KeighnMcDeath
RPG Codex Boomer
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Lol. This would have been fun to see.
-
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Ultima The Ultima Series Discussion Thread
- Thread starter SausageInYourFace
- Start date
Late Bloomer
Scholar
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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
Liturgist
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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.
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.
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I'm just going to leave this here.
KeighnMcDeath
RPG Codex Boomer
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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.
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- 97,571
Weeb Ultima IV made in RPG Maker:
KeighnMcDeath
RPG Codex Boomer
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2016
- Messages
- 13,093
I'm surprised this hasn't turned up earlier.
Buddy should've made Lord British a cut and paste job of one of Garriott's dorky cosplay photos. Missed opportunity. 
KeighnMcDeath
RPG Codex Boomer
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Use EAs Lady British.
behold_a_man
Educated
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- 150
So, I've finished Ultima 4.
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:
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
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
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
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
. 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
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
.
-> 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.
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:
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).
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
Sonora in Jhelom
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
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
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
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
2 mimics and cure spell needed later; this gives me ~500 gold in one try.
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
-> 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.
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