There's a YouTuber that's been going through and making in-depth retrospectives of each Ultima game that some here may find interesting. I've found them a pleasant watch and I don't usually go for this type of content. I never played the Ultima series until Ultima Online so I don't have the nostalgia goggles that I'd need to go back and play games this old (sorry, it's the truth) so these videos are as close as I'll probably get.
So funny to see this here, I was just looking into Ultima remakes last night, and saw this one among others. Looks really awesome. I never played any of the Ultima games back in the day, and have bounced off them when trying in later years. This should make Ultima VII a lot more accessible and playable.
While Exult basically matches the graphics of the original game, this is closer to "3D Ultima VII", with rotatable views and more interactivity in the game. It gives it what looks like a kind of voxel-ish look, mixing in original sprites with newly-modeled 3D objects.
Vaguely related but there is this whole set of videos on the production of the Ultima series on Youtube by Majuular that I've been playing while working out. Just such a different time, I almost regret missing it.
His video on 7 and serpent's isle brought back a lot of memories (although my preferred origin game was Wing Commander)
Rise your hand if you remember how long you had to tinker around to get enough EMS to load the game plus sound card drivers loaded into memory when being in DOS!
Wait play the game? I am fiddling my config.sys and autoexec.bat just right and making sure I could get to 610k. Using 4DOS to have a pick a path adventure of which configuration to load as it was starting up to run each game. Then I might play a game here and there.
I never played an Ultima game, but I remember that many years ago, there was a period where Ultima VII was commonly mentioned as "the best RPG of all time" by PC players. Nowadays it seems Ultima is rarely talked about anymore compared to classic SNES RPGs like Final Fantasy VI, which came out two years later.
The best RPG of all time should be either Ultima IV, Chrono Trigger+, that's it, with the Plus patch or Pokémon Crystal (a hacked ROM) with improving patches, such as:
- all mons ingame
- level cap
- no trading
- improved Battle Tower
Ultima VII shines with the in-game simulation, but today Cataclysm DDA:Bright Nights curb-stomps U VII in that area. Pokémon, well, it's about battling with your favourite mons, the game story it's just a placeholder with nice Japanese pixelated vistas.
Also, I'd put Slashem on par, too. Because it's damn silly and fun to raise a Samurai with Yakuza weapons, an anachronistic madness like the Discworld series (and OFC you have the Tourist role from the books too). More than strategy, Slashem/Nethack it's about lateral thinking and doing crazy stuff to advance into your goal. Throwing potions as weapons? Done. A Doppleganger Kung Fu monk doing DBZ-like attacks while using your Wand of Digging against rock based foes? OFC, done.
Later releases of U8 fixed jumping so it was less pixel-precise. It was still a clumsy mechanic, and the game still felt unfinished. But TBH I had a much worse reaction to Ultima IX, which capped off the series with a giant steaming turd. When I managed to get U9 to run at all after several years, I bounced out after a couple hours of playing. Still the only Ultima game I never finished.
This is pretty neat. There have been multiple attempts at something like that in the past, and of them, this is by far the best-looking one.
However, I think some artefacts can never be properly resolved (see for example the marble statue to the left at 1:53 in the video), which makes it look veird and break immersion (also the flat roofs that are supposed to be slanted/angled roofs)
Also, the U7 engine is a very complex beast so to properly implement it will take a lot of work and fine-tuning (although I guess they can use Exult as a start, which is by now pretty feature-complete)
On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play.
BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.
Tbf though, Exult kept the original fixed 2D overhead perspective which is a bit hard to grock when used to what has now become the 'traditional' camera angle for isometric games.
Revisited moves the entire game world into 3D and it looks magical:
Ultima 4 was good story wise, but the combat was extremely tedious with each in your party only being able to take a single step per turn. This was particularly annoying when facing easy to beat foes. The SSI AD&D games which only came out a little after U4 had a superior system, where each character in the party could move multiple steps (depending on stats) and so could the mosters. That system, while also repetitive, was much faster for combat, not to mention much more strategic and fun.
Later Ultimas, like U7 instead went for a streamlined realtime battle which was much better. That went overboard with the at the time infamous U8
pretty sure scummvm pulled in one of the ultima remake projects. Think it was exult but I could be wrong.
Do you need to play the prev ones? hmm I would say if you play 6 and 7 together you should be ok. You could get away with them standalone probably. I would not play the expansion packs of 7 without playing the base first though. the extra 6 ones you could play standalone. But you would probably want to play savage empire before martian dreams.
Out of those my personal fav was savage empire for some reason. A remix from origin using the ultima 6 engine.
There are a couple of references to earlier games, but if you read the manual then you know enough to just get started with QotA (Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar). QotA, WoD (Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny), and TFP (Ultima 6: The False Prophet) kind of make a trilogy (the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' trilogy) and you can port your character over between one game and the next, but they're perfectly playable by themselves. While TFP has the best story of the 3, I consider QotA my favourite because I love the concept of an RPG without a big evil villain. It's a story of a normal person cleaning up their act and becoming an exemplar of virtue and I love it.
Ultima VII is again perfectly playable by itself, but, yet again, it's best if you thoroughly read the manual for all the background information you need. There's an old joke of Bethesda introducing a new feature for one of the Elder Scrolls games (NPCs have schedules and go about their daily life! You can bake bread!) and the response being that Ultima VII already did that back in 1992.
There's a YouTuber that's been going through and making in-depth retrospectives of each Ultima game that some here may find interesting. I've found them a pleasant watch and I don't usually go for this type of content. I never played the Ultima series until Ultima Online so I don't have the nostalgia goggles that I'd need to go back and play games this old (sorry, it's the truth) so these videos are as close as I'll probably get.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL16yfJJxAM6g-4YxKGI-1...
So funny to see this here, I was just looking into Ultima remakes last night, and saw this one among others. Looks really awesome. I never played any of the Ultima games back in the day, and have bounced off them when trying in later years. This should make Ultima VII a lot more accessible and playable.
There's also a remake of Ultima Underworld being made in Godot: https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldGodot
Hoping for these projects to succeed, both U7 and UU sound like incredible games that deserve to be accessible to modern gamers.
UU was teh shizz. I wonder what it would look like with photorealistic renders.
You can play Arx Libertatis today with the assets bought from GOG (Arx Fatalis). The game is really close to UU.
My first thought was "How is this different from Exult?" (which is a relatively vanilla reimplementation of the game).
Some of the video segments here make differences clearer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4
While Exult basically matches the graphics of the original game, this is closer to "3D Ultima VII", with rotatable views and more interactivity in the game. It gives it what looks like a kind of voxel-ish look, mixing in original sprites with newly-modeled 3D objects.
That's a lovely art style, kind of Runescape Classic vibes.
Or some Ultima Online clients (Iris3D?).
Whiplash warning: seeing the portal in the video just threw me back 30 years!
Vaguely related but there is this whole set of videos on the production of the Ultima series on Youtube by Majuular that I've been playing while working out. Just such a different time, I almost regret missing it.
His video on 7 and serpent's isle brought back a lot of memories (although my preferred origin game was Wing Commander)
https://youtu.be/0NyaGRNH2zE
The one on Ultima Underworld is my favourite. What an incredible game, so ahead of its time.
Rise your hand if you remember how long you had to tinker around to get enough EMS to load the game plus sound card drivers loaded into memory when being in DOS!
:-D
Wait play the game? I am fiddling my config.sys and autoexec.bat just right and making sure I could get to 610k. Using 4DOS to have a pick a path adventure of which configuration to load as it was starting up to run each game. Then I might play a game here and there.
Looks cool! I wonder if they reworked/fixed the terrible font. I find it borderline illegible in the original! (example https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/31070-ultima-vii...)
It was a little more readable on CRT. But yes, not really great.
I also bounced off the original due to the weird camera angle
That qualifies as illegible? Maybe at the Tt mark but otherwise very clear. tL maybe?
Very excited about this project, U7 was my favourite game for a long, long time. These days we have BG3, and I'm dying for more of that.
I never played an Ultima game, but I remember that many years ago, there was a period where Ultima VII was commonly mentioned as "the best RPG of all time" by PC players. Nowadays it seems Ultima is rarely talked about anymore compared to classic SNES RPGs like Final Fantasy VI, which came out two years later.
The best RPG of all time should be either Ultima IV, Chrono Trigger+, that's it, with the Plus patch or Pokémon Crystal (a hacked ROM) with improving patches, such as:
- all mons ingame
- level cap
- no trading
- improved Battle Tower
Ultima VII shines with the in-game simulation, but today Cataclysm DDA:Bright Nights curb-stomps U VII in that area. Pokémon, well, it's about battling with your favourite mons, the game story it's just a placeholder with nice Japanese pixelated vistas.
Also, I'd put Slashem on par, too. Because it's damn silly and fun to raise a Samurai with Yakuza weapons, an anachronistic madness like the Discworld series (and OFC you have the Tourist role from the books too). More than strategy, Slashem/Nethack it's about lateral thinking and doing crazy stuff to advance into your goal. Throwing potions as weapons? Done. A Doppleganger Kung Fu monk doing DBZ-like attacks while using your Wand of Digging against rock based foes? OFC, done.
If only someone would properly finish U8 ...
And if there were less jumping in U8. Visiting the air elemental was cause to rage against a village.
Later releases of U8 fixed jumping so it was less pixel-precise. It was still a clumsy mechanic, and the game still felt unfinished. But TBH I had a much worse reaction to Ultima IX, which capped off the series with a giant steaming turd. When I managed to get U9 to run at all after several years, I bounced out after a couple hours of playing. Still the only Ultima game I never finished.
It was also kind of creepy that a very good way to level up was to kill that pack of aggro children north of town.
Neat, let me just find those old DOS U7 files…
GoG got you covered, and it's even on sale currently (I wonder if they scan HN heh)
https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_7_complete
Great initiative.
This is pretty neat. There have been multiple attempts at something like that in the past, and of them, this is by far the best-looking one.
However, I think some artefacts can never be properly resolved (see for example the marble statue to the left at 1:53 in the video), which makes it look veird and break immersion (also the flat roofs that are supposed to be slanted/angled roofs)
Also, the U7 engine is a very complex beast so to properly implement it will take a lot of work and fine-tuning (although I guess they can use Exult as a start, which is by now pretty feature-complete)
This is nice and all, but I want to revisit I, II and III!
Edit: Ask, and ye shall receive https://archive.org/details/ultima-1-gfx
This brings back so much memories!
Exult did this decades ago :).
On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play.
BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.
> Exult did this decades ago :).
Tbf though, Exult kept the original fixed 2D overhead perspective which is a bit hard to grock when used to what has now become the 'traditional' camera angle for isometric games.
Revisited moves the entire game world into 3D and it looks magical:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4
Ultima 4 was good story wise, but the combat was extremely tedious with each in your party only being able to take a single step per turn. This was particularly annoying when facing easy to beat foes. The SSI AD&D games which only came out a little after U4 had a superior system, where each character in the party could move multiple steps (depending on stats) and so could the mosters. That system, while also repetitive, was much faster for combat, not to mention much more strategic and fun.
Later Ultimas, like U7 instead went for a streamlined realtime battle which was much better. That went overboard with the at the time infamous U8
pretty sure scummvm pulled in one of the ultima remake projects. Think it was exult but I could be wrong.
Do you need to play the prev ones? hmm I would say if you play 6 and 7 together you should be ok. You could get away with them standalone probably. I would not play the expansion packs of 7 without playing the base first though. the extra 6 ones you could play standalone. But you would probably want to play savage empire before martian dreams.
Out of those my personal fav was savage empire for some reason. A remix from origin using the ultima 6 engine.
There are a couple of references to earlier games, but if you read the manual then you know enough to just get started with QotA (Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar). QotA, WoD (Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny), and TFP (Ultima 6: The False Prophet) kind of make a trilogy (the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' trilogy) and you can port your character over between one game and the next, but they're perfectly playable by themselves. While TFP has the best story of the 3, I consider QotA my favourite because I love the concept of an RPG without a big evil villain. It's a story of a normal person cleaning up their act and becoming an exemplar of virtue and I love it.
Ultima VII is again perfectly playable by itself, but, yet again, it's best if you thoroughly read the manual for all the background information you need. There's an old joke of Bethesda introducing a new feature for one of the Elder Scrolls games (NPCs have schedules and go about their daily life! You can bake bread!) and the response being that Ultima VII already did that back in 1992.
I also remember churning enough butter to fill backpacks in Ultima VI. (don't recall offhand whether bread was doable)
Not sure about VI, but I definitely spent an afternoon baking bread in Britannia in Ultima VII
Did you make make your own starter from flour and water? Inquiring bakers want to know!