Ultima The Ultima Series Discussion Thread

[KeighnMcDeath]

Lol. This would have been fun to see.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Apologies if there is a more recent, all encompasing Ultima thread. I only became aware of this video series today. Most likely because Ultima 3 is a favorite of mine and the youtube algorithm actually worked.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Dunno if anyone's posted this before, but the FM Towns port of the first three Ultima games has a bit of voice recording from Lord British himself:

Anyway, I messed around a bit with the first game's FM Towns port, having not played the game before. (So far this is in English outside of an intro video) I'm curious if these are emulation issues, an issue with this version or the game itself.

• Are there really no diagonal movement options?
• Is there really no basic talk function?
• Is it normal for overworld enemies to be stronger than the player? Dungeon enemies are fairly simple to kill, at least near where I started.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[:Flash:]

 

[taxalot]

I'm just going to leave this here.

 

[OndrejSc]

 

[OndrejSc]

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Dunno if anyone's posted this before, but the FM Towns port of the first three Ultima games has a bit of voice recording from Lord British himself:

Anyway, I messed around a bit with the first game's FM Towns port, having not played the game before. (So far this is in English outside of an intro video) I'm curious if these are emulation issues, an issue with this version or the game itself.

• Are there really no diagonal movement options?
• Is there really no basic talk function?
• Is it normal for overworld enemies to be stronger than the player? Dungeon enemies are fairly simple to kill, at least near where I started.

Well, Ultima 1-3 has no diagonal movement in any version as far as I know. Most talking (Transact) is for a simple one line response from npcs or to purchase something from merchants. Enemies vary and it has been a long bit since I played the FM-towns version. I think I noticed some planet maps in ultima 2 missing content. Usually the continent mobs were easier than dungeons in 1-2 but it might be inverted on this version. Japanese added a few monsters shared in all three games. The pazuzu demon was new. In ultima 3 you could run into mixed mobs of a type (ie, a skeleton encounter might have ghouls and zombies in it). I never got the cd quality music to run in gameplay except for intro and ending sequence.

 

[Infinitron]

Weeb Ultima IV made in RPG Maker:

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I'm surprised this hasn't turned up earlier.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Weeb Ultima IV made in RPG Maker:

Interesting, I've been thinking a lot about U4 lately. Was considering a replay.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Buddy should've made Lord British a cut and paste job of one of Garriott's dorky cosplay photos. Missed opportunity.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Use EAs Lady British.

 

[behold_a_man]

So, I've finished Ultima 4.

end

And what I thought:
1) The fundamental aspect of the game, for me, was note-taking. Most NPCs had something interesting to say, like remarks about other NPCs, shrines, spells, the quest, or joining the player; lack of proper documentation or inference usually resulted in missing a link to some quest.

I liked that most of the main quest had fallbacks:

Spoiler

a) Runes, mantras, shrine locations - first, Count British told my party where to search for them (which also gave me information on how to decipher the runes); in each city related to virtue, I got some part of the needed triple easily - and the other parts I could get by indiscriminately asking people, for example; but usually someone gave away what I needed. Also, hordes of people remarked about the importance of the seer. Even if I didn't ask Duke British about virtues, people in cities were pretty happy to tell everything about their virtue without the need to be particularly nosy.
b) 8 stones and the three part key - First, it was very easy to get information, that there is a stone hidden in the dungeon (in six of the virtue cities someone remarked about a dungeon and some stone) - what follows, searching for stones in the dungeons was a logical thing to do. Then, the location of white and black stones was given in at least two ways - by the shrine and by a person (Merlin and Isaac, a ghost). Then, there is a pairing between each stone / virtue and its principles; It can be done relying on information found in castles (from the ruler, from four fellas in the garden of love, and from the martial arts trainer) and associating virtues with stones; or you could just note the correspondence between the dungeon name and its stone, and then use the four stones associated with dungeons connected to altars.
c) Axiom - The runes provided all necessary letters, and it was hard to miss them; the map already forced me to learn most of the runes, and there are not many words with 3 I's, 2 N's, T, and F; the riddle itself was already defined by Joshua in Britain, and there were very explicit remarks about the answer in the cove (Endless? Eternal? Encompasses all things?).

What didn't have fallback (or, at least, I haven't seen those) were three items (upon one of which I stumbled randomly - the candle of love, I still don't know who the bard the altar referred me to is) and the word of protection (which I didn't solve fair and square - though now that I think of it, it was solvable by asking everyone around Cove about everything related to a main quest - which made sense as the city was hosting all other needed intel for the main quest).

Before playing this game, it never occurred to me, how limiting the journal with explicitly stated quests is; it gives away information on the existence of a quest (which indicates something has to be done, rather than a story should be ignored) and its completion status (so I know there's nothing more I am expected to do in this case). For example - I thought the story of a sailor in Serpent's Hold had something to do with the location ability, so I molested him senselessly about his destroyed ship, expecting its wreckage to hold the compass, but he couldn't spill the beans; only at the very end of the game did I find

an NPC

Sonora in Jhelom

giving me what I wanted. If there was a quest log and I wouldn't get a quest to 'get locate ability' after talking to him, I would probably just ignore him. And I conflated the word of passage with the axiom, expecting them to be the same word - which would be obvious if I had a journal with two quests instead of one.

2) Almost every aspect of the gameplay outside of combat seems to be meaningful; each non-offensive spell has an use case I can think of; one of the items available at guilds is necessary to finish the game, other one(s) are crucial for exploration, and torches are nice to have as a backup for the Light spell and necessary if your mages are dead or nonexistent; a telescope allowed to get information on the number of places on the map; and most NPCs had something useful to say (sometimes in a duplicate fashion). In other words, maybe except for horses(?), there was no part of the game that was redundant and could easily be removed.

3) All this virtue chasing was a much less prominent aspect of the game than I expected. For most of the time, I just had to give some hard-earned money to bums, indulge in bloodletting, and avoid talking trash. However, I hated the density of combat encounters paired with how the avatar needs to become 'valorous'. Up to some point of the game, I pretty much evaded all combat encounters - only for this

judgement

to fall upon me. Garriott should have gone for Lord French, the problem would cease to exist then. Also, the premise of the plot was completely made up, which I appreciate quite a bit - it's nice to see a world without any problems for once.

4) Combat was somewhere between terrible and insufferable:
a) There was too much of it - which wouldn't be a problem if not for the valor virtue.
b) Encounters were banal - at a very early stage of the game, I was already able to murder endgame enemies; the only dreadful ones were those able to put me to sleep (three types of enemies, if I'm not mistaken).
c) Enemies could shoot me from the diagonal direction, but not the other way around.
d) Pathfinding was botched: in

this case

enemies couldn't even get to me unless I moved upward.
The optimal strategy I found was to use exclusively ranged weapons and click a + arrow_up on repeat, until the enemy is down or I have to change the direction. Note, that I only had shoddy, non-magical armor, and yet the enemies still couldn't really terrorize me.

5) Interestingly, encounters within the dungeons were pretty well designed; they had lots of hidden doors, magical fields to dispel or omit, traps, or tactically placed enemies - like

batteries of reapers

. The series of encounters in the maze at level 6 of the Abyss was probably the highlight of the combat part of the game, having to figure out how the rooms are connected and maybe gathering data (visiting rooms without continuation) before descending into a string of ~8 encounters. Not like it mattered a lot, given the simplicity of combat.

6) Exploration of the overworld was as interesting as getting the additional logistical amenities - like a mandrake and its consequences, a sextant, or a ship. The difficulty of encounters was scaled to something (if I'm not mistaken, it might be the number of steps, in some cases reset at 10^5 - I noticed the encounter got harder up until some point, and then, some encounters were as hard as before (still banal) and some consisted of a single orc), so the overworld or dungeons practically posed no danger through the entire game. Dungeons were mostly boring - the first one I saw was neat, with traps, invisible passages (for which magical gems were essential), treasures, orbs, and strings of static encounters, but each of the six later dungeons (before the Stygian Abyss) reused the same tricks, maybe except for the entry to the altar room (thankfully XYZ spells allowed to circumvent them completely).

7) Economy is well constructed: there was always something to buy (though I could have broken it if I wanted it with a little bit of grinding abusing the fact, that static encounters in dungeon rooms respawn immediately - and they include

this

2 mimics and cure spell needed later; this gives me ~500 gold in one try.

and the like). Also, it's the first time in any RPG I've seen the prices of seminal items change so dramatically depending on the city. It's neat that the game rewards me for documenting, which reagents cost how much in each city (I paid 16 for the set of all reagents if optimized compared to 31 in the cheapest single city - which yields a dramatic difference if you want to buy them en masse). Itemization-wise, I liked how sparse the weapons and armour were; I didn't like the lack of any way to determine their stats.

8) The game had its fair share of problems, bugs, or odd decisions:
-> The number of ships declined with time. Additionally, ships I used disappeared over time. What follows, if I tried to finish the game as intended, I would probably not be able to do so - after not being able to utter the word of passage, I was teleported to the entrance to the Stygian Abyss; my ship was gone, so I used gate travel - but then I couldn't find any ship, including pirates'.
-> Sometimes I had to lie to get valid information, even if it made

no sense

.

-> The distinction between the world changing in real time (depending on dosbox cycles - or instructions evaluated per time) and turns passing either after a fixed time (independent of cycles) or after my move. For example, I could lead to a wind direction changing within a single turn. The side effect was the frustrating controls of the balloon - I couldn't get the white stone with it unless I lowered the cycles to something absurdly small - but then, the wind changed directions oftentimes.

To summarize, the game was rather unique in that its gameplay relied primarily on inquisitiveness and that pretty much each available mechanism of the game was meaningful. Most of its systems seemed well designed - but the dungeons were boring, combat was banal, and encounter density along with no auto-fight (losing battles is very hard in this game) or ability to escape without losing virtues seems like a match made in Stygian Abyss.


=====
As a side note, I'd love to see an RPG with similar focus on gathering information - but with a system of recording full dialogues (like in Divine Divinity), without any explicit quest journal, but with the ability to create notes in a hierarchic fashion myself, and refer those notes to exact dialogues (e.g., category 'stones' with subcategory 'white', subcategory with reference to dialogues #15 and #2112, and a personal annotation 'Balloon needed'), possibly also a ctrl+f like functionality if it makes sense.

 

[Cael]

The bard is there. You just didn't look for him in the right place (hint: He is behind two secret doors, IIRC).

Also, you don't need the balloon. It had always been a waste of time, even in the old days of Apple IIC.

 

[behold_a_man]

Warriors of Destiny took me quite some time.

Ending

Note that I didn't import the character from the last one.

And what I noted:

I: Combat
Encounter density was reduced dramatically, which had quite a few interesting implications; one is that the unfortunate combat system was less prominent; the other is that character development was stunted as the leveling system from the previous entry was retained.

Character development deserves a separate paragraph. Without grinding, I obtained ~6000-7000 experience points for all my party members. Each killed monster gives a constant amount of experience points to its killer. In order to get to level l, the character needs 100*2^(l-2) experience points (so, I need 6400 points for level 8). Finally, spells possible to cast (except for those from scrolls) are determined by a character's level. The interesting spells are mostly on level 8 - like stopping time or summoning a demon. What follows, the game heavily rewards soloing.

The combat mechanics (encouraging small parties) along with some spells becoming useless (Down and Up specifically got handicapped, eXit was removed - all of my favourite ones) led to the diminishing importance of reagents; I never ran out of them. Their prices became similar to one another in each city, trivializing the economic aspect of the game. After lowering the party size, rations became unimportant; I didn't need to waste a lot of my money on ships, I only spent money on my first skiff, and then frigates became overabundant; the only thing I bought at shops past the party size realisation were several invisibility rings.

I hated the overhauled combat interface; while it's nice that now I can attack diagonally and that I can get more than just gold after a fight, I needed to click much more in order to whack enemies or pillage chests after a won fight. After some time, I started using the two-man party of magical axemen, which allowed me to reduce the sluggishness of encounters. It's silly that ditching spiked helmets / shields or a second weapon is optimal if one wants to make combat faster.

Unlike in the previous entry, combat was very tightly bound to the pacing of the game. At level l I had 30*l rather than 100*l health points. This gave more meaning to the combat-related equipment in this game - at the very beginning, combat was rough, making ends meet was hard (I spent most of my money on rations and reagents), and dungeons were lethal. As I explored the world more closely, had more data, vital items, and noticed how the experience system works, I switched to a two-man party and steamrolled everything combat-related (except for Shadowlords, but

did it matter?

beating them in combat was immaterial

) with magical axes and invisibility rings for dragons, demons, and the Underworld. Only at the end, in the last dungeon, I encountered problems (as

things didn't work

invisibility ceased to work

). Thankfully, I had enough scrolls with high-level spells to pass those encounters; interestingly, it's one of the few games, where scrolls (or standard consummables in general) became very useful at some point. The implication of all the above is that the game consisted primarily of gathering clues at the start of the game, then adding more and more fighting from the ~midgame onwards.


II: The world
As before, the game is first and foremost a data crawl. Everything was centered around getting valid information, connecting dots, and reviewing own notes. In this aspect, the game does not disappoint. Most new things discovered, from sextants to secrets of moongates felt special. I liked that, in contrast to the previous game, there was some diversification as to where main plot related items can be found - like the

stuff

crown at top of the Blackthorn's castle, obtainable with either sneak or betrayal required, or the scepter in the nest of Shadowlords - which became clean after, well, whacking them

.

One of the more interesting things I did at the beginning of the game was deciphering runes; I didn't notice the "Book of Lore" with runes until

something happened

Lord Kenneth asked me for a certain song from there

, so I had to guess them, letter after letter, using the map paired with real names of places and inscriptions upon graves.

One ?puzzle? I didn't solve without external information is the

unfortunate one.

sandalwood box puzzle.

I didn't care about it until Herr British told me about it. There are several things I hate about this puzzle:
a) In order to use the harp, I had to stand by it and then press numerical buttons; first, it's not documented in the manual; second, it doesn't even leave a trace in the log, unlike any other action (admittedly, though, in any other place, using them leads to switching party member focus or an error); third, it's the only such interaction in a game. In any other case, in order to interact with any other object, I had to use search, look, or use (for handheld items); I'd expect maybe 'yell' to work here, but not simply pressing buttons.
b) It's a puzzle necessary to finish the game, but the product (Sandalwood Box) is referred to by only one person (I checked the transcript afterwards), in a very hazy way. Did Garriott expect players to back up their saves?

It might be my least favourite puzzle I ever saw in any game.

The plot was much more mundane than I expected; I barely felt any consequences of the Oppression while I played (in opposition to some claims over here, that the game has a sense of urgency). If anything in the world changed, it was a function of day cycles, moon cycles, or my actions - so the world wasn't getting any worse anyway, no matter what I didn't do. Also, the NPCs' dialogues were static no matter how the world changed (which was silly in the case of

some fellow

Blackthorn after burning Shadowlords

). While the presented idea (subverting virtues) may be non-banal, its implementation was not special; for example, I never felt like Honor, or Valor, or Compassion were enforced in any way; the only difference related to virtue was a rather modern taxation model in Minoc.


III: Exploration and other things
Dungeons became distinct - from Hythloth and its gem mine, through Covetous being a necropolis, to the Prison Wrong; each of them had somewhat appropriate interiors, loot, and adversaries. Not that it was beneficial to clean them, since when I started plundering them, money became immaterial - only Hythloth was important, for gems were scarce in this game. I abhorred the need to search for buttons within dungeons, as they were way more infuriating than previously - this time, aside from pressure plates, buttons that needed to be hit were introduced. They were invisible, placed on walls, and, because this type of target doesn't get locked after the attack, finding an exit required a lot of clicking and repositioning the aim of a ranged weapon. And it was boring.

Underworld looks roughly the way I'd expect it to look like - hard to navigate and mostly empty. The unfortunate part is that, as far as I know, the game didn't give me many tools to conquer it (that is, make it hospitable to some extent), only 'Locate' spell and mobile moongates (which weren't so useful, as I couldn't travel freely between different sections of the Underworld).

Graphically, most things look pretty and polished. I appreciate the attention to details like chair icons changing depending on whether they were pushed or not or a keyhole changing after unlocking the door. And I appreciate the saturated color palette even more.

Fortunately, the game gave me a lot of choices on how to proceed with standard gameplay problems with how many ways of travel there were, with distinct advantages and limitations, from movable moongates through skiffs, frigates, a grapple, or a magic carpet; with how I could take part in combat or evade it altogether, always; with spells giving advantages during exploration; with the meaning of party size. Also, the world became more interactive, with the ability to move stuff or take torches from walls among other things.


In summary, it was an odd game; on the one hand, it was created in the same vein as its predecessor, a game focused on processing data; it added some interesting choices gameplay-wise and much more interactivity; it had spectacular graphics; on the other hand, it made combat way more sluggish while not really making it tactical; the game difficulty varied between very hard and banal depending on party size; and the world didn't really represent the plot well. With respect to combat, it's an example of an entry in a series, that overhauls some mechanics of its predecessor without really following with changes where they should happen.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I was looking at facebook and mention of the old java-based Ultima 3 came up again.

Ultima Infinity: A Java-Based Remake of Ultima 3​

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Last video entry was a bit ago. In this video you see that SEA SERPENTS DESTROYED (by a whirlpool presumably), and chests opponents that stack on each other in combat. So in theory, you could have all 8 chests in a combat stacked on one square and each attacking same dude. Interesting bug.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Another project I just noticed linked on the Ultimacodex is Penult for the atrai2600. I love this when people challenge the limits of a system to put say an RPG on that system. I still await someone to break into the colecovisions Gateway to apshai and add up/down ladders, remove timer, add the key, add the gateway, add an ending, and maybe a few QOL features to it. Anyway, there aren't many videos of Penult but you can order to play the demo. This should probably be in a thread titled Ultima-knock offs or something.

 

[AdolfSatan]

Skald, while entertaining, failed to deliver Ultima levels of complexity, and I've already beaten Moonring. Are there any other modern takes on the Ultima formula worth playing? Ideally with the QoL one'd expect from a contemporary rehash of a proven idea.

 

[Butter]

Skald, while entertaining, failed to deliver Ultima levels of complexity, and I've already beaten Moonring. Are there any other modern takes on the Ultima formula worth playing? Ideally with the QoL one'd expect from a contemporary rehash of a proven idea.

Have you played Nox Archaist and Realms of Antiquity?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Realms of Quest Trilogy (I-III)
Realms of Quest IV
Realms of Quest V
Realms of Quest VI (in progress)

 

[AdolfSatan]

I bought RoA back when and refunded it. Don't even recall why, but I presume I must have disliked the combat.
Nox I think I passed on for the same reason, everything led me to believe combat would be too basic. Am I right with those impressions, or did I sell myself the wrong idea? Truth is, I have little patience for bad combat nowadays, but I can stomach it if there's little of it and everything else is good. Should I give them another try?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Bad or too simplistic?