Ultima The Ultima Underworld I & II Thread

[Comte]

Playing through UU2 and I am wondering what is the best sword in the game? I am still using the Magic sword I found behind the reaper in the sewers in the beginning of the game. I just entered the tomb of Praecor Loth.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Playing through UU2 and I am wondering what is the best sword in the game? I am still using the Magic sword I found behind the reaper in the sewers in the beginning of the game. I just entered the tomb of Praecor Loth.

You're pretty much set with that sword. There are a few better swords, such as the Black Sword that is being carried by someone you'll run into later in the tomb (Black Swords don't break.) and the Jewelled Dagger of Unsurpassed Damage in the tomb (if you're the stabbity-stabstab kinda player) and finally a Broadsword of Great Damage in the "blue" section of the Ethereal Void.

For more powerful weapons, you should have gone with axes. The Jewelled Axe of Fire Doom is legendary for making a mess out of everything.

 

[octavius]

Excellent Black Sword of Unsurpassed Damage, I guess. I think I found it in The Tomb.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

I was thinking about Ultima Underworld today.

I really appreciate that settlements are limited in size and the quests you get there seem fairly natural and seem to fit with the motivations of the inhabitants - existential concerns.

I have to say that I am bothered by the trend of quest concentration in hubs in cRPGS and I don't much like having to comb over towns striking up conversations with people to see whether there is a quest there. It seems forced and lame a lot of the time. Oh great, here is 40 dwellings to comb through for content. Meh.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

It's even worse when some of those quest triggers only activate if you have a certain stat/skill at a specific minimal level.

 

[Zep Zepo]

How many "WALL RUNS" or PARKOUR did you have to do in UU 1 or 2 Again?

Oh...

Spoiler

Fucking 0

Zep--

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

How many "WALL RUNS" or PARKOUR did you have to do in UU 1 or 2 Again?

Oh...

Spoiler

Fucking 0

Zep--

There was most definitely what would be considered parkour for the time. It was all over the place actually. In some instances, jumps could only be completed if you crouched in conjunction with the jump. Maybe you were in a drunken stupor when you played them and don't remember. Or maybe you were in a drunken stupor when you posted that there was no parkour in the underworlds. It was parkour before parkour was a thing.

 

[Zep Zepo]

There was most definitely what would be considered parkour for the time. It was all over the place actually. In some instances, jumps could only be completed if you crouched in conjunction with the jump. Maybe you were in a drunken stupor when you played them and don't remember. Or maybe you were in a drunken stupor when you posted that there was no parkour in the underworlds. It was parkour before parkour was a thing.

Serious question...have you been diagnosed as being retarded? I've played the shit out of both of those games. No Parkour to be found. You are calling a super-jump or double-jump parkour? Yeah...but no.

Zep--

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

I am repeating what LG has said and highlighted what is in the games. LG wanted thieves to be able to do those things and they put in what they could given limited available compute power. LG felt thief types got the short end of the stick skill-wise in UU and UW2.

So lucky you, you get to harp on how shit it was and how much shittier it will be in UA.

 

[Ash]

Wall-running, double jumping and whatever else is fine, if executed well. All that matters is this game has that trademark LG intelligent design permeating throughout. Given they have a bunch of newbies on board which have yet to win me over in that regard, it could go either way.

I was thinking about Ultima Underworld today.

I really appreciate that settlements are limited in size and the quests you get there seem fairly natural and seem to fit with the motivations of the inhabitants - existential concerns.

I have to say that I am bothered by the trend of quest concentration in hubs in cRPGS and I don't much like having to comb over towns striking up conversations with people to see whether there is a quest there. It seems forced and lame a lot of the time. Oh great, here is 40 dwellings to comb through for content. Meh.

I love how natural-feeling side quests appear in LG games. And even from a "gamey" standpoint nobody wants to search through 40 homes looking for banal side quests anyway. "less is more" sometimes does apply. In other words I agree with what you are saying.

Some dumbfuck in the NuDeus Ex thread was saying Deus Ex's side quests are NOT an example of how it's done, and implying Human Revolution's boring as shit forced quests are. I was going to give him a stern berating but that thread is a lost cause.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Can't change a closed mind so goo idea to not bother.

You are right as well that it could very well go either way. I am placing some faith in Paul and Tim who were principals in UU working with newbies at the time. I think their hiring process has a such to do with their success as anything. Hopefully they hired people who are already aligned. It probably helps in that the current batch are attracted to Otherside because of the pedigree and the prospects of working in the LGS way.

Ultimately I really do think that it comes down to vision and with Paul the visionary and Tim as the aligned technical master crafter, they can possibly churn out the next level. That is my hope.

Zep could get the last laugh but that wouldn't really be winning anything worthwhile now would it?

 

[LESS T_T]

If you didn't read it already, you guys will find this 2005 interview with Doug Church interesting:

Ultima Underworld seems to have been pretty ambitious in how it blended genres, combining simulation-style technology with an RPG. How did that come about?

You ve got to give Paul a lot of credit there first off, simply because he had the initial idea. And if you look back at Space Rogue , that was a 2D tile map Ultima- style RPG, but then you d get in your ship and fly around in 3D and shoot pirates or not and shoot cops or not. It was a very early, fairly open -ended story RPG with a space flight 3D element. Which was definitely a very hybrid genre , because the space stuff was pretty glitzy, where there were wormholes where you had to follow these 3D rings through space, and there were battles and trading, and yet there was also this little story-based walk-around the tile map, talk to people, and so on game. So I think it came pretty naturally to Paul.

Of the original guys that were hired , there were a couple of people who had a tiny bit of game experience. One of them we got rid of fairly early because he wasn t appropriate for what we were doing, and then the other two guys we got were friends of mine from school who I recruited. So three of the four of us building the tech and all of us doing the design, none of us had any game experience and we were all twenty. In college in the late 80s the consoles weren t nearly as big a deal. I had actually played Space Rogue because one of my friends had a Mac, but the clusters were all Unix boxes so I ran X-Trek and Net Hack and things, but I hadn t played a PC game in five years or something. So we just said, Let s do a really cool dungeon game in 3D, let s go. It s interesting, because a lot of people talk about how we were doing such a DungeonMaster game, but as far as I know none of us had ever played Dungeon Master. It was a very much Hey, let s go for it. We didn t have any idea that we were doing anything that wasn t just obvious in some sense, because we had no context and the last time any of us had played a game was back when we were fourteen. We played games in college, but they were very different; you re playing networked X-Trek or something, it doesn t feel like a home computer game. For Underworld we wrote four movement systems and we wrote three combat systems, because we d just write something: Oh, this seems cool, let s go for it. We d get it half done, and we d say, Eh? That s not working. Which is nice in a lot of ways; it let us do a lot of things we probably wouldn t have done otherwise . But it also meant that we worked a lot. All the time, basically, for a long time. We spent a lot of time and a lot of energy to make it work.

Given all that, it is pretty impressive it turned out as well as it did.

It was kind of amazing it ever got done. I remember my first thought when I saw it in a store was, Don t they know we re not professionals? We never got a license to do this! If people buy that, they ll realize... It s pretty weird to see your thing shrink-wrapped. It s just very odd, you get that moment of, Wait a second, I guess I just go do what I want to do with my life.

It s interesting. Paul was very day to day at the beginning of the project. Later he got more involved in running Looking Glass, which was Blue Sky at the time, starting up new projects and dealing with business stuff and money and all that. But I have to say he was a huge help at the beginning, just giving us a grounding framework that was very open. He was very good at painting a picture of where to go. He brought this idea of games as this awesome, creative, open thing and you can do all these amazing things, and what do we want to do? And I m not sure it would work right now with an eighty-person for $12 million or whatever we do games for these days, but for three, four people in a tiny rented office space in New Hampshire, most of us twenty years old and not particularly being paid piles of money, it was awesome .

Paul set a very good example by finding the right staff. And a bunch of us had been at school together, so we had that You re in college, and you re an engineer, and you go figure things out. Which, once again, often leads to a lot of thrashing and hard work and trying and retrying . It s sort of like we were always a preproduction team, because at our largest we were five. I knew every line of code, I knew every level, I wrote conversations, I wrote a bunch of the editor. You could hold the whole game in your head and that let you iterate and improvise in a way that s a lot harder now. So I think Paul set a really good agenda of You re a programmer/designer, you ve got to care about creativity, you ve got to get it done, you ve got to know your computer, you ve got to be smart, you ve got to write fast code.... And for the final part of the game when Warren got really involved, not only was he great creatively to help us put finishing touches on it and clean it up and make it real, but he also knew how to finish projects and keep us motivated and on track. He had that ability to say, Guys guys guys, you re focused in totally the wrong place. Working on Underworld II and System Shock with him, when I was project leading more full time, it was nice to have Warren there to say, Hey Warren, here s what I m thinking, I m trying to do this, this, and this... in our weekly phone call, or once a month when he would come down to Boston. His ability to say, Yeah, Doug, I hear all that stuff you re saying, but fifty percent of it you shouldn t even care about now. And twenty-five percent of it will be fine however you go; just pick something. The other twenty-five percent is pretty scary; we re going to need to figure that out. And you know there s this other twenty-five percent you re not even talking about and I don t know why. Tome that s the scary stuff. He had that ability to help me and the rest of the guys reset, from the big-picture view of someone who has done it before and was really creative, but who also understood getting games done. It was a huge, huge win.

So we got really lucky, between Paul and Warren as our two experienced vets. The other programmer who wasn t from the school gang was an ex-Infocom guy who had done a ton of tools programming, and he just said, Hey guys, come in to work and do the work, and get it done. So we had a decent balance early on to learn from, so that we didn t just get obsessed and be college kids flailing forever and trying to be super creative. But we also had enough pushing us that we didn t just try to get the code written as fast as possible and call it done. So we got pretty lucky in the people we had around us to learn from, look up to, and get ideas from.

[...]

It seems like Ultima Underworld was very much designed around the technology, instead of the other way around. How did the game design process work?

We d all played Wizardry I . It s not like we had nothing in mind. I had played tons of Bard s Tale 1 when I was in junior high school, and we d played the early, early dungeon games. And we were obviously incredibly conscious of the technology. When you re sitting there timing all your assembler loops and trying to figure stuff out, there you are, right? And it s not like it was fast enough even with all our attempts to make it fast. Game making is a lot different when your programmers are your designers and you have one artist. It s just a very different thing. You re conscious of everything. You run the game, and you hit the hotkey to switch into editor mode and then you attach the trap and oh, the trap doesn t really have the parameter you want. So you exit, change the code, change the parameter, go back in, change the trap, go back into the game, hey that worked, and so on. Because who are you going to talk to about it? Obviously, the three of us who did most of the programming on the second half talked all the time, but even so, we all built levels, we all wrote conversations, we all worked on the editor, we all worked on the game. It s a very different thing. Back then, one person could easily have the whole game in their head. All disciplines, all elements, all content. Maybe not easily, that s probably a little glib, but they can do it. And then five years later you probably couldn t have the whole game in your head but you probably could have a whole discipline in your head, or the story, or how it s structured. And nowadays, if you re a project leader your job is to get the eight or ten managers all seeing vaguely the same thing. Because what you have to do is get those eighty people to all act like they re seeing the same thing. That s hard, because the fact that humans communicate at all is sort of magical , as far as I can tell. And when you re talking about creative collaboration, creative collaboration s really, really hard. I really do think as a project leader these days your job is to Vulcan mind meld your team.

You can read more here: http://flylib.com/books/en/4.479.1.135/1/

It's a very extensive interview.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Great interview, thanks for the link.

I think this interview is the single clearest capturing of the LGS way, Paul's vision, Warren's impact and how process, practiced by bright people, produced the LGS secret sauce.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Great interview, thanks for the link.

I think this interview is the single clearest capturing of the LGS way, Paul's vision, Warren's impact and how process, practiced by bright people, produced the LGS secret sauce.

A quarter century ago...now it's just old drunks begging for money over the internet.

Zep--

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Yes, they are the old drunks and you are the clairvoyant sage.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Yes, they are the old drunks and you are the clairvoyant sage.

Look at their red noses and rosy cheeks...a clear sign of alcoholics.

Zep--

 

[Neki]

Got the GOG version of UU1 last week and man,what a experience.

One of the few games that remember me of my Pre-teen years.
Arcades,Local multiplayer,and Boomboxes.Those were the days...

I made a full axe wielding figther,on Level 3 right now and im loving it.The game can easily imerse me more than any bioware space opera ever will.
Got my young nephew playing too.
He starves almost every time and is so funny see him complaining that the game lacks ''regenerative health'' or stuff like that.

Does anyone tried to finish with ranged weapons only?It became almost impossible later on to me.

So many memories,so little time

 

[Zep Zepo]

Got the GOG version of UU1 last week and man,what a experience.

One of the few games that remember me of my Pre-teen years.
Arcades,Local multiplayer,and Boomboxes.Those were the days...

UU1 was a great game, even though I had to play in "postage stamp" mode because of my computer at the time. I got the UU1 demo that was included with U7, and after playing the demo I had to have it!

I liked UU2, it made some improvements, but UU1 was the better game of the two, IMO.

Zep--

 

[danilopiazza]

Completed game, got a lot of fun. Bread of Cure Poison and Ale of Lesser Heal are probably less known items in the game.

I remember finding out about the Ale of Lesser Heal by drinking it and noticing it healed me.

Spoiler

It is located in the western part of level 1, just outside the Imp's room.

But where is the Bread of Cure Poison? Now I am going to try and stack every single loaf of bread on top of the other loaves... (or just OWY'ing them).

 

[Unkillable Cat]

This is one of the things that amazes me about the Underworld games to this day: People are STILL finding something new in them, almost 25 years after their release.

Underworld 2 has loads more of these bizarre little items.

 

[---]

Someone should really write a list of all in game items.
There's pretty much nothing on the Internet.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Without extracting the data straight from the files, that's going to be a daunting task because of how the Lore skill works.

When you Look at an item, two skillchecks are made: A Detect Magic check (game tells you that the item is magical) and an Identify check (game tells you precisely what kind of item it is) against your Lore skill. However, both skillchecks are made against your current Lore stat. If either check fails, there is no further skillcheck until the Lore stat is raised, in which case another check is made.

However, Lore 30 (the maximum) does not guarantee 100% success for either roll (though the Detect Magic check is extremely likely to succeed) and therein lies the problem. Fowyr can probably tell us how to hexedit a Lore 30 stat into a fresh character, but if the skillcheck roll fails, you're not going to learn anything for the rest of the game.

In other words, even with a maxed-out Lore skill you may miss out on magical items.

That may be the reason why not even the Ultima Dragons (a fairly organized fanbase) have done this.

Stacking items helps to spot the magical items, but have fun picking up EVERY item in the game and stacking it with similar ones...and that's before we get to the unstackable items.

It'll take untold amount of man-hours to pull off, not to mention Minecraft-esque levels of autism.

I think we're better off pestering Otherside Entertainment to release the source code for the Underworld games (they have it).

 

[aweigh]

only in the codex does a flame war erupt over whether or not crouch-jumping constitutes parkour

 

[Fowyr]

But where is the Bread of Cure Poison? Now I am going to try and stack every single loaf of bread on top of the other loaves...

I maaaade it! Due to "too many items" bug.
I think it's on level 8 (or, less probable on 7) somewhere in SW or NW corner.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Someone should really write a list of all in game items.
There's pretty much nothing on the Internet.

Fowyr you have been messing about with the innards. Can you extract a list of item descriptions?