott officially out the door, the cult of personality around this is probably going to head into a sharper decline than it already is I'm guessing that it will end up like Star Trek Online: supported 100% by two or three dozen whales.
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Nov 8, 2019 23:18
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So the takeaway is; the makers of Generic RPG #11735 gave Garriott $200 for the rights to use Lord British in their lovely game, in the hopes that it will lure in Ultima nerds, even though the 17 Ultima nerds remaining are cursing Garriott's name because they blew their life savings on SotA? That's some fine businessing there, Lou.
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Dec 6, 2019 21:41
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Oriental Hugs posted:How the hell do you spend 6 figures on this game. I realize that there are people with six figures worth of disposable income, and I realize there are nerds who are very, very obsessed with gaming. But, I would imagine the Venn diagram of the two resembles a pair of glasses.
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Mar 4, 2020 09:41
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Rotten Red Rod posted:richard garriot Basically this. Back in the eighties, the Ultima series were very good games, and a lot of people got into them, so it stands to reason that 1% of fans really, really, REALLY enjoyed them. They now have coding or engineering jobs, and most have Gotten Lives, but a few of them still really, really love Ultima and Lord British. Thanks to the nintey-nine rule that's all you need.
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Mar 5, 2020 00:09
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jabro posted:How did this statement make it past the elevator pitch stage? it's 100% buzzwords, perfect gateopener for a VC with more money than brains.
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Mar 5, 2020 21:49
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ItBreathes posted:Did Romero do anything bad besides Daikatana? After Ion Storm collapsed, he spent the next 15 years joining and forming a bunch of half-assed companies making GBS threads out half-assed games.
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Mar 10, 2020 20:17
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Thompsons posted:look it's totally on-brand for games based on old CRPG settings to have completely loving incongruous sci-fi elements Ultimas 1 and 2 had the player flying a spaceship, so yeah.
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May 17, 2020 21:02
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