Talk:Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle

Serpent Isle in Spanish? The Wikia says Serpent Isle was orginally released in Spanish, but Aiera http://www.ultimaaiera.com/category/serpentisle/ suggests that the Spanish and Italian translations are fan projects. Any enlightenment? Dungy 16:09, September 20, 2010 (UTC)

The origins of Serpent Isle
I believe we had a discussion about how development on Serpent Isle started somewhere with the usual theories (Two games cut in halfs, separate game shoehorned in the Guardian saga...) but I can't remember on what page so I'll post this here, since this is appropriate in any case.

Basically in order to try to clear up all the misconceptions about Serpent Isle, I decided to take a gamble and I e-mailed Bill Armintrout to see if he could clear some things up about how development on Serpent Isle begun. I'm not sure about posting his whole answer here (I've asked for his permission so I'll see what he says), but the ghist of it is this:

Serpent Isle originally started as a World of Ultima type game basically conceived a fantasy pirate game (Note that I am not sure if this was meant to be set in the Ultima universe or as a separate thing like Arthurian Legends - I'm trying to get more details on that). Early in development it was decided to turn this game into a follow up to Ultima VII (which was nearing completion at that time and whose engine was deemed stable enough). This version kept the "Carribean Pirate" aspect of the original project and this of course the one that Sheri Graner Ray has mentionned on her blog in the past, focusing about VoDun magic.

Later on, when the original project director Jeff George left Origin - it was decided to start from scratch as the team felt the pirate game would not work in the Ultima VII and they create this new story deeply tied to Ultima past and mythology, with Sheri Graner Ray coming up with the concept of the Ophidian Virtue. The rest as they say, is history.

So in other words - Ultima VII and Serpent Isle really were not a single game to begin with, and the later was basically a last minute addition the Guardian Saga. I'll be proceeding to rewrite the development part of the article in light of these new informations. --Sergorn 15:15, October 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * That's more or less how I figured things went. It's great to now have confirmation from an official source and it was very cool of Bill to shed light on the matter. --Terilem 15:23, October 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree, it's great that Bill would answer this kind of fan questions about ancient history. And it is also interesting to have a deeper understanding on how the concepts of SI evolved.--Sega381 17:20, October 10, 2010 (UTC)