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Ultima
hambone
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This thread is for the discussion of
If not the first computer roleplaying series, it shares the crown with the Wizardry series for its influence in shaping the genre. As a trilogy of trilogies, each successive game pushed boundaries in terms of gameplay, writing and technical achievement.
It all started in 1979, when Richard “Lord British†Garriot created Akalabeth as a hobby. By today’s standards, it’s a primitive wireframe black and white first person dungeon crawl, programmed in Basic for the Apple II and originally sold in Ziploc bags to Garriot’s friends. Akalabeth is generally considered Ultima 0 as a historical footnote, but I don’t see it as very important to the series as a whole.
Ultimas I, II and III, the first trilogy, are known as the Age of Darkness. During these perilous times, the land of Sosaria is seemingly constantly under attack from powerful and sinister forces. The style of play has been called “Kill the Foozle†by Lord British.
In Ultima 1, you, The Stranger, are called upon by the Brittanian king Lord British to stop the evil wizard Mondain. Though much of the adventure is carried out in the medieval fantasy world of Sosaria, eventually the game takes you into outer-space. It was not popular at the time, but was reprogrammed and re-released in 1986.
Ultima 2: Revenge of the Enchantress pits The Stranger against Mondain’s former apprentice and lover, Minax. Again you play as one character from another land, but this time Minax has found out the origins of The Stranger and using time travel and silver moongates, invades Earth.
Ultima 3: Exodus is the first Ultima game to include a full party of adventurers and it replaced the wireframe dungeons with solid walls. Exodus, being the unholy spawn of Minax and Mondain, is carrying out a third invasion of Sosaria from his Isle of Fire. The party must obtain the help of the Time Lord and it is ultimately revealed that Exodus
[spoiler:bef6c5da38]is a computer.[/spoiler:bef6c5da38]
The Age of Enlightenment began with Ultima 4: The Quest of the Avatar. Ultima 4 marked a great departure from the original trilogy in that no longer was your goal to “Kill the Foozleâ€. For the first time possibly ever in a video game, the player was asked to consider the ethics of his actions.
After the death of Exodus, Sosaria was ripped apart, with Brittania seemingly the only continent to survive. To heal his people and recover the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, Lord British creates a system of Eight Virtues: Valor, Honor, Honesty, Humility, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Justice and Compassion, and called for a champion among his people to embody these virtues as the Avatar.
You could not beat the game without playing virtuously. Running away from fights is unvalorous, stealing from others was unjust, ignoring beggars uncompassionate, and so on. Your main character’s class and starting location was chosen by answering series of hypothetical ethical questions about which virtues you lean towards. Each town and class represented a virtue, and each town had a party member of that class who could join you. This introduced the eight companions, central characters to the series such as Iolo, Shamino and Dupre.
Ultima 5: The Warriors of Destiny continued with this new concept of ethics in gameplay, by showing what happens when the virtues are taken to their extremes. Lord British has been imprisoned, and Lord Blackthorn sits on the throne, imposing his own version of the virtues where Justice means mandatory death sentences for even minor crimes. On top of that, three terrifying figures, the Shadowlords, are roaming the countryside.
Ultima 6: The False Prophet was the last game in the Age of Enlightenment trilogy. In it, the Avatar is once again summoned from Earth, presumably to fight some new evil, but instead finds himself in a trap set by the Gargoyles who lived in the Stygian Abyss. He escapes with the help of Iolo, Shamino and Dupre and sets out to repel this new invasion. In doing so, it is revealed that the Gargoyles have invaded because their home was destroyed when the Avatar took the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom at the end of Ultima 4, and that they have their own system of virtues not unlike Britannia.
During the period between Ultimas 6 and 7 (2 years on Earth, 200 on Britannia), the Avatar has a series of lesser adventures:
Ultima Underworld was developed in 1992 by now-canonized Looking Glass Studios and broke new ground as a first-person RPG, creating my favorite sub-genre. Released a full year before Doom, Underworld featured jumping, swimming, and the ability to look in a full 360 degrees. The Stygian Abyss had been turned into a massive dungeon with several races and subcultures each staking out their little claim. As the Avatar, you’re sealed in the Abyss as punishment when you are framed for the kidnapping of a nobleman’s daughter, and must rescue her to prove your innocence.
Ultima: Savage Empires and Ultima: Martian Dreams are huge, though interesting, departures from the series. In each, the Avatar finds himself adventuring on a strange world. In Savage Empire, you’re traipsing through the jungle with primitive tribesmen. In Martian Dreams, you’re exploring the ruins of a Martian civilization with the help of the early 20th centuries’ greatest minds. The games ran on the Ultima VI engine, and are highly sought after by collectors. I’ve never played them, myself, but would like to.
That brings us to the final trilogy: The Age of the Guardian.
Ultima VII: The Black Gate begins with the Avatar being summoned in the usual way, though strangely, Lord British wasn’t behind the summoning. In the 200 years that have passed, the virtues have fallen into disuse, and people follow a new religious cult called the Fellowship. The Avatar finds himself reuniting with his old friends while investigating a brutal ritualistic murder. The more he learns about the Fellowship, the more he begins to hear the strange and ominous voice of The Guardian.
This was my introduction to Ultima, and stands as my favorite video game of all time. The world of Britannia is beautifully colored, and everything is persistent. It was one of the first “sandbox†games that actually made you feel like you were in a world. Each NPC had his or her own schedule, story and life. There were no loading screens or level changes from Point A to Point B. You could harvest wheat from a field, grind it into flour at the mill, and bake that flour into bread in the oven and use that bread to feed your companions. Fourteen years since its release, I feel no game has achieved the high watermark set by Ultima 7’s combination of plot, dialogue and world interactivity. There was almost zero linearity.
Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds takes place after Ultima VII, when the Avatar must journey through several different dimensions, each controlled by the Guardian, to escape imprisonment and free his friends.
Serpent Isle was Ultima 7.5. It featured refinements to the Ultima 7 engine, and sent the Avatar and his companions to the titular Isle in pursuance of the Guardian’s agents. Though it lacked The Black Gate’s non-linearity and open-endedness, Serpent Isle had arguably the best story in the series. The Cosmic Serpent of Balance has been imprisoned, leading the Serpent Isle into Armageddon as the Serpents of Order and Chaos become unfettered by Balance.
Still seeking to return to Earth, Ultima 8 finds the Avatar trapped alone in the land of Pagan, a dominion of the Guardian, who has apparently found a way into Britannia. In this bleak and sunless world, the Avatar finds himself abandoning his virtues quite frequently as forces the Four elemental Titans who control Pagan to do his bidding. The world of Pagan must be torn apart for the Avatar to return to Britannia and thwart the Guardian once and for all.
Ultima 8 was and still is much maligned. It is the first of the main series since Ultima 2 to not include a full party of companions. It put the Avatar behind a metal mask, instead of allowing the player to choose a male or female character. It had awful, awful jumping puzzles. Garriot himself issued a lengthy apology to the fans, and made some pretty big promises for Ultima 9, the grand finale of the Guardian Trilogy.
But if you thought Ultima VIII caught a lot of flak, Ultima IX made it look like solid gold.
Ultima IX: Ascension spent five long years in development, with several revisions. Fans clamored for the return to a traditional Britannian adventure, with old companions and familiar themes. What they got was a slap in the face. Instead of starting off in a Guardian-ruled Britannia as in the end of Ultima VII, Ultima IX starts off on Earth, where the Avatar has somehow been hiding out for the past several years. Instead of having a party of companions, the Guardian has turned them against you, in some cases you are forced to kill them. Instead of choosing your gender and appearance, you play a strong-jawed blonde guy, like Duke Nukem without the glasses. Instead of the rich and proud Gargoyle culture of the previous games, the gargoyles are mindless evil drones. You even have to kill the “Queen†of the Gargoyles who had previously been asexual. Instead of going anywhere or doing anything, you followed a linear story
Ultima 9 did look pretty though. Technically, it was ahead of its time, and quite buggy. But the graphics were second to none. And the gameplay was pretty decent. There was a a fan patch that fixed a lot of the games inconsistencies and explained a lot of the plot holes, and generally goes a long way to making the game less of an insult to Ultima fans, but it still doesn’t come close to what it should have been.
Pretty nice looking for 1999.
After its release, Garriot left Origin. The company was realigned by EA to focus only on one product, Ultima Online and currently the series as we know it is dead and gone.
Or is it? There are many fan remakes, notably Exult and Lazarus. Exult is an open-source reverse engineered engine for Ultima VII for modern systems, allowing you to play The Black Gate and Serpent Isle flawlessly (as long as you have the originals). Thanks to Exult, I play both about once every year or two. Lazarus is an Ultima 5 remake that uses the Dungeon Siege engine, but that already has its own thread.
Where can I buy Ultima games? Ebay and Amazon’s used sellers are the only places I can think of. Look for the Ultima Collection. It includes Ultimas 0 through 8 and .pdf versions of the manuals and cloth maps for each game. The Underworld games were release on an EA greatest hits CD that’s a bit harder to find. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams have never been re-released or put in a compilation and are almost impossible to find.
Links:
Ultima Collector’s Guide
Wikipedia on Ultima
The Notable Ultima (warning: midi)
Ultima: The Reconstruction, a site featuring all the different Ultima remake projects.
Doug the Eagle's "walkthroughs"
If not the first computer roleplaying series, it shares the crown with the Wizardry series for its influence in shaping the genre. As a trilogy of trilogies, each successive game pushed boundaries in terms of gameplay, writing and technical achievement.
It all started in 1979, when Richard “Lord British†Garriot created Akalabeth as a hobby. By today’s standards, it’s a primitive wireframe black and white first person dungeon crawl, programmed in Basic for the Apple II and originally sold in Ziploc bags to Garriot’s friends. Akalabeth is generally considered Ultima 0 as a historical footnote, but I don’t see it as very important to the series as a whole.
Ultimas I, II and III, the first trilogy, are known as the Age of Darkness. During these perilous times, the land of Sosaria is seemingly constantly under attack from powerful and sinister forces. The style of play has been called “Kill the Foozle†by Lord British.
In Ultima 1, you, The Stranger, are called upon by the Brittanian king Lord British to stop the evil wizard Mondain. Though much of the adventure is carried out in the medieval fantasy world of Sosaria, eventually the game takes you into outer-space. It was not popular at the time, but was reprogrammed and re-released in 1986.
Ultima 2: Revenge of the Enchantress pits The Stranger against Mondain’s former apprentice and lover, Minax. Again you play as one character from another land, but this time Minax has found out the origins of The Stranger and using time travel and silver moongates, invades Earth.
Ultima 3: Exodus is the first Ultima game to include a full party of adventurers and it replaced the wireframe dungeons with solid walls. Exodus, being the unholy spawn of Minax and Mondain, is carrying out a third invasion of Sosaria from his Isle of Fire. The party must obtain the help of the Time Lord and it is ultimately revealed that Exodus
[spoiler:bef6c5da38]is a computer.[/spoiler:bef6c5da38]
The Age of Enlightenment began with Ultima 4: The Quest of the Avatar. Ultima 4 marked a great departure from the original trilogy in that no longer was your goal to “Kill the Foozleâ€. For the first time possibly ever in a video game, the player was asked to consider the ethics of his actions.
After the death of Exodus, Sosaria was ripped apart, with Brittania seemingly the only continent to survive. To heal his people and recover the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, Lord British creates a system of Eight Virtues: Valor, Honor, Honesty, Humility, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Justice and Compassion, and called for a champion among his people to embody these virtues as the Avatar.
You could not beat the game without playing virtuously. Running away from fights is unvalorous, stealing from others was unjust, ignoring beggars uncompassionate, and so on. Your main character’s class and starting location was chosen by answering series of hypothetical ethical questions about which virtues you lean towards. Each town and class represented a virtue, and each town had a party member of that class who could join you. This introduced the eight companions, central characters to the series such as Iolo, Shamino and Dupre.
Ultima 5: The Warriors of Destiny continued with this new concept of ethics in gameplay, by showing what happens when the virtues are taken to their extremes. Lord British has been imprisoned, and Lord Blackthorn sits on the throne, imposing his own version of the virtues where Justice means mandatory death sentences for even minor crimes. On top of that, three terrifying figures, the Shadowlords, are roaming the countryside.
Ultima 6: The False Prophet was the last game in the Age of Enlightenment trilogy. In it, the Avatar is once again summoned from Earth, presumably to fight some new evil, but instead finds himself in a trap set by the Gargoyles who lived in the Stygian Abyss. He escapes with the help of Iolo, Shamino and Dupre and sets out to repel this new invasion. In doing so, it is revealed that the Gargoyles have invaded because their home was destroyed when the Avatar took the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom at the end of Ultima 4, and that they have their own system of virtues not unlike Britannia.
During the period between Ultimas 6 and 7 (2 years on Earth, 200 on Britannia), the Avatar has a series of lesser adventures:
Ultima Underworld was developed in 1992 by now-canonized Looking Glass Studios and broke new ground as a first-person RPG, creating my favorite sub-genre. Released a full year before Doom, Underworld featured jumping, swimming, and the ability to look in a full 360 degrees. The Stygian Abyss had been turned into a massive dungeon with several races and subcultures each staking out their little claim. As the Avatar, you’re sealed in the Abyss as punishment when you are framed for the kidnapping of a nobleman’s daughter, and must rescue her to prove your innocence.
Ultima: Savage Empires and Ultima: Martian Dreams are huge, though interesting, departures from the series. In each, the Avatar finds himself adventuring on a strange world. In Savage Empire, you’re traipsing through the jungle with primitive tribesmen. In Martian Dreams, you’re exploring the ruins of a Martian civilization with the help of the early 20th centuries’ greatest minds. The games ran on the Ultima VI engine, and are highly sought after by collectors. I’ve never played them, myself, but would like to.
That brings us to the final trilogy: The Age of the Guardian.
Ultima VII: The Black Gate begins with the Avatar being summoned in the usual way, though strangely, Lord British wasn’t behind the summoning. In the 200 years that have passed, the virtues have fallen into disuse, and people follow a new religious cult called the Fellowship. The Avatar finds himself reuniting with his old friends while investigating a brutal ritualistic murder. The more he learns about the Fellowship, the more he begins to hear the strange and ominous voice of The Guardian.
This was my introduction to Ultima, and stands as my favorite video game of all time. The world of Britannia is beautifully colored, and everything is persistent. It was one of the first “sandbox†games that actually made you feel like you were in a world. Each NPC had his or her own schedule, story and life. There were no loading screens or level changes from Point A to Point B. You could harvest wheat from a field, grind it into flour at the mill, and bake that flour into bread in the oven and use that bread to feed your companions. Fourteen years since its release, I feel no game has achieved the high watermark set by Ultima 7’s combination of plot, dialogue and world interactivity. There was almost zero linearity.
Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds takes place after Ultima VII, when the Avatar must journey through several different dimensions, each controlled by the Guardian, to escape imprisonment and free his friends.
Serpent Isle was Ultima 7.5. It featured refinements to the Ultima 7 engine, and sent the Avatar and his companions to the titular Isle in pursuance of the Guardian’s agents. Though it lacked The Black Gate’s non-linearity and open-endedness, Serpent Isle had arguably the best story in the series. The Cosmic Serpent of Balance has been imprisoned, leading the Serpent Isle into Armageddon as the Serpents of Order and Chaos become unfettered by Balance.
Still seeking to return to Earth, Ultima 8 finds the Avatar trapped alone in the land of Pagan, a dominion of the Guardian, who has apparently found a way into Britannia. In this bleak and sunless world, the Avatar finds himself abandoning his virtues quite frequently as forces the Four elemental Titans who control Pagan to do his bidding. The world of Pagan must be torn apart for the Avatar to return to Britannia and thwart the Guardian once and for all.
Ultima 8 was and still is much maligned. It is the first of the main series since Ultima 2 to not include a full party of companions. It put the Avatar behind a metal mask, instead of allowing the player to choose a male or female character. It had awful, awful jumping puzzles. Garriot himself issued a lengthy apology to the fans, and made some pretty big promises for Ultima 9, the grand finale of the Guardian Trilogy.
But if you thought Ultima VIII caught a lot of flak, Ultima IX made it look like solid gold.
Ultima IX: Ascension spent five long years in development, with several revisions. Fans clamored for the return to a traditional Britannian adventure, with old companions and familiar themes. What they got was a slap in the face. Instead of starting off in a Guardian-ruled Britannia as in the end of Ultima VII, Ultima IX starts off on Earth, where the Avatar has somehow been hiding out for the past several years. Instead of having a party of companions, the Guardian has turned them against you, in some cases you are forced to kill them. Instead of choosing your gender and appearance, you play a strong-jawed blonde guy, like Duke Nukem without the glasses. Instead of the rich and proud Gargoyle culture of the previous games, the gargoyles are mindless evil drones. You even have to kill the “Queen†of the Gargoyles who had previously been asexual. Instead of going anywhere or doing anything, you followed a linear story
Ultima 9 did look pretty though. Technically, it was ahead of its time, and quite buggy. But the graphics were second to none. And the gameplay was pretty decent. There was a a fan patch that fixed a lot of the games inconsistencies and explained a lot of the plot holes, and generally goes a long way to making the game less of an insult to Ultima fans, but it still doesn’t come close to what it should have been.
Pretty nice looking for 1999.
After its release, Garriot left Origin. The company was realigned by EA to focus only on one product, Ultima Online and currently the series as we know it is dead and gone.
Or is it? There are many fan remakes, notably Exult and Lazarus. Exult is an open-source reverse engineered engine for Ultima VII for modern systems, allowing you to play The Black Gate and Serpent Isle flawlessly (as long as you have the originals). Thanks to Exult, I play both about once every year or two. Lazarus is an Ultima 5 remake that uses the Dungeon Siege engine, but that already has its own thread.
Where can I buy Ultima games? Ebay and Amazon’s used sellers are the only places I can think of. Look for the Ultima Collection. It includes Ultimas 0 through 8 and .pdf versions of the manuals and cloth maps for each game. The Underworld games were release on an EA greatest hits CD that’s a bit harder to find. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams have never been re-released or put in a compilation and are almost impossible to find.
Links:
Ultima Collector’s Guide
Wikipedia on Ultima
The Notable Ultima (warning: midi)
Ultima: The Reconstruction, a site featuring all the different Ultima remake projects.
Doug the Eagle's "walkthroughs"
Just a bunch of intoxicated pigeons.
hambone on
0
Posts
I wouldn't hold out for a rerelease. EA's a bitch like that. The original Ultima Collection was released to drum up interest in IX.
Ultima 9 is very playable, as long as you get the right patches.
The fan patch can be found at the Reconstruction link I posted, but disables the voices (which isn't a bad thing).
When I originally bought the UO collectors edition it came with ultimate 1-8 on cd along with moslo to make it run correctly. Unfortunately I no longer have the cd.
I was a big UO fan up until the Trammel incident and the carebearing of the game.
I don't think I've actually played Dungeon Siege proper.
It really depends on your patience for older games. The first trilogy is probably best left to nostalgia. They're dungeon hacks without a lot to offer these days.
The second trilogy plays well if you don't mind the old-school interfaces, graphics and dialogue. Games have come a long way in the last two decades, but the Ultimas after 4 are each unique and interesting and have enough qualities to set them apart.
The Ultima Collection and the Underworld games should all run well under dosbox, though Ultima 7 should be played with Exult.
I really ought to get round to playing it properly.
Thread doesn't mention the censored, watered-down SNES version of Ultima 7, btw.
Have you done the IT-HE walkthrough for it? If not, do it now. I posted a link with my last post.
Matter of fact, I think I'll go play that sumbitch.
There's probably a reason for that.
Pun intended. I got Ultima 9 along with Ultima 1-8 in some sort of package off of eBay. It was about $20. My best purchase ever.
The storyline for Ultima Underworld 1 was... awesome. I really wish LB would create a spiritual successor to the Ultima series. Similar to Bioshock i suppose.
I greatly enjoyed 8 and 9 each for their own reasons. I miss the bravado the old origin that wasn't afraid to push the limits of what a computer could do. 9 was a system slayer, but it looked better than anything else out there and was pretty darn fun if you got lucky with the savegame corruption bugs as the savegames got larger.
For all the complaining of bugs in 8 and 9, it was ultima 7 that was unbeatable for me due to a bug.
I was playing and following the murders (wandering around slowly as well, so I had a huge amount of playtime invested) until I was supposed to go to a murder scene and get a ceremonial dagger that unlocked the rest of the storyline. The dagger was nowhere to be found. After an insane amount of searching and research on the internet, there was no solution to this game ending bug other than loading up all your old savegames and hoping one of them had the dagger. I had 4 savegames, NONE of them contained the dagger.
I am bitter about that game to this day. Nowadays there may be an easy solution, the bug may be gone in the new reverse engineered system, but I don't have the urge to play it again and hit the same bug.
It would not have upset me so much if 7 was not a fun game though. I also never met a system that ran this game well. Moslo made it quirky in my experience and a system slow enough to not be too fast was very choppy. There seemed to be a very small window of computers that could play this right. I leapfrogged over that window.
I also played some 6 but it was a tad open ended for me and I didn't really end up following the storyline and instead just wandering around exploring. I did have a lot of fun in it though.
Other than those, I also spent WAY too long as a kid completing Exodus on the NES.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
MMOG Comic, Quests, and News. www.thebrasse.com
Ultima 7 is pretty much all mouse.
Quite a bit, but since combat is turn based it's not so bad. It's generally a good idea to keep a notebook too, since there's no in-game journal. You'll have to learn the runic alphabet, keep track of the moon phases, learn the mantras, learn the spellwords and their reagents, that sort of thing.
To be more exact, I was always kinda dissapointed with Morrowind because you had to load between interior and exterior zones, while UIX was entirely seamless.
Mind you, most of the "towns" in the world consisted of three small shacks and occasionally a cave, but it was still seamless.
That said, SA had a really amusing "lets play Ultima: Ascension" thread a few weeks back.
edit:
Best CD EVAR! Too bad I can't play most of what's on it anymore... :O
Like that one chest right outside of Trinsic (that was where you started, right?) that contains a metric fuckton of gold and equipment.
And, of course, the hoe of death.
3DS: 1607-3034-6970
I have a CD with those exact same games on it, only it looks different.
Also, it was the Hoe of Destruction.
Gotta resist the urge to rebuy the collection...
And also:
Packaging rivalled only by Infocom.
The closest thing we have is Arx Fatalis; but it's not nearly as good as UW. Especially once those fucking super-warriors start messing your shit up and you have to abuse game mechanics to actually kill them.
Sadly, my attempt to play UW just now failed misrably as I just can't come to grips with the control scheme anymore. Using a touchpad probably didn't help. This game needs a true remake badly. Hell, even a source port with a more modern control scheme would be helpful.
Indeed.
http://www.playtr.com/team/team_bios.html
That story is also pretty awesome. I wish people still role-played like that.
http://www.playtr.com/team/team_bios.html
AHAHAHAHAHA!
There ya go.
If it's the shack I think it is, I seem to remember there being a pirate in there. It was sort of a lame joke about how people who pirate games are losers.
But when you really think about it, Ultima VII really pushed technical boundaries for its age. Vast, immense world that was extremely well thought. And game ran even with 386SX.