Ultima Thread

What's your favorite
Also which was worse, 8 or 9?

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nuvie.sourceforge.net/
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My favorite game would be Ultima Underworld, because it's actually fun to play rather than just being about story. That's really the problem with the Ultima series, they give you a huge sandbox to play in, but nothing really interesting to do. At first you are blown away by the sheer amount and uniqueness of the content, but after a while you have been to every town and you are left with the mediocre gameplay.

The gameplay actually kept improving with every game up until (including) VI. The interface of VI is actually not that bad if you don't have to interact with it for too much. But when you have to it gets really on your nerves to fiddle with each item one at a time and one tile at a time. I recommend the Nuvie port, it has an optional Ultima VII style interface and that one fixes the only real complaint I had with VI.
nuvie.sourceforge.net/

I know this will not be a popular thing to say, but I really don't like VII. Oh sure, the amount of things you can do and discover is amazing, but none of it is really interesting. It's pretty cool that you can bake bread, but you end up doing it once or twice and then the novelty has worn off. Combat is a clusterfuck where everyone starts swinging wildly and then it's over. Your companions cannot be controlled at all (unlike in VI where you could control or automate them) and will waste magic wands like there is no tomorrow. And then there is the interface. All your items are now inside realistic-looking backpacks, bags and crates with no sense of order. Items are on top of items, forcing you to dig through ever container until you find that one thing you were looking for. Even if you were to sort your inventory it will soon become a mess again because every container has a size capacity but you have no idea how large your items are, so you will eventually come across an item that doesn't fit into its designated container. Speaking of not knowing, the game hides almost all stats. I get what they were going for, in real life when I picked up a sword I wouldn't be seeing weird numbers either, but I don't live in Britannia, I have no idea how "good" a sword is if I don't have the numbers.

VII is really just a point&click adventure in a RPG engine. All you do is just talk to people can occasionally change your equipment so you can get past tougher enemies. Sure, that's most RPGs, but in most RPGs the combat is at least somewhat interesting. Role-playing is a joke as well, you have no choice other than following the pre-set story like a dope. You can't do something like this:
Or how about this:

I know earlier games were like this as well, but those didn't attempt such a grand plot.

I agree because, like you said, the combat is pretty bad. Sure, the earlier games didn't have great combat, but there was at least some strategy involved. With VII all you could really do is hope for the best whenever you encountered an enemy, sort of the like the real-time mode in Arcanum.

Not to mention the ritual murder victim you find in that barn.

Ultima VII with Ultima VI's combat system would've been a better game.

Anyone else play Ultima Online during the open beta and launch? There was a palpable feeling that anything could happen. Gaming has definitely lost something.

No, sadly. I didn't even have internet when it came out. From what I've heard it was really amazing during it's prime. Didn't some guy even kill Richard Garriot's avatar and steal all his gold?

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This article meshes with what I remember - a guy pick-pocketed a firewall scroll, LB didn't have his invulnerability up and the murderer was banned.

archive.is/gZwVD

I grew up a Macfag, playing mostly shareware RPGs like Shadowkeep, Realmz, Exile, TaskMaster, Sword Dream, Odyssey, and Cythera; and a few high-profile ports like M&M3, Fallout, Summoner, and Baldur's Gate; so I mostly didn't experience Ultima directly, except the Ultima III port, which I didn't really get very deep into because (in spite of the many amenities of the port) of its arcane interface.

Years later, when I got around to seriously attempting Ultima IV, I was amazed at how many of the features I took for granted in most of the RPGs I'd played seemed to originate there. The entire game felt like the formative spark for the genre as a whole.

why

This was legit huge at the time.

Bare in mind mmos were a brand new thing to the vast majority of people at the time. They didn't even break into the mainstream yet.

In an era where games are just paint by numbers affairs you'd never see something as spontaneous as a player murdering the creator of the fucking game in an mmo out of nowhere.

It helps that at the time it was a meme to try and find a way to kill Lord British in every Ultima game so it solidified it in the minds of people. Especially since he started including more unique ways to do it. Like in Ultima 7 where you can not only poison him but you can also drop a plaque on his head and the game even has a scripted cutscene where the black sword kills him.

It really was like the stone age on the internet at the time. Barely anyone even knows it happened now since at the time only like a couple hundred even saw it.

Ultima 4 really intrigues me. There's no final boss to fight and your goal is to fulfill a spiritual journey of enlightenment rather than defeat a central antagonist.

And it was better for it. No wikis, no youtube walkthroughs, no streamfaggotry.

Imagine spending years of your life creating a world where you're both King and God. You're surrounded by employees and fans and up walks some random faggot and obliterates you.

...

It was due to at the time the moral outrage over how video games were violent. At the time Dungeons and Dragons was still seen as taboo by Christfags.

Ultima got a reputation at the time since all of the games were actually very challenging if you tried to play a moral character. As a result almost everyone just found an exploit that let you steal a huge amount of gold/really good armor.

Ultima 4 was unique at the time because Richard Garriot wanted to have more religious influences and wanted the player to essentially be a Christ figure. Which is still somewhat rare even now. Especially since he would impose really hard limits like you got penalized for killing enemies that ran away.

This also tied into how Ultima 5 was an ideal sequel since not only were you that religious figure but you are now tested by how that zealotry in the citizens of Brittania is now used against you.

The later games toyed with this a lot. Like Ultima 6 dealt with the possibility that your religion isn't actually true. Ultima 7 dealt with the idea that everyone's faith in that religion has faded away and they've adopted newer beliefs. Ultima 8 was planned to deal with the idea that morality is way more grey and that inorder to get back to Britannia to stop the Guardian you'd have to do some morally reprehensible things. But the majority of the plot was cut.

Holy shit, I had way too much fun with this when I played it back in the day.

THIS IS NOW AN Holla Forums STANDARD
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o_O

I would have given the guy a custom title. Then again I don't have the go as Lord British does.

Too bad we'll never get a proper Ultima 8. What we get now is some shitty kikestarter MMO that's destined to fail.

Origin was just fucking up the series in every imaginable way. It's amazing that they wrote something like UO that could've easily been used as the basis for a proper Ultima sequel, yet every variation on Ultima IX was some kind of degenerate single-character action game in spite of their customers screaming at them since before Ultima VIII shipped:
wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Development_History_of_Ultima_IX

Has to be Underworld

Gonna have to replay this stuff.

Fun fact: Arx Fatalis was going to b Ultima Underworld 3 but they failed to acquire the license. The game even has a UU mode where all textures go super low res and you are the Guardian who fights the Avatar, while, if my memory doesn't fail me, it's the reverse in Underworld.

How hard is it to get into the Ultima series? I dont want to be a faggot and skip the first three, is it overall worth it?

y tho

I'd just skip all the way to 7. Play 6 if you liked it afterwards. While there's a lot of lore, I don't think it harms things playing them out of order. Anything older than 4 I'd not even attempt to play.

I'll try to give a short overview. Keep in mind that these games expected you to read the manual. You would get dumped in the game world with little to no direction, the manual would fill you in on what is what and what your purpose actually is. As for the order of the games, it is generally best to play them in order, but the manual will fill you in on the lore if you decide to skip games. One argument in favour of playing in order is that each game gets bigger and bigger, it' easy to be overwhelmed by the size of 7 when you have never played any of the previous games, but if you have then you will have an idea about the world's geography.

The bad ones, skip unless you are curious.

Some teenager's incoherent ramblings. A lot of weirdness, awful balance and in general it's more about finding out WTF you are supposed to do than actually doing it. Only play them if you are interesting for their historical value

The first game by Origin, so this time Garriot had to actually deliver a quality product. A lot of improvements over the first two: actual game balance, a party of up to four characters, separate tactical combat screen, dungeons with purpose… Still very primitive though, you can skip it if you don't have much patience for old PC games.

This is where the series actually took concrete shape. Garriot was with 3 for the first time able to get direct feedback on one of his games, so he used it to make 4 better. It has the most unique setting of any RPG to date. It's freeware, so you can judge for yourself. Requires a lot of note taking.

Similar to 4, requires even more not taking. I find the story to be even more interesting this time.

Only play with the Nuvie port because it offers an alternate interface that's much better. Requires very little note taking and offers a continuous open world with great interactivity. I remember the dragons at dungeon Despise giving me problems, so I dragged a cannon from one of the guard towers all the way over there and blasted the dragons with it. I don't think the designers intended for me to do that, but whatever.

See

These are spin-offs. The first one takes place somewhere between VI and VII, but it was just shoved in there awkwardly since the game wasn't originally meant to be an Ultima game. You can play it basically at any time. Underworld 2 takes place between the two VII games, so there is connection to the lore, but you can still play it at any time. The games have some sort of proto-WASD controls so the interface is actually quite good.

There were several multiplayer games at the time, even on the internet, but it was limited to very small circles. Ultima Online had the brand recognition and it was popular enough to be a trend setting moment, though.

That also meant that Ultima 9 was completely obliterated and also most of the single player rpgs, since everyone was doing mmos. WoW actually came awfully late in the original mmorpg cycle.

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Also, if you like 6, there were two spinoffs reusing its engine, Savage Empire and Martian Dreams.

Holy fuck that's amazing.