Ultima 7 Design Documents: Playtester Impressions for Forge of Virtue

Courtesy of former Origin programmer Bill Randolph, and thanks to the tireless efforts of Joe Garrity of the Origin Muesum, the Ultima Codex is pleased to present this document — which has been broken out into five (5) images — which contains quality assurance notes from various playtesters who tried out Forge of Virtue at various stages of its development.

Download the documents:

[wpdm_file id=121]

The very elaborate signature on the second report — urging Origin to make the cluepath for Forge of Virtue more complex, so as to make the player work hard for the stat increases that were among the rewards of the expansion pack — might belong to David “Iolo” Watson. I can’t be sure. What can be seen, though, is a distinct progression in the ratings delivered; the beta did not play well based on the notes, but as the project matured, the reports grew rather more positive.

Now, the images here, in JPEG format, are lower-resolution extracts from a PDF scan of the original document. They are legible, but not of particularly high quality, and thus are not recommended for printing; download the PDF files for that purpose.

Most importantly, though: enjoy! Pull up the image, download the PDFs, and pore over them. Search out every little detail, and enjoy a fascinating glimpse into the nuts and bolts of how Origin crafted a truly ground-breaking RPG. The Ultima Codex is indebted to Joe Garrity for providing these documents, to Bill Randolph for releasing them and making them available for us to see, to John Watson, and to everyone who worked at Origin Systems.