What exactly is Worlds of Ultima: Lost Sosaria?

Practically speaking, it’s a Neverwinter Nights module with a plot based on, and tangentially related to, the events of Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld 2. Its most direct inspiration is Ultima 7 Part Two: Serpent Isle, and the way in which that game saw the player taken to a new, but strangely familiar, land to continue the adventure of the Avatar there.

Indeed, the idea to recycle one of the continents from a previous Ultima title comes directly from Serpent Isle, for it did the same thing with the Lands of Danger and Despair (of Ultima 1 fame) that Lost Sosaria is going to do with the Lands of the Dark Unknown — show the evolution of those lands in the aftermath of the cataclysm that tore the original realm of Sosaria apart in the wake of the wizard Mondain’s death.

At the same time, the project carries the name of Worlds of Ultima, invoking the spirit of exploration of new worlds and vastly different situations and viewpoints that the two Ultima 6 spinoffs of the same name demonstrated.

On a more personal note, however, Lost Sosaria is the fulfillment of a love and enjoyment of the Ultima games that has been nurtured since a youthful first experience of Ultima 6 and the incredible novelty of that game. Indeed, it’s difficult to find a parallel to Ultima titles like The False Prophet or The Black Gate among modern games, because so much has been lost in the switch to 3D engines and the seeming need of game developers to cater to the lowest common denominator (i.e. the miniscule attention spans of far too many gamers today).

Things like world interactivity, complex plot development, moral choices, and just having the ability to explore a vast, living game world were never all that common even during Ultima’s moment in time, and these already rare quantities have only become more rarified in the modern era of gaming. They can be added back in — projects like Lazarus have demonstrated that much — but it takes an immense amount of additional effort by a dedicated fan or group thereof to achieve it, wheras with the original Ultima games such things were usually included by the developers.

I make an exception in the above statement for Ultima 8 and Ultima 9, which were not nearly on the same level of achievement as their immediate predecessors. But even then, I’d rather play Ultima 9 than some other games, because even though one has to pass roughly a third of the plot to get to this stage, one can still find time to explore and just enjoy a reasonably well-crafted world.

All of which is nice, but in a sense none of it really answers the question that began this explanation which is showing all the signs of transforming into an essay.

Lost Sosaria is intended as a spinoff of the Ultima series, a side story that doesn’t go against the established canon of the series (hopefully!) and fills in a few of the gaps that were left between the end of The Black Gate/Serpent Isle and the beginning of Ascension…or whichever Ultima 9 plot variant the reader prefers to regard as canon. Among the plethora of unanswered questions that I refer to here are such things as the following:

• Sentri all but disappears after the end of The Black Gate. What happened to him?
• What about Gorn? He was a companion in Ultima 6…did they just leave him in that cave forever, or did someone go and rescue him eventually?
• What about Natassia, the only authentic “love interest” for the Avatar that was ever introduced?
• Batlin fled Britannia…is it possible that other Fellowship elements fled as well? If so, to where?
• Regardless of which Ultima 9 plot variant one recognizes as being canonical, that plot makes it clear that the Guardian entered Britannia somehow. How?
• The Lands of Danger and Despair survived the cataclysm after Mondain’s death…did other continents survive as well?

There are other points of note that will be address in the game, but for the most part these are the ones that Lost Sosaria begins by asking, and it expands from there.

More importantly, Lost Sosaria is an attempt to recapture the spirit of exploration that gave most of the Ultima games such a high replay value. The goal is to create a wide open land that the player can wander through for days on end without quite seeing every facet of it.

If you think about it, the whole plot of Ultima 6 could have happened in roughly a quarter of the map space the story is actually set in. Most of the map is essentially devoid of plot elements, but at the same time is not empty space. It’s there to explore, to let the player, and his or her mind, wander through the trees and the fields of this artificial world that has been presented in the game. And that’s a huge part of the immersive nature of the games.

Lost Sosaria encompasses a total land area of approximately 18 square kilometres, using BioWare’s standard value of 10 metres per “world unit” in the game. The plot could probably take place in a mere 20% of that area, but a major design point of this spinoff is not to simply compel the player to get through the game’s plot. It’s to present the player with a world to explore and get immersed in. Hopefully it can hit that mark. Obviously, the plot is the main reason the player will download and attempt Lost Sosaria, but ideally that won’t be the only reason they do it.

The question could be asked concerning why, in 2007, Lost Sosaria is being built with Neverwinter Nights, when it is likely that the NWN engine will be a decade old by the time the module releases. That’s a fair question, although the answer is an easy one. Put plainly, the original Neverwinter Nights (unlike its sequel at present) is a mature engine with a well-established community that has grown up around it. There is a lot of high-quality custom content available for NWN now, and some of the best of that will be used in Lost Sosaria to give the module a very “advanced” feel. Additionally, NWN has been released on Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux, which gives the game a broader audience and gives us more versatility in terms of who can download and play the module.

People will reinstall Neverwinter Nights if they want to play a module for it; that’s a fact that the remake community must, by definition, count on, or else much of the point of its existence would evaporate. And so, in turn, Lost Sosaria counts on that as well.

There’s no point in this space to go into depth concerning the module’s plot, but suffice to say that Lost Sosaria will address not only matters of continuity in the Ultima series, but philosophical and moral issues in much the same way as some previous Ultima titles have done. Like some of the later Ultima titles, it will also challenge the player to question things, and to question themselves. Hopefully we can create something that will have lasting replay value, but even if it’s a one-shot deal we hope to create a story that is immersive and engaging, challenging and rewarding.