Ultima VII Revisited

That's a lovely art style, kind of Runescape Classic vibes.

The 0.1.0 release video also has addition segments about feature improvements [1] with some examples of the 2D to 3D conversion process that are quite impressive.

[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=25 0:25 to 0:40 has a bunch of the small scale objects being replaceable, rotatable, and animatable in 3D.

[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=48 0:48 to 1:06 has bulk replacement of scene objects with personally chosen substitutes. (3D rotatable)

[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=67 1:07 to 1:25 has fixing broken geometry and creating fully textured 3D replacements.

With the current state of the engine, and the extensive personal editing features, much like the comment from VariousPrograms, it could be used as a platform for doing other games, modified quests, and multi-player MMO style games.

Whiplash warning: seeing the portal in the video just threw me back 30 years!

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.

Yes when I was a kid we didn't have Minecraft, we had to built forts in Ultima 7 out of logs :D

The one on Ultima Underworld is my favourite. What an incredible game, so ahead of its time.

UU was teh shizz. I wonder what it would look like with photorealistic renders.

The updated camera angle is the killer feature for me. That’s the only issue I have with the original and I had that same issue when it came out.

I played them (starting with 4) back in the day. And 35 years later, I fixed a bug in the ScummVM version of U4. I discovered it while showing the game to my kid.

I couldn't have predicted that back then. Although as a kid, I did fix a "bug" in Ultima that required the floppy disk when you had it installed on HD.

I also bounced off the original due to the weird camera angle

It was a little more readable on CRT. But yes, not really great.

The one that comes to mind for me is Exult: https://exult.sourceforge.io/. It is still being actively developed to this day: https://github.com/exult

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.

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.

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

You can jump right into U7 but U4 and 5 are some of the best games ever created. 6 is skippable; just read the plot between 5 and 7.

> 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

And if there were less jumping in U8. Visiting the air elemental was cause to rage against a village.

Let me go find my collection of floppy disks, then I'll need a 32 pin connection adapter for the drive. I remember U7 was my favorite game for a long time. I received U7 Serpent Isle as a gift, but at least one of 15 of the 3.5" disks was corrupted, ordering a replacement disks cost $14 dollars per disk, and I wasn't sure how many disks might be corrupted. I gave up on the game. I should just buy it on GoG.

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

the game didn't run with EMS. You needed XMS

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.

Oh yeah, I had to unload the CD driver and move the mouse driver to himem just for this...

Haha this XD... I couldn't figure it out on my own and asked my Mom for help, luckily she was able to get it running for me :D

I definitely remember the collection of boot disks I used to load the right autoexec.bat/config.sys settings for the Ultima and Wing Commander games, and how long I spent tuning these settings. I was just a kid then, but I remember the whole exercise being pretty complicated!

Raise

I recall that it was possible to squeeze a disk cache in too, which made a nice difference for performance.

As someone who played these back in the day and enjoyed them, I don't think I could even recommend them to myself today. Ultima VII is everything the other comments say it is... but it's also one staggeringly large nested fetch quest, with nothing much breaking it up.

I'd recommend some combination of the Bethesda open world games and the JRPG genre today. They're not the same, nothing really quite fills the Ultima gap that I know of, but between those two I'd call it close enough.

A YT'er named 'Spoony' also made a thorough, entertaining retrospective of the Ultimas, and even caps it off with an interview with Lord British!

I'm a huge fan of Majuular, these videos are amazing. I like that he dives deeply into the history behind each game as well - like the company, Richard Garriott (Lord British), etc.

His other videos on other games are great as well!

What's the busy work like in Ultima? I've never played it.

archive breadcrumb: https://archive.org/details/spoony-ultima-retrospective-orig...

I'm holding out for Wiz 2 & 3 being remade. Wiz 4 would be fun for 30 minutes or so before I give up in frustration

This looks great. I see a Linux version; do you happen to know if anyone has tried it on a Steam Deck?

I remember playing Ultima VII back in '94 (or was it '95?). When the game started up, I could only feel wonder. It was so far ahead of the competition at the time.

The only other instance where I got the same "this game is way ahead of everyone else" feel was when I first played Morrowind.