All Things Ultima |OT| The Virtues of Old Computer RPGs

[Deleted member 6215]

Hello everyone! Welcome to an attempt to kickstart a bit of discussion about the Ultima series of games. I realize that the traditional GAF/ERA audience is not very large for these games, but I'm hoping there are a few other like-minded individuals still around.

There is an incredible amount of material and information about Ultima, which is not surprising given that it has a 38 year history. Rather than try to take the approach of many other OTs and attempt to summarize everything, I'm going to highlight my own personal history with the series and share some things I think are interesting.

One thing before we start...
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What is Ultima? The most influential series of computer RPGs created by Richard Garriott (aka Lord British).
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Great, now that we have that out the way, let's begin:

Akalabeth: World of Doom. AKA "Ultima 0" (1979)

I don't have much experience with it as I was 2 years old at the time it was released. I haven't made any attempts to go back and play it, either. From all accounts it appears very rough around the edges and hard to play with a modern gaming mindset. I'd be curious to hear any first-hand experiences with it.

Ultima I, Ultima II, Ultima III (1981-1983)

I'm lumping the first three Ultimas together as they were sold at one point as trilogy and because I played them all during one Christmas holiday vacation about 12 years ago. Within in the games, the period of time they cover is sometimes referred to as the "Age of Darkness" as you're not the Avatar yet, but called the "Stranger." Historically significant and undeniably influential, I enjoyed playing them and came away with a greater appreciation for the series. I probably won't be replaying them anytime soon, though.

Time for some PC game box porn:

These are among my top prized items in my game collection. Really miss this kind of thing when buying PC games now.

Ultima IV (1985)

This is the game that really launched the success of the series in my opinion. Revolutionary at the time, it still feels revolutionary today. What other RPG has you seeking to become a spiritual leader by upholding key virtues? I've played both the PC version as well as the NES port (which is surprisingly good!) If you're looking for a place to start, Ultima IV is where I would do it. If you can get past the dated graphics, the game holds up incredibly well today. "Timeless classic" is an often overused statement, but not here.

It's free on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/ultima_4

Also worth checking out is the Retronauts episode on Ultima IV: https://retronauts.com/article/34/retronauts-pocket-episode-4

Ultima V (1988)

In terms of story, Ultima V really shines and it's what I enjoyed the most about it. After the warm fuzzies of Ultima IV, the tone of the game is much darker. The cover art on the box does a fantastic job of capturing that and it remains my favorite. There are themes of oppression and dictatorship, as well as references back to the first Ultima. It's fantastic.

Ultima VI (1990)

One of my favorite childhood memories is playing this game during 6th grade computer lab behind the back of the clueless teacher. It took some guts, not just because we were playing games when we should be writing a BASIC script, but the images of gargoyles sacrificing someone on an altar with "666" inscribed would have landed us in very hot water if seen at our fundamentalist Christian school. Seems ridiculous, now, but I digress.

The game came on six 5.25" floppy disks:

Click to shrink...

I was always impressed with the small touches of detail found in Ultima games. Notice how each disk has its own drawing to represent what you could expect when you switched disks. It added to the wonder and excitement of playing...

Ultima VII (1992)

Hands down my favorite Ultima and possibly my favorite RPG of all time. There are things this game does that games in 2017 still won't (or can't) do. I was fully expecting Ultima VII to take computer RPGs in a whole new direction with deeper mechanics and world-building, but it didn't quite work out that way.

Thankfully we can still play Ultima VII and it continues to hold up incredibly well. It's even easier to play these days thanks to things like DosBox. I still have my boot disk used to squeeze every last drop of memory out of my PC so that I could play this game. The requirements were absurd, but I look back at those early years of troubleshooting EMM386 issues as what would lay the groundwork for my future career in IT.

I loved Ultima VII so much at the time that the map the game came with wasn't good enough, I had to make my own:

Click to shrink...

In addition to playing the game via DosBox, it's worth mentioning the Exult project as a modernized recreation of Ultima VII that's playable on modern systems.

Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle (1993)

I was annoyed at the time that it was a "part 2" and would be watered down, but it's an excellent game that stands on its own. My friends and I at the time mercilessly mocked the voice acting during the intro:

Ultima VIII (1994)

Beginning of the decline. The "platforming" puzzles were completely out of place with the rest of series. I still haven't finished this game, but will be making an attempt in the next year or so.

Ultima IX (1999)

The deathblow courtesy of EA. This game was such a buggy mess that EA sent me a free copy and two month subscription to Ultima Online. It's remarkable that it still runs like crap even on a modern, high-end PC today.

Cloth maps!

One of my favorite extras, here are some pictures of the cloth maps from my collection:

Click to shrink...

Trinkets!
Long before preorder bonuses were a thing, Ultima games provided a "trinket" in every box. Here are mine from left to right: U4 ankh amulet, U5 Codex coin, U6 Orb of the Moons, U7 Fellowship medallion, U8 pentagram coin. For some reason Serpent Isle didn't have a trinket included.

Other useful links:
The Ultima Codex
Ultima Wiki

Non-mainline Ultima:
UItima Underworld 1 & 2
Ultima Online
....coming in a future post

 

[tiesto]

Cool thread - I picked up the series on GOG a while back but haven't had time to go through them. Ultima 4 is one of my alltime favorite western RPGs though.

 

[Kvik]

Glad to see there is a community for this game. The true precursor of open-world RPG! :-)

As much as I love Ultima VII, I dreaded the item management so much. I don't know how I managed the key-ring less situation before Serpent Isle. The murder mystery at the start was a great opener and it brought smile to my face how Divinity Original Sin pays a little homage to it.

 

[Deleted member 6215]

Glad to see there is a community for this game. The true precursor of open-world RPG! :-)

As much as I love Ultima VII, I dreaded the item management so much. I don't know how I managed the key-ring less situation before Serpent Isle. The murder mystery at the start was a great opener and it brought smile to my face how Divinity Original Sin pays a little homage to it.

Click to shrink...

The the nice thing about playing U7 via Exult is that you can add the keyring mod to make life a lot easier: http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Keyring_Mod

 

[Deleted member 6215]

I recently stumbled across someone working on converting Ultima Underworld into a modern 3D engine. The game is fully playable now and looks great:

https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldExporter

https://github.com/hankmorgan/Underworl ... s/tag/v1.0

 

[Raptomex]

So is Ultima Online worth playing?

 

[xir]

Man. I love ultima 4&6 but only ever played like twenty minutes of 5. Feel like I missed out. 6 is a top 5 game for me.

 

[LifeInTheFactory]

Sorry for digging this thread out, but I have some thoughts about Ultima IX that I wrote a couple of years ago on my work computer. Today is my last day at my current job. I found the text again, never having posted it anywhere. And it's too long for a review on GOG. So I'll post it here.

To make one thing clear from the beginning: this game is broken. And it's broken in such a way that it clearly impacts the fun I've had with it. If you think modern Bethesda games are janky or you're frustrated by early access bugs, you are in for a hell of a ride here. But I still had enough fun with Ultima IX to spend just under 50 hours playing and completing a 17 year old game that was released in such a messy state. And here is why.

After playing Ultima IX, I really felt the urge to write down my feelings about it (also to not forget them myself). So this is going to be a long review. The tl;dr is above, my journey to finish this game starts here.
I wanted to to play this game when it came out. But I was a poor 14-year-old kid at the time and did not have a PC that could run it properly, that was very clear from the demo they released. I just thought Ultima IX looked fascinating, even though I wasn't big on RPGs back then and I hadn't played any of the other Ultima games. A few years later, when I finally had a PC that was powerful enough, it was clear that Ultima IX was broken, crashed all the time, and in the long run, critics didn't like it much as well. So I skipped it. Fast forward to 2012: When the Ultima games started showing up on GOG, I remembered that I always wanted to play UIX, so I bought it, tried it, and still couldn't get over the issues. Also, 12 years didn't go easy on the general UI, controls, and graphics of this game. I abandoned it again.

Why I finally started playing this year? Not sure, I just stumbled across the game again and again in my library. And I had a free afternoon. So I set myself a couple of ground rules: 1) Take some time and research to make it look as good, run as stable, and control as nicely as possible. 2) Consult a guide to get started and avoid frustration.
I ended up installing some of the unofficial patches and using a tool to edit the options.ini. I also tried the "Beautiful Britannia" mod, but ditched it after it increased the crash rate to unbearable levels. (Nice view distance, though!) And I got the Prima guide book to read the introductions to how the game works. It turned out to be not that complicated, but it took some effort to get back to the mindset of 1999 and how games functioned back then: maps, quest logs, stats, that kind of stuff.

In Ultima IX, you are the Avatar (just like in most of the previous Ultimas). You live on Earth, where the game's tutorial takes place, but end up the in the fictional world of Britannia very soon. After getting up to speed with the events, it becomes clear that Britannia is under siege by the Guardian (your basic evil guy) who perverted all of the eight virtues and destroyed the shrines associated with them. Your main quest is to restore those shrines, and then defeat the Guardian.
In terms of gameplay, you wander through an open world (although it's very much gated for the first 15-20 hours, and again towards the end), look for hints to restoring the shrines, talk to people about restoring the shrines, go to dungeons to find the items you need to restore the shrines, and then - surprise - restore the shrines.

4. The frustrations
Alright, here we go. Before I get to the point of why I still loved this game, I have to get this part out of the way. So here is my list of broken things I stumbled upon, in no particular order:
-There is a dungeon below a little island that was considered too hard by the devs shortly before the game was finished. With no development time left, instead of repairing it, they just put in a teleporter after the first half of the dungeon, which lets you skip the second half. Not even the official guide book gives a damn: they just tell you to skip it.
-The same dungeon looks like a sewer, which makes no sense given where it is located. The reason is that it was originally supposed to be the sewer of Britain, the capital city. But that got cut, and instead of designing the actual dungeon that was supposed to be on this little island, they used what they already designed for the sewers.
-The game crashes, no matter what you do. It's probably memory leaks. It happens sometimes after 30 minutes, and sometimes after three hours, but it will crash at some point.
-The game also crashes in very specific places: There is one conversation for example, after which I couldn't use my mouse anymore or it was back to Windows. The solution is to walk away and leave town without moving the mouse.
-During the same quest, the quest giver wanted me to go to a cave. But there was a giant boulder in front of it, no way in. As it turned out, I the boulder only goes away after you choose a specific dialogue option.
-There are only two places in the world where you can buy a quite rare reagent (which you need to bind spells to your spellbook). I discovered that I screwed myself over from buying it from one of those places: I did a quest for someone else that the seller of this reagent did not approve of at all. That's fine, made sense even. The problem was that the other seller of this reagent (in a completely different place) bugged out. She is supposed to go to her shop and open it after you meet her in a different spot. Well, her pathfinding didn't work, she wandered in front of her tent (and still does) and I can't buy from her.
-For a game that is also about exploration, the inner logic of whom you have met at what time is sometimes nonfunctional. The dialogue scripts do a bad job of keeping track what you have actually heard and what not. Examples:
--I still don't know how the "love story" of this game originates. The person in question just suddenly told me she loves me.
--I came across some weird talk about me not paying for drinks at the pub in Britain, it became apparent that someone was impersonating the Avatar. When I finally found the guy, the game clearly assumed that I had met him before and that I had discovered other things he did apart from not paying the pub bill. This would have been such a nice little plot point: I had been away from Britain for a long while at this point in the game. The idea of coming back and finding your reputation shambles is great, especially in a game that is so much about karma and virtues. But the execution is horrible.
--There is apparently a civil war in the underwater gargoyle city. But that is not clear at all from the five people that run around there. It looks like people who have played the earlier games might know what's going on, but it's not explained very well. And the quests I had to do there had nothing to do with that theme.
--I think I freed a girl from slavery, but she still stands on the slave market crying.
-The story is unfinished in almost every part. Characters don't get introduced, the progression is very static, there are plotholes at every major story point. It's not even a complicated story, but it is told so uneven, it sometimes barely makes any sense. Some characters will go into minute details about tiny aspects of the game, other big plot developments just happen and then you're supposed to know why without any explanation. More than all the technical issues, this is the one issue that stings, because there is so much missed potential here. I won't pick the whole plot apart here, but if you are interested in what happened with the story of the game, just google "bob white plot".

5. The other side
In spite of all these problems, I still enjoyed Ultima IX tremendously. And I'll try to explain why. The game presents you with a fascinating open world that is very different from today's open worlds. On the one hand, your main quest line right to your final goal is clear from the very beginning, no big mystery. You can even see all the dungeons you have to clear on the map right from the moment when you arrive in Britannia. On the other hand, the open world is very small. It usually takes only seconds to go from one place to another. This creates a nice sense of scope. It's a sandbox I can immediately grasp. When it works, Utlima IX is a very focused exploration game. The strict limits are of course also due to technical limitations of the time. But they create density. There are no bullshit side activities here.
The self-limitation is also applicable to other parts of the game. Instead of dozens of materials there are eight (plus one later in the game). You need those in different combinations to brew potions and bind spells to your spellbook.
Speaking of the spellbook: It is quite a manual process to bind a spell: You need to place a scroll and the required ingredients on a pentagram, light some candles, and then type in an incantation. From today's perspective, that might sound tedious. But it's much more personal than clicking on a button to learn a spell.
There are barely any numbers in the game. You can see your hit points and money, but that's it. Armour and weapons don't have visible stats. There are two bars that let you see if equipping a piece of armour or a weapon makes you stronger, but the actual numbers don't matter. There are also magic items to be found in the world. If you want to know what they do, you need to find a book with a description. Yes, it is obtuse, but I liked not thinking about stats in an RPG.
Consequently, character development is just as barebones. There are no experience points, you just get to upgrade one of your three main stats every time you cleanse a shrine. And you can increase your combat skills in a few different categories if you find the trainers in the world. The caveat here is that by the end of the game, it's very likely to have maxed out every single stat. It would have been pretty cool and more meaningful if you had to make actual decisions here and couldn't just skill everything.
Oh, and the journal is just a stream of consciousness of quest-related notes. No tracking, no search function, no ordering. It's the best. And it only works because there are not dozens and dozens of side quests.
I really like all of these self-imposed restrictions that the game has. Every upgrade feels essential, every new weapon I find, I will probably use for a while, every skill I learn makes me more powerful.

6. Conclusion
When - and this "when" sometimes is a big "if" - this game works properly, it is the open world antithesis to modern open world games. The limited UI and stats, the information that you have to scrape together to advance, the relatively small number of enemies, the lack of fetch quests, the focused exploration - this could be an awesome and timeless game. Unfortunately, the technical issues make it a mess to play. And the plot holes are aggravating. In the end, I had a lot of fun with Ultima IX. The biggest hurdle are the bugs and the ancient controls and gameplay mechanisms at first. Once I managed to handle those, it was great - until I saw the story falling apart. And after that, it was still worth playing, at least.