By Kieron Gillen on January 24th, 2010 at 12:16 pm.
No, don’t get over excited. No news of any new Ultima. But before I do the Sunday Papers, I thought this may make a worthwhile talking point. I was chatting with Paul Barnett of EA Mythic on Friday about Ultima, specifically people’s memories of it. As in, it’s one of the series which a towering thing in the PC history, but what it actually means to you can vary enormously. In its original golden age, I’d argue it was particularly American-centric in terms of its appeal. And then there’s a second, seismic impact with Ultima Online. And some of you reading will never have actually even played any of the things, and it lives on sheer reputation. Anyway – that’s the question for the comments thread. What was the first time you became aware of Ultima? What did it mean to you?
And, of course, my answer…
Seeing this…
Not even a boxed copy. An advert. As I said previously, I actually came to owning a home computer late. A Commodore 16 when I was 10 or so. A Spectrum +2 a year or so later. And then a rapidly burgeoning love of videogame magazines, which lead me to – when I was about 14 or so – actually buying a load of old pre-me Your Sinclair and (persumably) associated multiformats magazines – when I saw someone advertising an enormous stack in the local free paper.
Anyway, I went through these objects, I absorbed them all, and furnishing a lot of my internal memories. I remember dwelling lengthily on the Ultima one – mainly because it was such a striking image, in a retro fantasy way. What nags after me all these years is… well, linking back to that “presumably”. It must have been in a multi-format mag. If it wasn’t a multi-format mag, why would they be advertising a non-Spectrum game in a Spectrum mag? But, thinking harder, I don’t think there were multiformats. I think they just put it in. They put it in to tease us.
Really, there was nothing in the advert. This was pre-Bard’s Tale for me, so it just promised some engimatic fantasy world, which I’d never play. The thing with being a Spec-chum was that, in terms of actual mainstream RPGs as we’d understand them, there really was very little there. In other words, while I played lots of pen and paper RPGs, I had no idea what Ultima would actually play with. It was just this promise of another world – another world it was unlikely I’d ever visit.
That’s Ultima for me. Not actually getting my own PC until around 97, the only one I even tried to play before turning into a professional games writer was VIII – and I’m sure someone in the comment thread will have a good old growl about Ultima VIII’s Mario-isms. I actually was the PC Gamer writer to review IX, which I did kick around a bit, and did one of my earliest patented Anecdote About My Exs intros. But…
Well, Ultima carries some weight for me, if only because of those once-removed memories and the enormous weight of reputation it carries with Americans. And after writing all this, it does make me wish EA would do something else with the bloody thing.
And you folk?
I’m currently playing Ultima V: Lazarus, the fan remake in the Dungeon Siege engine. I wasn’t sure whether I’d get into it or whether there’d be too much of a clash between my nostalgic memories and the game, its world and characters.
It took me an hour or so to get sucked in again, but after that I never looked back. I started playing the series with the original Ultima V and have played every game that’s come out on computers since. Returning to Britannia was like coming home in a nerdy, geeky way. I remembered many of the Mantras and Words of Power, I remembered where the towns, shrines and moongates were. If I had the time and talent, I’d love to recreate Britannia (roughly around Ultima VII) in the Oblivion engine.
Having almost finished Lazarus, I’m definitely putting The False Prophet, The Black Gate and Martian Dreams (bought over eBay) back on my “To play” list.
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And to answer your question a bit more: I remember both Ultima V and Bard’s Tale III being reviewed in the German computer magazine I was reading. My mum’s English and her parents were both about to visit, so I asked whether they could get me the two games. BT3 was fun, but it was U5 that I sunk many, many tens of hours into. It’s probably fair to say that a lot of my basic English vocabulary comes from these games, so it’s quite amazing that I don’t go “thou” and “thee” all the time. (It might explain why I later studied English Literature, focusing heavily on Shakespeare…)
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I somehow stumbled into a UO freeshard a long, long, long time ago. Played it, loved it, but school was more important and stuff, so it disappeared from my sight. I was more occupied with C&C at that time.
However, UO still influences my gaming. My favourite mmo was built by people who played and loved Ultima Online, so the went along and made their own mmo basing on it’s design principles.
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If you’re looking for a freeshard again, unfortunately, most of the popular server lists don’t work anymore; I’ve found the only one that works is by using Razor (http://www.runuo.com/razor/) to connect to the UOGamers server.
Also, what’s your favourite MMO? The only MMOs I can think of that were created with the UO design princibles would be Mortal Online, Darkfall, or EVE.
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Eve, of course. It works really well like that.
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I started with Ultima IV, but Ultima V was the one that really interested me.
Since then, I have played U4-to-U8, and Ultima Online for a while.
One of my favourite series of games ever made, and I do hope they’ll find their way to Good Old Games some point in the future.
I still remember my Brittanian Runic Alphabet…
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Means absolutely nothing to me. My crpg roots lie (as all my gaming roots do) on the mac, with Realmz of Fantasoft.
Oh, sure, I’ve heard of it. And Ultima.. 8? Was available for the mac, I believe.
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Ultima III was my my first true gaming love, played obsessively on my Commodore 64. My friends and I passed around a single copy between each other, grinning madly as we handed it off to the next, like it was pornography, or gold. It was the game I’d always wanted to play but didn’t know it. RPG’s have been my favorite genre in gaming ever since and nothing since has matched the joy I experienced playing it. Yeah, I’d say Ultima was pretty influential in my life.
It had a cloth map. A CLOTH MAP.
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This, pretty much. I won’t go so far as to say that I never experienced the same joy again–Thief, Privateer, Civilization, and a handful of others come to mind–but Ultima III was the first.
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I Started playing With Ultima VI, Ultima VIII and then Ultima IX.
I have never played Ultima VII, that almost everyone claims to be the best of the series. At the time, when Ultima VII was published, I had an old 286 that was not able to run it…
However I was aware of the Ultima games well before my experience with Ultima VI. I fantasticated on the adverts published on magazines, in the same way is described in this post. When I finally started to play the actual game, on my new 286 PC was a beautiful moment to remember.
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reading about the lord british assassination and other crazy UO stories are pretty much all i know about the series
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I do remember playing an Ultima game, maybe it was on the SNES. And yeah, Lord British. That’s pretty much it.
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So my first memory of ultima was stumbling across the manual to Ultima Seven in amongst the treasure trove of books left behind by my brother when he went to Uni. This was the same source as virtually all my exposure to SF and Fantasy reading, and later, when he gave me an old computer with a shed load of even older games installed, my early gaming.
I remember so vividly the Ankh symbol on the front of the book, and was fascinated by this weird book of lore for a game I couldn’t yet imagine. I flicked through and read about virtue and avatars and what not, and was baffled but fascinated.
So that’s first contact.
Later, when the aforementioned computer arrived, one of the installed games was Ultima 8: Pagan, which I understand to be thought of as one of the worst games in the series. Once I figured out how to actually play the game at all (which took about three years…I lacked short term persistence in those days) I got really into it, finally made the connection with the book upstairs, and loved the game. Until a fatal bug occurred on meeting one of the elemental avatars.
The only way I could get past it was to load up one of my brother’s saves, which was left in an utterly inexplicable position of surrounded by stuff on a tiny island in a sea of lava with no way off.
So I gave up.
And that’s about it. I thought it was a solid game at the time (though I was lacking in discernment at the time) enjoyed it (and got frustrated by it) thoroughly, but have never bothered to get into any of the earlier ones. No excuse for that, just find it hard to go further back in time than games I’ve already played (if that makes sense…which I’m pretty sure it doesn’t).
Anyway, that’s my ramble.
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@Alabaster Crippens
Your brother was using the stuff to walk across the lava, by tossing one item then gathering the rest, then jumping to the next item and gathering the rest, etc. It was a flaw in the engine, and let you skip to the sorcerers’ enclave before you were supposed to.
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I feel ashamed to say this, but I have no idea what ultima is. >.>
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My first memory of Ultima? Being intensely frustrated by a game that made absolutely no sense to the little kid I was back then.
I think it was Ultima VIII. When I blundered through this game, following as many of the scripted scenes as I could, I inevitably found my way to a wilderness full of zombies. As far as I could tell my poor Avatar had no weapons or armour; combat was practically impossible to figure out. But what was *really* frustrating was the manual.
This manual was brilliant. There wasn’t alot of material in it but it was all stuff that seemed so interesting that it encouraged me to keep trying to actually play the game – and every time to no avail.
I look back and wonder what the hell was I missing for that game to be such a pain in the butt to play…
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My first memory of Ultima was getting Ultima VIII as one of the bundled games with my first CD-ROM drive (along with Syndicate, Wing Commander 2 and Strike Commander; if only they gave away discs like that nowadays). I remember being really irritated when I came to install it, because I had to free up 30 MB of my 100 MB hard disk.
I remember enjoying it when I played it, though I also remember being bad enough at games to not really try playing it properly. An interesting experience, though.
A few years back I did actually acquire all of the other games, but I never seem to get past meaning to play them…
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My first memory of Ultima is a review of Ultima 8, which was “the game that wouldn’t run smoothly on any computer”. Some years later, my uncle and a friend of mine tried to convince me to play Ultima Online, which I did not.
Until this day, I haven’t played any Ultima title, and I regret it a little bit. Some weeks ago I thought I should take a look at Ultima 8…which is, sadly, still unplayable at this point. “They” say the demo runs well enough, but I can’t find it anywhere.
I would guess it’s too late now to join the party?
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Ultima 9, of course. Ultima 8 was published when I went to kindergarten…
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There are some unofficial patches and whatnot at http://reconstruction.voyd.net/ that might help with getting things to run. As for actually finding the Ultima IX demo, I can only wish you good luck. I know I have an old covermount of it at home somewhere, but not with me.
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PLayed IV and V.
Was quite a few dozen hours in V when my younger brother decided to try to play the Complicated Game, and sqhashed my save. Back to Iolo’s hut. Little bastard.
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I consider Ultima VII one of the best RPGs ever made. It had an interactive, living world… I enjoyed just doing things like making bread and hunting. The combat left something to be desired, but it seemed secondary.
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The first time I saw something to do with Ultima would have been an ad for either VI (Avatar stomping a gargoyle) or Underworld (Avatar hears a noise downstairs in the middle of the night; oh no, it’s a goblin!). The first one I actually played was probably Underworld. Or VII. Or VIII. Or maybe Savage Empire!
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Let’s not forget the Ultima Underworlds as well, I think I preferred those to Ultima VII. though that one too has many fond memories.
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I only ever played Ultima IV on the Master System. Unfortunately my second-hand copy was missing a book that was supposed to come with it which made some parts tricky as I recall.
It’s the first game I can recall my siblings and I all playing obsessively and then for some curious reason all our save games got deleted and I witnessed the only time I’ve ever seen my sister lose her temper as she went into a curious and terrifying rage.
So Ultima for me = confusion and fury.
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This is how I got into Ultima though it was a rental and not a second-hand copy. Maybe it’s the same thing. Later on I decided to try Ultima on a computer once I got one of those super fast Pentium 100s and went for Underworld since that was the one with the first-person perspective.
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I remember getting ultima 8 free with some hardware (soundblaster cd maybe?) and trying to play it a few times.
I ran around the starting area. Jumped a bit. Picked up stuff and put it in the inventory. Talked to a few people. Had no idea what to do. Gave up.
I’ve heard great things about the series, but never got into it.
My other memory is that the PC mag I used to buy (pc gamer uk, maybe) had a Top 10 of each Genre in the back of every issue, plus an all time top 10. For the whole time I was growing up it had Ultima Underworld, then Ultima Underworld 2 as the top games… and looking at the screenshot always wow’d me.
Never got to play UU, but then I got and loved System Shock, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex…. so I guess that’s how it influenced me indirectly.
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considering how much cash Final Fantasy is still raking in (or even elder scrolls), it’s beyond bizarre that they haven’t made any ultima games for so long…
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Through combination of youth and systems, Ultima VIII ended up as the first Ultima I played. Ofcourse I then sought out the previous games but, probably because it was first, Ultima VIII remains my favourite. One of my favourite games ever, in fact.
I don’t think I’d really played anything like it at that point. The world seemed so alive. I got to run around wherever I want, fighting the monsters that wandered the wilderness. I could search for powerful objects in secret caves. I got to cast spells using different magic systems, to summon my own demon which could turn on me. I spoke with Deities and powerful wizards. Travelled through planes and… crashed a lot as I approached the end of the game. But, I think it was the intro that stuck out the most, the Guardian’s booming voice as he banishes you. I can still quote every word. Oh, and the music…
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Ultima Online The Second Age was my first major interaction with the Ultima name. (previous to this, I had Ultima IV or something, bundled with my first graphics card or CD player – whatever, it never worked anyway)
There was a feeling I had reading the manual in the car on the way home from Electronics Boutique where I’d bought it for about a fiver. Before I even had a chance to play, there was a powerful sense of excitement at the scale and shear possibility. When I started out, it wasn’t daunting either. Many RPGs and MMOs bombard you with lore, exposition and an almost anxious insistence on combat. UO allowed me to go off adventuring, hunting down the largest beasties in the darkest dungeons, or just walk through a forest, chop down some trees and make furniture or find some water and go fishing, or… so, so many ors. For someone who likes to explore and see things, it was perfect and it had that sense of mystery that comes with games that are less polished and refined. Weird things would happen: creatures would appear in odd places, mysterious structures existed for seemingly no reason. This only added to its magic. You don’t get that with games that are dutifully combed by large dev teams.
In some ways I think UO spoiled me for all games to come. I’m too often disappointed at the limited scope of some PC games, their lack of depth, or atmosphere and the sterility that comes with popularity. UO really does show that adventurous game design transcends graphical presentation. To me it’s a game that embodies what PC gaming is all about.
And it wasn’t just about fucking orcs, humans, elves and dwarfs.
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Judging by a lot of these posts, it must have Ultima VIII I got bundled with some hardware.
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Strangely enough, I never really played any of the mainline Ultima games.
My introduction to the series was through Ultima Underworld, which my best friend and I (then somewhere in our teens) sunk so completely into that Uri (my friend) could write things using the aforementioned runes instead of English. What an awesome game for the time it was.
He went on to utterly fall in love with Ultima 7 and kept telling me how wonderful it was, but I wasn’t biting for whatever reason.
I played UU2 vicariously through him, too.
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@ bill Yes! The Soundblaster! That was how we came to own it as well. Was in a pack of 5 games, the others being syndicate, wing command 4, and… the rest i don’t quite remember.
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My first Ultima was IV. I played it together with my sister (I played, she watched) and we even wrote our own little bound guidebook for it with shop prices and reagent mixes and such things. I don’t know that I could still be arsed to play through that game, but I still consider it one of my all time favorites.
After that I completely skipped V and VI, and finally came back for VII when we got a proper computer. I was completely obsessed with that game and its sense of place. I still get flashbacks of a summer completely spent in Britannia when I hear some of the music. The only other game ever to do anything similar to me was Daggerfall some years later. Still waiting for the third one, but I secretly fear I might be too old now :’(
When Ultima Online was announced it sounded like the fulfillment of all my dreams, but I never managed to get into it. I didn’t even finish my initial free period. I guess that was the official end of an era for me.
EDIT: Oh, I completely forgot Underworld. That was another summer spent in computerland… I seem to have spent a lot of summers that way. I ended up never finishing the game, however, as I had to go to a summer camp in the middle of it and somehow never returned to it when I got back home.
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Seems lots of people started out by getting Ultima 8 as some sort of freebie, and I’m no exception.
The game wasn’t very good, but the setting was intriguing enough that my interest was piqued. This was around the time the Internet started getting popular in my country (around 1996), and some of my first activities online were searching for more information about Ultima.
I found the Ultima Dragons, managed to “acquire” some more of the Ultima games, and the rest is history…
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Made my heart jump seeing that logo on the front page of RPS.
My first true crpg, I had Ultima 6 for my amiga 500 and later everything Ultima for the PC when I finally got one.
U6 got me hooked , I remember killing the gargoyles the first time i met them which screwed up my game but more than that id irredeemably damaged the world of U6, the game had allowed me to do so, i was given the freedom to chose, the depth of the plot and characters in comparison to other games id played at the time completely blew me away and has effected my views of all RPG’s and probably other genre’s since.
That was only exacerbated by the first game i played on my PC which was ultima underworld which may be my favorite game of all time, the amount of innovation within that single game is staggering, I believe it was both technically and artistically far in advance of its peers.
Needless to say when i heard of Ultima Online I had sleepless nights imagining a virtual reality in tasty full fat Ultima sauce.
when i eventually played ultima online a very different kind of world existed to the one i had imagined, indeed id never imagined i might have to flee from an enraged rabbit but it was beautiful none the less, like a wild frontier where people were learning to fend for themselves.
and the air was thick with fending, I had never considered some players capacity for evil against fellow man, i probably spent a good half my time of the first two weeks running around in my pants (in game) trying to find my looted corpse in the hopes of salvaging a wooden shield or some other crap.
I’ve played quite a few MMORPG’s since but none have managed to capture that feeling of freedom and vulnerability, they all feel like games with big friendly buttons and smooth edges, UO was more like..a n00b meat grinder.
Ramble ends.
G
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Evil is right. I remember walking near the docks in Britain and spying an item in a boat. No one was around so, being a relatively new player, I thought I’d nip aboard and see if the thing would be of any use to me.
As soon as I did so, two ruffians un-invisibled themselves, raised the gangplank and sailed me squealing out to sea, beyond the aid of the town guards. Despite my polite requests to be let off, they silently butchered me and looted my corpse.
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The only memories of Ultima I have is seeing one of them (Think it may have been VIII or IX) on the budget shelf at one point and deciding to give it a miss. Can’t remember what I bought instead.
The first CRPG I remember playing was actually on the Spectrum, a little game called Journey’s End which nobody but me seems to recall these days (and it was a fantastic game dammit).
On the PC, It was one of the Wizardry series. Crusaders of the Dark Savant I think.
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Ultima 7 Serpent Isle was my first contact with Ultima beyond reading about it (I actually read all the walkthroughs about 1-6 in the C64er mag because they were written like short stories back then.
to this day, Ultima 7 (both of them) is/are among my favourite games and in lots of ways still the best in certain mechanics. like open world games, interactive world, exploration. also both had a great, mature and complex plot, and a lot of sex + violence without making it seem like a marketing gag as but like organic parts in mature game. the worst you could say about U7 would be that the combat sucked.
I really hope EA will at some point get back to the single player Ultimas. maybe bioware would do this? I’d love to see their take on it.
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I played a few segments of Ultima 8 and Ultima 9 but I never really got into them. Always wanted to try the one that Warren Spector worked on.
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I first really became aware of Ultima via Ultima Online. I think I was aware that the series existed before then, and that it was a fantasy RPG kind of thing, but I hadn’t paid it much attention. Ultima online however had a great appeal to me, as it was one of the first MMOs that I was really aware of. However the cost made it prohibitive to someone who still relied on pocket money, especially when any internet access would have been via pay-per-minute dial-up. When I did finally play a small bit of it in a 30 day trial on a coverdisc, I realised that it would have been beyond me.
I later picked up Ultima IX in EB for a couple of quid about six months after launch. The box alone was impressive, and I loved the cloth map. I was quite happy just exploring the starting area, but never really got in to the game proper. I was never a huge fan of combat in games*, and I recall getting killed by a pirate in town, shortly after leaving a church. I never went back to it after that. I can’t remember anything about the plot, I don’t think I had even found it.
* Still aren’t in many ways, real-time twitch combat especially. I’ll generally take non-combat routes is available, and am especially uncomfortable with melee. Even more abstracted systems, such as turn based ones, will have me avoiding fights if I can, and preferring taking enemies out remotely, if I can’t to it peaceably. All a combination of poor reactions, pacifism and cowardice.
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I was drooling over the Ultima IV and Ultima V ads in the magazine before I could ever get to see either. First I saw was Ultima VI at friend’s place. Later got to play a lot of VII with it’s addons, but the really fondest memories all revolve around Ultima VIII, no matter what other people say. Playing week after week and finally cruching through it without help from walkthroughs and tips was so satisfying. It was ages ago but there were scenes and places I will never forget.
If someone did some quality work with the Ultima title it would be a guaranteed best seller. Someone throw BioWare the rights to this franchise and give them a few years and we have a winner ;)
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The Serpent Isle was not only the first Ultima game I played as a kid, it was one of the very first RPGs I ever played, period. Its impact on me cannot be overstated — I still think of it as the template for how an open-world RPG should work. I had a hard time connecting with the gameplay of Ultimas 1-6, 8 I didn’t enjoy and Ultima 9 was a game I really, really wanted to work better than it did; I played it anyway.
What they all had in common was right there on the box, in Origin’s slogan: “We create worlds.” I loved that the Serpent Isle was a living, breathing place full of characters that seemed real, with their own little stories and motivations, a world into which I could insert myself and do whatever I wanted. I remember amassing a giant horde of jewels and gold by robbing every house, goblin cave and castle, and hiding it all in a secret room in the basement of a tavern (which I also robbed).
There was a daring to Ultima 7: The Serpent Isle — a vastness, a willingness to create a narrative beyond slaying goblins and running fetch quests, and it hit me at just the right time to help define the kind of experiences I want from games.
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First experience I had of Ultima was seeing a review of UVI in ACE magazine (the EDGE of the day) and lusting after those beautiful VGA graphics because I had a rubbish CGA card at the time. I pretty much wrote it off as it was “one of them damn yankee games you can’t get at Woolworths and the shop in town would take months to order”, but glorious day, saw it in aforementioned shop in town and pestered my parents for it as a Christmas gift. I played it for maybe 6 hours on Xmas day and definitely got a telling off for not going to the table faster when tea was ready and again for leaving immediately to play more after tea. My parents derided my “videogame teatowel” and stylish polished piece of stone/mystical orb, but I loved that crap – also BIG fuckoff bestiary/manual/reference card shenanigans/mysterious runes to translate on the manual that probably said rude things.
You didn’t get the conversation topic hints in CGA so I’d type in virtually every word a character said looking for clues. I don’t think I ever freed more than 4 shrines, but remember most of the item codes (88 was vital – gold coins!) and used Armageddon in an unpopulated area, not realising my error until I had saved game and gone to a town and finding it a tad…desolate. I know the copy protection off by heart. I think I even dreamt in Britannian. Brilliant game. Never quite got into VII because of the real-time thing and the frankly atrocious system requirements at the time.
UO is another kettle of fish. I had fun in it but really MMOs aren’t for me at all. At least I learned that from the best one.
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Ah yes Ultima V. First game I ever got for Christmas. Played the crap out of it, never finished. I think it was too much for my wee 12 year old brain to handle.
Am I the only one here who used the pentagram coin as an amulet for his wizard costume on Halloween? The sweet extras are one thing you can’t get on Steam.
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Ultima IV was released on the master system in 1990?!
I am officially old…
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I remember getting Ultima 6 for my Packard Bell PC back in ’91. I was 8 years old. It opened up my love of early open-world games. The underlying logic of the game was admittedly over-my-head, but i could still experiment in the world, and it definitely shaped my experience on future open games and the like. Plus, I could go on serious rampages.
The best would always be out of reach though. Ultima 7 came out a year later and my computer wasn’t powerful enough for it. It looked utterly amazing though… the screenshots were unbelievable. It would be 10 years before I seriously got into that one. Next computer I got was in ’95 and I could easily run Ultima 8. Definitely dug on that for a wile, but realized it had some shortcomings. back in the mid-to-late 90s, PCs couldnt’ run older Dos games due to the incompatibilities of DOS and the new Windows 95. Some games worked, others didn’t. Ultima 7 Pts 1 and 2 definitely didn’t. I even read about having to run a “Voodoo” memory program to get them to work. They sort-of worked, but the mouse drivers would eat up all the free memory and you could only use your keyboard. No thanks.
UO Came around in 97, but I was too young for a credit card and the whole UO scene was pretty brutal. After a several-month obsession, I let that one go and got in to Daggerfall and Might and Magic 6.
Ultima IX came around with another new computer in ’99 and my new computer was still not powerful enough to run the latest Ultima. Ultima, like most of the Origin games, had this aura of being “three steps ahead” technologically and I’d be lucky if I had the computer that could sort-of- play it. I read U9 was a buggy mess, though, and Bioware was just starting to hit their stride so I sat back and played the Fallouts and the Baldur’s Gates while Origin went belly-up on their own ambitions, sadly.
Which brings me to my college years… they finally came out with an emulator for Ultima 7 Pts 1 and 2 and I jumped on it after getting the ‘Complete’ Ultima 7 on Ebay. All those years of waiting and thinking about those games finally paid off: Those were definitely the best. I was old enough to appreciate the subtexts of what Lord British was trying to say, and it was really satisfying. Dark plots, great graphics, memorable characters, a full realization of Brittania’s open world. My relationship with Ultima is fond indeed… it’s a shame that some corporate thug is just sitting on the license.
At least we had Gothic/Risen, Oblivion, Divine Divinity, Arx Fatalis, MMO and -Bioware games to (sort-of’) scratch the itch that those Ultima games scratched long ago.
Still, that pitch-black black box that just says ULTIMA 7: the Black Gate cannot be denied.
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Age 10 is “coming late to owning a home computer”? Heh, heh. Kids!
Anyway, Ultima IV or V – can’t remember which at this point – was the first RPG I ever played, and one of the very first of any kind. But that was long after I’d finished college (where computers meant mainframes and punch cards).
I’d had a couple of very primitive computers before then, including a kit programmed by toggle-switch, with a “screen” of eight LEDs, but I couldn’t afford the earliest home computers.
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When I was really young kid I had a copy of Ultima IV, the only problem was that the disks were corrupted. Every time I tried to play the game I’d do the quiz in the gyspy’s trailer and prepare for adventure only to have the damn thing crash. Never stopped me from trying though. I was convinced that it was going to be this awesome amazing thing but it wasn’t until a decade later that I actually got to play it. I dug it but the moment had passed.
My first proper exposure to Ultima came when I got a new computer with a fancy soundblaster sound card. The sound card came with a CD with a bunch of games on it and one of the games was Ultima VII. Man I loved the shit out of that game.
The funny thing was that it was everything I’d imagined IV would be. At the time I’d never experianced such a richly detailed world that offered so much freedom. Even a more modern game like GTA III fells shallow and cartoonish in comparison. I mean Ultima VII is a game where you can make bread from scratch. From cutting the wheat in the fields to cooking it in an oven. It’s a stunning achievement.
Yeah good times, an amazing game, and an amazing series.
Also I’m pretty sure it did the whole sleep with prostitutes before murdering them thing way before Rockstar thought of it.
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It was also Ultima V for me, when I was about 9 years old, in 1989 or so. I couldn’t figure the damn game out for the life of me, but I found it entrancing.
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Started with Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and it remains to this day one of the five best PC RPGs ever made, and one of the 10 best anything RPGs ever made.
I wonder at the assumption that the series is primarily of concern to Americans, since Ultima III was a big seller worldwide and is usually understood to be one of the main influences of the JRPG, along with Wizardry. There’s got to be lots of European fans too, I mean look at all the CRPGs we get from those guys. You can’t tell me Ultima didn’t influence them.
And yeah, despite the huge flaws and unfinished nature of Ultima 8, I loved it and still do.
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Started with Ultima VI then back to IV, V and VII.
I remember in VI, I kept seeing, flour, butter, milk, etc objects and figuring out why they are littered across Brittania. Then I figured out you can craft these same items in the game from basic materials. My avatar was an honest baker/farmer (and earning at it) before resuming his duties as a gargoyle basher.
***
I disregarded Ultima 8, with its horrible controls and non-ultima feel (and this game was a freebie with a SoundBlaster card). Weird, but Crusader: No Regret is fine and used the same engine. About other Origin games, Wing Commander 1/2 and Strike Commander was a blast to play – I miss those games.
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Someone played through the entire Ultima series (from Akalbeth through U9) blogging his experience along the way:
http://bloggingultima.blogspot.com/
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Tsk, started with Ultima 1 after mucking about with Akalabeth. U3 was probably the best upgrade.
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My first Ultima gama was Ultima 8 Pagan, loved it very much, it was a little different from the other Ultima games but it was not a bad game.
also I recently wrote an article here about Ultima Underworld and its legacy to videogames http://gmzzz.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/ultima-underworld/
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Briefly played an ultima game at my sister’s boyfriend’s house when I was 14ish. He was trying to get me to smoke weed. I can only imagine now that it wasn’t because he loved me, but because he wanted me to get high so he could laugh at me. Maybe, though, intended laughing was just his mental cover up of the true feelings of love for me, another human, who he wanted to share the experience of weed with. He couldn’t openly love me, because he’d been programmed to feel ‘bad’ or ‘stupid’ when he loved someone. (The reason I’m assuming that he wanted to laugh at me, is both a vague memory of his tone when suggesting to my sister that ‘they’ give me weed, and a memory of my sister later breaking up with him for being a ‘dick head’ and ‘total arsehole’.)
The game was in 3D. I think it was Ultima 9.
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Or maybe he was just attributing that reason for wanting to share weed with me… and the rest of the stuff about love is just why I personally would give weed to someone… and people don’t necessarily feel that at all. Because they don’t love themselves? Maybe I’m getting somewhere here.. who knows.
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You guys should smoke weed. Or stop, I’m not sure which.
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terry: I’ve done both of those things. Now what?
(I am both the above posters, just wasn’t logged in at first.)
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The Savage Empire is probably the really made me a PC gamer in the first place (together with Railroad Tycoon and Leisure Suit Larry 3). Those were the first 3 games I got to play on my father’s brand new i286. I simply loved SE’s lush setting to explore, the beautiful 256 colours graphics, the terraced landscape that let you spy places you wished to get to but couldn’t reach for another couple weeks of playing, and of course the evil that was Dr. Spektor, an in-game version of Warren Spector himself.
Before that, I had spent most of a year reading and re-reading articles on Ultima 6 in various gaming mags, wishing it would finally be released on my trusty C64 (which it did only after I got a PC and was – so I hear – rather disappointing).
The disappointment with Ultima 8, then the unbearable wait and the high hopes for Ascension only to be disappointed again slowly eroded my enthusiasm, even though I closely followed all the fan projects for years onwards and even signed up as a newsposter at Ultimadot.
UO, though, never really drew me in. I wanted to be the avatar, after all, not just some avatar…
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@Moorkh
Yes, The Savage Empire was great. It’s what got me into the Ultima series, and still vies for position with Ultima VII/VII.2 as my favourite. I played through The Savage Empire, then in various order Ultimas IV, V, VI, VII, VII.2, and most of VIII (and Martian Dreams somewhere in there). Something that kept coming back to me when playing Oblivion was how much *less* rich and detailed its world and characters were than Ultima VII. But I still like the Savage Empire for the ability to craft rough flintlocks out of bamboo and shoot dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers.
Like so many others here, I got The Savage Empire, Ultima VII, and Ultima VIII on CD, bundled with SoundBlaster cards. I much later got The Ultima Collection off eBay to play through some of the other games.
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Hehe, nice to see others have the same preference.
I forgot to mention how much I loved the crafting in the game – I don’t think any RPG did anything quite like it in its time: using knife on tree to get flax, using flax on loom to get cloth, using knife on cloth to get cloth strips, using strips on tar pit to get tarred cloth strip. And that was just the fuse for either the grenade or the bamboo rifle, iirc. You also had to make blackpowder and grenade casing from scratch, and if you never just happened to find Spektor’s notebook while idly exploring, you wouldn’t have any idea that you were able to do anything like it.
On thing still keeps me awake some nights: I was never able to find the pricess of that tribe with the sick chieftain on the mesa to the southwest. Damn! There is an Exult-like for U6 engine games somewhere on the web, so I might be bothered to go back and find her one day…
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I’ve got a laminated Ultima V advert from Games Master magazine on my bedroom wall, still :) Also, the Official Book of Ultima is a good read, if there are any copies floating around.
First in the series I played was Ultima IV, on an Apple IIe. Also the first computer game I played, back in 198..6 I think, with my cousin teaching me how to play… Filled me with wonder, excitement, and dreams about orcs chasing me through the forest. So many good memories :)
Played the entire series, 1-8, Underworld 1 & 2, Martian Dreams, Savage Empire, UO (offical servers), UO (several freeshards). Eventually inspired me to get into game development as a career (I got my jumpstart from working as a writer / qa on the Ultima V Lazarus remake a few years back).
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Never played it, don’t want to.
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Ultima 8 for me. Here’s a more interesting question: what have the Ultima games been superseded by, as far as design and gameplay, and why?
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Never played any of them. I’ve always been aware of of them (mostly due to the fact their creators are still making games), but they were before my PC gaming time.
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As Kieron says, except for the Bard’s Tale (which was probably great, but looked downright offputting), RPGs didn’t exist on the Speccy, and I still haven’t got my head around the mechanics (I bought Knights Of The Old Republic on the strength of the PCG review in 2003 but couldn’t get over the weird combination of modern graphics and bloodless dice-rolling for long enough to play it).
I remember the reviews of UItima VI and Martian Dreams in ACE which made them sound like the best games in the world, but the only time I tried playing an UItima was last year when I played through the ’86 remake of Ultima 1 twice and still couldn’t decide whether it was a tedious waste of time or a work of visionary genius that I came to too late to be able to appreciate. But I gather they got a bit better after that.
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I always thought of Lords of Midnight as an RPG, and that was out on the Spectrum, too. A tactical RPG of sorts, but still one nonetheless.
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I credit the Ultima games for helping to get me involved in the games industry.
My first encounters consisted of looking at the boxes of Ultima 1-5 on game store (well, computer store–we didn’t have game stores then) shelves in the mid ’80s. The box art always drew me in, the description sounded fascinating, but there was something intimidating about those early games. Maybe it was the weight of the things, stuffed with manuals and maps and trinkets. Certainly the price–higher than usual, as I recall–was a factor. The fact that the series was multiple games in might’ve been part of it, as well.
But I was aware of Ultima through boxes and advertising for quite a while before I finally owned one. A magazine review and walkthrough of Ultima 6 convinced me I wanted to try the games myself, and the series became one of my favorites. It had story! I loved story! It had scope! It had compelling characters, a rich background and mythology (that didn’t involve elves and dwarves…), etc.., etc. Ultima 7 remains, to this day, one of the best examples of what an RPG can and should be–compelling, nonlinear, full of interesting moral choices, a model of a living world… take all the strengths of modern BioWare and Bethesda games and combine them into one, and there’s Ultima 7 for you.
So, yeah, I was a fan, and Ultima very clearly influenced the sort of games I wanted to make. It was many years later when I got my first industry job offer, in Austin, Texas–former home of Origin. And honestly, there was something special about going to the city that seeded so much of the modern industry.
I still haven’t played Ultima 9. I’m not sure I can bring myself to.
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I think I first became aware of the series through bits and pieces about Ultima: Online in the back pages of ‘Gamer, which, not being much of a fantasy or RPG nut at the time, didn’t really do much to entice me towards the series (with Kieron’s Ascension review putting the final nail in that particular coffin). It’s only more recently that I’ve become aware of the legacy of the series, although I’ve not found much impetus to go back and investigate the series.
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For me, Ultima VI was my first venture into the lands of Britannia, spurred along by a friend of mine who’d been playing the series for years. I found in it incredibly absorbing, with a world where you could wander pretty much anywhere and interact with the most mundane of things. The combat system was pretty terrible, but the rich environment and story managed to win out for me overall. I went on to love VII and VII Part 2 as well, only to be massively disappointed with VIII and the subsequent decline of the series. It would be nice to see it get back to its roots, but that would require some bold action on the part of EA, and those are not words that generally go together…
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Ultima Online was probably the first game that got me hooked on gaming. I played it for two months and loved it to death. My parents forced me to stop because of the phonebills (800 euro’s), but man did i have a good time. I just loved how everybody was truly playing a character, which made it so interesting to meet good (and bad) people. Ive seen people actually play married farmers, and watched theatre plays once in a while. The last day i took all my money and bought beer and food for all in some pub. There i actually met a guy who did a profession i never heard of; treasure hunter.
Probably the best moments:
When animal tamers sell huge ass dragons in city towns and people with no skill actually buy them, after which the dragons go rampage :D.
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There’s only a handful of games you keep in your hard drive … sleeping. And every once-a-couple-o-months you wake em up, just to see how they’re doing; to see how well they are still holding up. For me Ultima 7 is one of those games. That and Oblivion which I play thinking about what kind of design changes would U7 need to be a real contender in present time. Oh, U7 in Oblivion’s 3d bloominess … ooohhhh *shudder*
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Look no further (well, Ultima IX “canon plotified-remake”):
http://cfkasper.de/ultima/
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I remember I when I played Ultima VI as a young kid. Instead of talking to people and doing quests, I used to wheel a cannon around and use it to kill people in their beds. A few years later when I was a bit more mature, I played it ‘properly’.
My fave games for a long time were Ultima VII: The Serpent Isle and Ultima Underworld 2. At least until the folks at Black Isle/Troika started doing their thing.
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Haha! Nice one. Now that’s escapism.
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Ahh, the Underworld series! I completely forgot about it during my walk down memory lane. I was working in a computer software store at the time it was released and someone had put the demo/intro for that game on a loop. I think it got burned into my brain, though, because I found myself repeating it over and over at odd times of the day! “Whether thou speaks truth or falsehood, I cannot say”.
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Serpent Isle made me fall in love with RPGs. My English wasn’t even particularly good back then, but it (and KQ6) made me persevere. It just has all the little things that made the world so exciting to explore—random clothes and useless-but-atmospheric items like candlesticks tucked away in drawers and nooks and crannies, kegs that spilled wine and people who yelled at you for it, weird groves of mushrooms that have no plot purpose but did spawn purple creatures who steal your food and leave you starving later, the people going about their businesses, frost roses in front of Frigidazzi’s house, houses haunted with ghosts that explode when you talk to them (yes, I later learned this is a bug), the ruins and dreams of Gorlab swamp—-the setting and the people who live there and die there! (And yes, I tracked down the rest of the series later and loved the rest all the more—most of them.)
It made me an exploration-centric gamer, though still one with a bias for story. It gave me a love of locales that extend beyond games and the fantastical. It made me realize that fictional people in these games can be as interesting as in any book, and it still remains a personal gold standard of mine in how little touches and small details can make a world breathe. To this date, the VIIs remain tied with Planescape as my favourite RPGs.
Favourite moment in general : Too many. Running into the giant Knightsbridge board was quite memorable, though.
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I’m with you there, ET. The little touches and small details really go a long way to bringing a place to life. They might not necessarily take pure graphics horsepower, either.
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Never enjoyed a single Ultima game. There was something incredibly awkward about every one of them. I had a friend who enjoyed them tremendously and as we hung out i’d be forced to watch him trudge his way through the brownest shit i could think of.
So yeah. Not for me.
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ultima VII – one of my all time favourite games. Played it for 6 months solid and my (then new) girlfriend threathened to leave me. Many years later and she still sighs whenever she sees the logo. Im still waiting for a game to recapture the feeling of a fully working world. reasons I loved it?
- NPC’s had working schedules. looking for an npc – Wasnt at home, so must be at work right? nope not there. so where? ohh… in the pub, having dinner!
- it was one of my first ‘sandbox’ games. I liked to arse about with things that weren’t related to the main story.
-interactions. some of the object uses were insane. you could have a viable career as a baker if thats what you wanted.
use bucket on well = bucket of water. use flour on benchtop, use water on flour = dough. put dough near fire and wait a while = bread.
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Yes! It’s all in those little details (random loot, complex interactions) which kept me interested. It was the first time I could actually believe little computer people were having a life that didn’t necessarily include me. Other games have done it too but I dunno … it just felt right in U7.
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I was wallowing in nostalgia thanks to this post, so I did some image searches and bumped into this:
http://rampantgames.com/blog/uploaded_images/U6cover-761961.jpg
Does anyone know which character in VII is the compo winner?
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According to a look through the game files, the winner is likely a child NPC kalled Kristy. The only other mention of “competition” in the NPC files is to describe an unnamed wench at the bathing house. If that was a prize it was a pretty crap one.
Here’s the relevant block –
“### KRISTY
(start)
This is a cute toddler holding a baby doll.
“Hi!” Kristy exclaims.
name
“Kwisty.”
(Naana) “Kristy, like Nicholas, is one of our orphans. She was found in an abandoned home in Paws by one of the Great Council members.”
job
(Max) “Tag! Playing tag!”
The toddler runs off in search of a nursery-mate.
Kristy looks confused. “Sing. Horsey. Rosa. Winner.”
sing
Kristy is more than happy to do so. “A-B-C-D-E-F-G! H-I-K-M-M-M-O-P! Q-T-W-Y-X-Z!” She is proud of her song, although she didn’t get it quite right.
horsey
“I love horsey!” She rocks hard on the rocking horse.
Rosa
Kristy hugs her baby doll tight. “Rosa!”
winner
“I am winner!” she proclaims loudly.
(Naana) “She keeps saying that. I am not sure what it means. Something to do with a competition.”
bye
“Bye bye!”
(aloud)
@Tag! Thou art it!@
@Cannot catch me!@
@Nyah nyah! Thou art it!@
@Catch me if thou can!@
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Wow, nice, thank you! I remember the kids, although not individually. I really should play through it again.
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It’s funny, I remember looking at the box and just totally disregarding those stars they put on them. I think many games from that era had stuff on that was basically advertisement. Didn’t realise it was a contest to be in VII.
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When I was about 13 or so, I came across a box with a wizard bikini babe and the words Ultima written on it (must be an Asian thing… can’t even find it online) when I was going through one of them computer malls in Hong Kong. Unfortunately for the Ultima franchise, Giants AND System chock 2 were sitting pretty much right next to it, and those ended up being the first games I ever bought with my own money.
And that was the first and only contact I’ve had with the Ultimas: beaten by Giants, a totally mediocre game, because it had a shitty cover. I have to regrets.
OMG, edit!
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I played Ultima III a little, back in the day, but didn’t LOVE the series until IV. I abandoned it halfway through VIII, and haven’t played one — or even demoed one — since. That includes Ultima Online; I’ve never been even slightly interested in any MMO.
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Same here! Played Ultima III on a friend’s Commodore, saving to cassette tapes. But didn’t really get into it until Ultima IV on my family’s Apple II. Man I loved that game. Don’t think I played it right, but I sunk a sick amount of hours into that game.
I definitely played Ultima V, but don’t remember too much about it. However, I’ll always remember Ultima VI as one of the most engrossing games I’ve ever played, definitely in my Top 5 favorites. Super nerdy fact: in grade school, me and two friends would bring our computers over to one of our houses and individually play U6 all night, comparing stories, etc. One of these friends wasn’t huge into games, and would just slay every villager and move their bodies until he had a huge pile of corpses in the center of town. Good times.
I fancy working on games sometimes, and the Ultima series would be a definite inspiration. I loved the NPC behavior, the open world, the usable objects, etc. My first adventure into sandbox gaming, and something still lacking in many modern games.
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This is what Ultima means to me: http://www.it-he.org/front.htm#ultima
The only time I’ve ever played an Ultima game myself was fiddling with a fan port (which may or may not have been what it was advertised to be) of Ultima III to Mac. It was utter rubbish. This soured me on the franchise for some time before I realized that the series didn’t really find the aspects that everyone praises until around Ultima IV or V. I’ve long meant to go and play them for myself, but there are a lot of games I mean to do that with, and I can’t even decide where to start – IV sounds like an utter pain in the ass, V more approachable but still somewhat primitive…I do own Dungeon Siege so I could try Lazarus, but I hated Dungeon Siege and am dubious about its merits as an underpinning for something like Ultima. VI, Worlds of Ultima (both games) and VII are all on the list, of course.
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Ultima…
My first PC games magazine I bought back in 1997 (which I still buy actually) had a preview of Ultima Online. It looked like so much fun back then. A game where you can play with thousands of gamers? A game where you can be a wizard and have your own horse or house? Sounded incredible back then.
And of course Ultima 9 got reviewed in a later edition. It got an average score so my interest wasn’t that high.
Never really got to playing any of these games. A monthly payment meant that mmorpgs had to wait until I was a bit older. At which time WoW was around.
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just because im shocked this hasnt been mentioned yet.
http://exult.sourceforge.net/ – an ultima 7 interpreter that runs on all sorts of systems and modern tweaks.
theres a one for 8 called pentagram but I dont think its as advanced yet.
http://pentagram.sourceforge.net/
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Ultima VI wasn’t the first RPG I played, although it wasn’t far away, but it was the first game to really show me a world that existed from the cooking pot in the farmer’s cottage to the wide ocean all in one seamless space. The detail and the simple trick of giving every character the old name, job and portrait (as well as of course a routine) made it a living world – that this was 20 years ago is amazing.
I also loved that the world was more than just a Tolkien-esque fantasy – for example the Wizard of Oz seemed as much an influence on the world as The Lord of the Rings (how can you not love winged monkeys and hot air balloons?, never mind the whole brains/heart/courage value system).
And then they followed it up over the next 2 or 3 years wth a string of amazing games. Origin certainly did create worlds (do developers still have mottos?)
Also, a 3D first person Return to the Savage Empire would be ace.
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God, it’s all coming flooding back… I totally loved the campy “Worlds of Ultima” games, too. I played through Martian Dreams and enjoyed it– at the time mostly because it had guns! But I’ve come to appreciate the “Space 1889″ genre and in terms of story at the time I remember being genuinely intrigued.
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UO, still the best MMO to date, I can’t even begin to say how much I loved that game. It’s thoroughly depressing that we’ll never see another game like it. The unofficial shards just don’t capture the old magic and the game has been butchered out of recognition to its glory days to make it worth playing on the official servers.
*raises a goblet to fellow Europa refugees*
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It’s one of my great gaming laments that I missed the original Ultima games. For most of its golden era I lacked a computer of my own, and was at the mercy of what my uncle bought, which meant no “pure” RPG’s. He did, however, buy the Ultima Underworld games, and they were quite simply the most remarkable things I’d ever played at the time. Those things consumed countless weekends (and a frankly unhealthy number of Coke and Pringles cans) and shaped what I wanted out of an immersive gaming experience in ways I suspect I can’t entirely understand.
Anyway, with the obvious exception of Ultima Online (no interest, no matter how brilliant it may be) I would happily snap up every Ultima game ever made if they would just turn up on GOG, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
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You know, with Exult, you don’t have to wait for Gog to play U7 + Serpent Isle…
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Er… There was that article about Ultima games in PCG a few years ago.
That’s about it, really – I’ve never played any of them, despite playing PC games on-and-off since 1990 or so, and having friends with Amigas and various other systems they’ve (apparently) been ported to.
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I saw the Complete Ultima boxed set in the Electronics Boutique shop I worked in, when it was reduced to 99p picked it up sharpish! I actually played more Alakabeth than any of the actual Ultima’s in the boxed set.
Before that, I’d had my first taste of MMO in Ultima Online as a lumberjack/carpenter. I used to love roaming the forests of Yew, harvesting the trees and searching for small clearings. I’d craft an entire set of room specific furniture from the wood I’d harvested and lay it out in the clearing, and then wander off. I often wondered what people would think when they found a clearing with a bed, two bedside tables, a chest of drawers, an end table and a couple of chairs, all laid out perfectly. :)
Oh! And I almost started a cult in game too – I decided one day that Mongbats were turning the milk sour, causing our aged female adventurers to succumb to osteoporosis long before their time. Through force of personality, newbie boredom and a mad afternoon, I had about 40 other newbies like myself storming through the newbie areas destroying every Mongbat we could find; because they turn the milk sour.
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Bizarrely, I too did the whole lonely lumberjack/carpenter thing too. Every so often I would come across a stack of benches or lecterns like some strange Woodhenge in the forests and figured others were doing the same. Either that or they realised no-one would buy undyed bog-standard furniture (except me). I’m only just recalling how much irrelevant shit I preferred to do in that game than kill monsters. I much preferred soloing if I had to fight, the organised hunting trips to do tmaps and going to the Ophidian lairs were too strange and scary for me. I would instead make arrows and spam irritating rhymes at people banking. For a while I ran a bandage vendor, and would cut up brigand clothing to make stacks of coloured ones. I spent a day once locking down a huge rainbow of bandages as a shop display. I would potter around in Felucca pretending to be an NPC, while stealing from wandering NPCs. Anything but actually play the damn game.
And was I the only one who locked down musicianship at 0% skill and ran around spamming the drum? The drum rhythm at a low skill level would sound like some sort of inept flailing which entertained me a lot, particularly to break the tension of violent battles – “across the mist-swathed moor, a battle raged. corpses, soaked in blood, lay withered in the mud. but a distant sound can be made out – the spasmodic peal of a lone survivor derangedly bashing a tomtom drum”
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My memories of UO are really hazy now. I just remember walking into a field and seeing two guys dressed only in their pants, duelling like mad. I turned and walked the other way; I don’t think they even noticed me (thank god).
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I am one of the few people that actually liked Ultima 8 enough to beat it. Like mentioned by others, I got Ultima 8 for free with some hardware upgrade (I think it was the CD-Rom drive). I was pretty young at the time, and really had no idea about the other Ultima games. I did play 7 when I was older, but 8 has that nostalgic place in my heart for the Ultima series. I think if the controls weren’t so ass and the combat was more than clicking incessantly, more people would love it.
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I think I remember people not realising you could choose where to land when you jumped. Not knowing that made things more awkward. But apart from that, I don’t really understand complaints about the controls. Seemed straight forward enough at the time.
Learning that many longer term fans of the series considered 8 to be some sort of abomination was a big surprise, as I loved it too.
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Targeted jumping wasn’t in the original Ultima 8. It was patched in later after the game was universally panned for bad controls.
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Aha. That would explain it.
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I reckon most people who started the series with VIII feels like spoon & I. I wasn’t “connected” back then, so I couldn’t even search for patches. Hearing about this jump feature sounds like something I should’ve had though!
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Back in those days, I assume most people got patches through CD’s from magazines like PC Gamer. I think some publishers used private BBS” to distribute patches too, but you had to fork out for the long distance which was pretty steep considering how long you had to stay connected to download anything on a 28.8 modem.
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Well… just reading these posts makes me feel old. I got started on Ultima II and then skipped to IV, which was my last real foray into the Ultimas. I was in love with them around the age of 10 (for II) and fell in love again when IV came out on my Atari 1040STfm – (oh yes, that’s right.. it had 1 MEG of memory and a badass internal 3.5″ floppy. You read that right.)
Those will always hold strong memories for me, especially discovering and visiting planet X. I loved them to bits.
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My first Ultima was VII, and despite all the wretched hoops I had to jump through to get it to run properly, it remains tied with Wizardry VII for my favorite RPG of all time. Despite the fact that I never beat either. I picked up I-VI in a package a few years later, and managed to beat the first three before losing steam. Played with IV-VI a bit each, but just didn’t get sucked in like I had with VII. I should probably re-visit them, but the CD they were on is all scratched now.
Still, Ultima VII is probably the most fun I ever had with an RPG. I don’t know that it’s the best one, but the most fun. I think I might reinstall it and give it another go; maybe fifteen years later, I can finally beat the thing.
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Oh yes, the aptly named Voodoo memory management system. That thing was an absolute horror to get working properly. I bet my boot floppy still exists somewhere.
Thanks to all the autoexec.bat and config.sys tweaking you had to do back then, I probably knew more about the inner workings of my computer as a ten year old than I do now.
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Ultima III was the first game I bought for the PC. It had crappy 4 color graphics (black, white, cyan, magenta for those not old enough to know the standard CGA colors). I didn’t know english well back then but I hung on, made it to the finish and was hooked to RPGs from there on. Ultima IV and V I enjoyed also very much and I’ll fondly remember “Rule Britannia” from the sith installment (finally sound you could stand to listen to on a PC.. Adlib FTW).
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Ultima 7 & SI were my first. What stands out the most for me is the wonder of a world to explore that was both vast and richly detailed. Poking around in some kid’s bedroom was as rewarding as sailing across the sea and discovering a new continent that was nothing like any land you’d yet seen. And you got to do plenty of both.
I particularly remember the moments when you got the sailboat and then later the magic carpet, and the awesome feeling of freedom as access to a huge wide world opens up before you. It was really my first moment in video games that was like the moment you step out of the sewers in Oblivion, and is perhaps one of my favorite video game pleasures.
Oh, and being new to the series, I totally didn’t expect the framing device in which the Guardian summons the Avatar from our world to Britannia. That seemed super-awesome-creepy-cool at the time.
Next were the two Ultima Underworlds. UU1 blew my mind. It felt like it was combining everything I had loved about video games up to that point all in one game and, even more astonishing, making it into a coherent whole.
It had all the stats and loot and spells of an RPG. It had the puzzles and conversation trees and exploration of an adventure game. It had the immersive first-person combat and spatial exploration of a FPS (I discovered the Underworld games after playing Doom). Really nifty mechanics like collecting runes to spell spells. And every individual piece of it so well done. And then, even more amazingly, UU2 was even better. Just perfect games, they seemed at the time, the best I’d ever played.
Finally, I played Ultima 9. I came to that one very late too, and was able to play it with a fan patch that fixed many of the problems and on a computer than could actually handle it. I remember the griping that started when previews were released, that Ultima had sold out by trying to ape the success of Tomb Raider by using a single character with a 3rd person perspective. But to me, it seemed obvious that they were trying to make an Ultima Underworld-style game, except in 3D and with a huge U7-style open world. Which was basically my dream game (then and now, although now there’s a lot more other types of games which are also my perfect dream games – Sands of Time, World of Goo, Portal …)
Sadly, U9 was never finished by the develpers. What we have is a working beta with a lot of promise, some wonderful moments, but a lot that is simply unfinished. There’s really no balance to the monsters and the combat and the loot and the spells in the second half of the game. And the later dungeons seem like unfinished, incomplete rough drafts.
But. That area at the beginning where you explore the Avatar’s backyard? I’d never seen anything remotely that awesome in a video game at that point. Just extrapolating the rest of the game from the possibilities suggested by that little starting area was more amazing that half the games I’ve played. Much later, the moment when you get the sailboat? And the camera pans way back and a really wonderful sailing theme plays for the first time? That was a fantastic moment.
I absolutely love the ambition, the vision of what the U9 team was attempting. If only they’d been allowed to finish it.
Which brings me to Gothic and Gothic 2 which, to me, are the real successors of the Ultima Underworld games. They succeed in pretty much everything that U9 was trying to do (with the exception of giving us a nostalgic trip back to revisit our friends in Britannia).
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My dad bought our first PC in 1992, and I remember going to the store to buy our first game for it. Ultima VII caught my eye, because there had been a special on 60 Minutes or Nightline or some other evening news show about this hot new buzzword called Virtual Reality where some of the U7 team were interviewed about the world they were creating.
My dad read the back of the box, which described a grisly murder, and my 11 year old dreams were dashed. We walked out with Wizardry 7 instead, so I didn’t mind too much.
Two years later I was able to get my hands on U7 and it instantly became my favorite game of all time, and I regularly read rec.games.ultima.udic.
One of my favorite memories about Ultima was after my dad moved back to Austin. So many of the locations and jokes in the Ultima series and the culture of Origin was interwoven with Austin. The Bee Caves are a real thing, Iolo really exists and really makes crossbows, and Shamino and Dupre would leave coded messages for each other in the Announcements section of the Austin Chronicle classifieds.
I still play through Ultima 7 once or twice a year. And whenever I visit my dad, I always check the Chronicle in hopes that my old friends are still around.
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Ultima V was one of the first PC games I played, and definitely the one that turned me into a PC gamer.
I remember getting a hand-me-down PC with a few boxes of floppies. I had been sorting through them, trying to see if any were games. I saw some that said “Ultima” and thought “This has to be a game!”. It took me a while to find all the disks and figure out how to make it work, but once I did, I was hooked. Even as early as Ultima V, all the people had schedules, relationships, long keyword based conversations.
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Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar on the Sega Master System (of all things!). I distinctly remember taking the console & game on a family holiday to Budleigh Salterton in Devon. Quite a strong image/memory of sea, fish & chips, family, country walks and a bloodly good CRPG in the evenings. I loved the tarot card beginning defining your character. I remember getting stuck with the plot and thinking the game must be bugged, though a cursory internet search just now didn’t bring anything up. I always loved the name ‘Iolo’
On a side note, after years of struggling with flaky software on the Spectrum+3 which worked, let’s say, 37% of the time, it was a joy to nudge the Master system cartridge into place and just play. Heresy I know.
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Jesus, for a mnemonic jolt back to 1990 – here’s the
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Grr, code didn’t work.
Here’s the music:
http://www.uo.com/archive/ultima4/
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My first encounter with Ultima would have been Ultima IV on the Master System (an unprecedented £40 in 1990-ish), mainly watching my little brother play it. I can see why it’s Garriott’s favourite of the series. I mean, it’s an extraordinary game and it’s odd that it doesn’t get the same sort of reverence as the laughably rudimentary console RPGs of the same period. I dabbled with the Underworlds and played through U8 mainly to justify the hassle of getting it running. (It does have some brilliant things in it, in spite of the flaws.) I never played U7 until a brief go on an emulated version many years after the fact.
Modern RPGs like Oblivion feel really hollow and superficial compared to the completeness of the simulation in the Ultima games.
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Spooky simultaneous memory post.
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i began with Ultima III on the C64, pirated of course since i had no chance in hell to afford the real deal back then when i was like 11, pirated the other C64 versions until i got an Amiga around 91 when my C64 went up into the attic, 1993 i got my first PC and Ultima 6 came along with some other RPG games like Might and Magic III.
bought Ultima 8 in a second hand store around 1998-99 (was playing Ultima Online back then so i was already severly immersed into the Ultima franchise again) and Ultima 9 when that was released (2001?), and around 2003 i began collecting RPG games and now i have them all complete in box, which feels nice.
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Everyone with fond memories of Ultima should go to GOG and vote for it in their “games I’d like to see on GOG” poll. Those of us that never got a chance to play most of them will thank you. :)
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Like Kieron basically.
It was around 1990 i got my first computer, a second hand C64, sealing my fate as a gaming nerd until this day.
I didn´t have any real money at the time, and Ultima was expensive… i remember drooling at the ads aswell. Drooling alot! I was a Tolkien/fantasy fan, and the Ultima ads sounded like giving you the opportunity to participate in such an adventure.
It wasnt until the mid 90´s that i actually got my hands on U7 which fortunately turned out to be the best in the series.
I had lots of fun with it, the scope, the detail, the storyline. Richard Garriot knows how to spurn a good story for sure! I rate the stories in that game, and those in Morrowind/Oblivion as some of the finest computer RPG storytelling i´ve come accross to date.
I left the game after playing it for a long while and getting stuck at some of the harder puzzles. I eventually found a walkthrough, but i never did like those much, preferring to crack puzzles myself if they were logical, or ditching the game altogether if they were crap. I was basically done with the game at that point, moving on to some higher-tech games (pretty ones- i know better now).
I tried the U8 but it wasn´t as fetchy as the 7 so i never bothered picking it up. I did play Ultima Underworld however, which was fresh with neat 3d graphics and enjoyed that one a bit aswell.
I also spent quite a few danish Kroner on phonebills (and got massive complaints from mum, coz i blocked the phone line) when Ultima Online came out which was completely mind-blowing at the time.
I didnt play that long, but it was fun. It was also a lot more hardcore than mainstream MMO´s these days, with player loot, free pvp, and housing and i did miss that part a lot. Hoping to get back into it, with some of the new small team efforts in recreating the basic rulesets of UO in 3D.
Darkfall nearly got things right as far as im concerned, but the exploiters and AFK macroers of that game, killed any competitive drive i mightve had at the beginning.
I´m currently testing out Mortal Online, which is the newest attempt at revitalizing the hardcore MMO.
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Ultima VII and VIII and Star Control 2 are pretty much the main pillars of my early gaming memory, which is also supported by Sierra and LucasArts adventures (in particular the Quest of Glory series). My older brother is mostly to blame, they were his games and I would watch him play and later play through the same areas myself.
Funnily enough the thing that sticks in my mind the most is using the debug code in Ultima VIII and finding interesting ways to break the gameworld by picking up landscape tiles and jumping through the floor. Also that one cutscene of a guy getting beheaded on the docks and finally the other thing was that vaguely annoying magic system requiring harvesting reagents.
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ultima online: my favorite game of all time. people who have never experienced a hardcore mmo (or gotten past the learning curve) may never fully understand the beauty of a game like that. I’m sure it wasn’t right for some people, but for me it was an incredibly rich and deep gaming experience that has yet to be replicated.
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The first computer my family ever had was a massive Compaq SLT 286 running Windows 3.11 that my dad’s employer gave him for field work. It had a monochrome screen with a beyond-horrendous refresh rate. I remember playing Ultima 1 on it. This was toward the mid-90s after Ultima had been out for quite some time. I honestly don’t remember much about the game aside from the visuals. But I do remember enjoying the depth it offered compared to other games I played in those days (which were mostly NES and Genesis games).
I still have that compaq and it still runs. I should dig it out and boot up Ultima just for old times’ sake.
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That’s the one! I don’t remember what the other games were either…. Syndicate was my favorite though.
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another cool memory of Ultima VII – seeing the boxes on display!
game boxes were huge cardboard affairs back then, and seeing rows of these on the shelves was like a massive wall of black.
http://media.strategywiki.org/images/b/b3/Ultima_VII_Black_Gate_box.jpg
and as always, the stuff that came with it. I still have the cloth map and pentagram coin that came with U8
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I didn’t know anything about the Ultima series when I started Ultima VIII on our pc as a child. Nor was I prepared for the awesome CGI intro… I’ll always remember the voice of the demon saying “You have been a thorn in my side for far too long Avatar”.
I was gripped, I was stunned and I was scared. The graphic execution of the man on the pier only a few moments later left me standing around not knowing what to do. The world seemed huge and imposing, but I loved it.
Although I never completed or even got very far in the game (I think a few fatal bugs stopped progress for me), I’ll always fondly remember the awesome atmosphere, burglary, explosions and awkward fights.
It was really sad a few years later to see the new Ultima game in full 3D reviewed in the magazines. It looked ugly to me, even though it was spanking new. A whole splurge of Quake 1 (or similar) based 3D games released around that time were actually darn ugly. I never understood why any of them went 3D to begin with. Oh well…
A long time after that at university I was introduced to Ultima Online. I actually enjoyed it for a while too (oh, so much fishing…), but the small locally hosted server just didn’t provide enough content to keep me interested.
It’ll be a HUGE undertaking to build a modern game that actually satisfies all our emotionally driven expectations, but I really hope someone makes the effort.
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;)
http://www.u5lazarus.com
Ultima 5 Lazarus from the ground up remake. Forums are down but you can still get the game (requires Dungeon Siege 1 to run). It’s frickin’ awesome (disclaimer: I think it’s awesome).
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I played the hell out of Ultima 8, but never properly. I’d just go round collecting oil canisters and those exploding gem things, and lay them down around the NPCs, set them off and then run like hell when that town defender guy chased me for turning the citizens into meaty chunks.
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http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/ultima-6-project-beta-2-released/
Good timing with this post: the Ultima 6 Project (using an evolved version of the lazarus ‘engine’ for dungeon siege) has released a new version of the beta – one line from the release notes mean I’m dl’ing this now: “The entire world is complete, and ready for players to explore.”
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Started with U8, then U7:BG, then Ultima Underworld. High moments in my gaming life (yes even U8, which wasn’t at all bad, just not what it could have been). The “evil publisher” pun in U8, kinda shows that origin wanted to take things in another direction.
Someday I shall find the time to play Serpent Isle and Underworld 2. Damn, but i miss Origin Systems and their games!
Bioforge, System Shock, the Ultimas, Privateer, etc, etc. If EA deserves shit for anything, it is because of what they did to Origin.
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My lasting memory of Ultima Online is spending what seemed like 7 hours chopping down trees to build up my strength (and turn each trunk into a single arrow) then getting killed by a rabbit.
Oh and joining a guild who very kindly gave me a full set of armor and weapons, all of which was promptly stolen a few minutes later when I was killed by someone 20 zillion levels above me.
You youngsters today namby-pamby WoW’s wont remember the before time when MMO’s were unforgivably cruel like that :-)
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Okay, I’m going to write another one of my essay posts, which I’m sure that someone out there must actually enjoy reading.
What was so special about the Ultima games was that they were always amazingly progressive, they weren’t about number crunching and what numbers were there were so easy to understand that anyone could play it. This reached a culmination in Ultima VII, a game that truly anyone could pick up and play.
The best RPG systems of the day–and something that’s far more common today in general–is that they didn’t rely on thousands of numbers, ten handfuls of dice of varying sides, and levels, they had none of that, they preferred to go for character progression instead. A fine modern example of this is White Wolf, where all abilities are in a pool, and the DM awards points as a reward, these points can be put into powers, powers can then be upgraded by putting points into the attributes that use them, with not a level in sight.
It was all very easy to understand, and I had a friend who played the system with next to no knowledge of it, because it was so intuitive, and that’s what makes for a brilliant RPG, one where you’re playing the game instead of struggling with the outmoded and archaic rules of the game.
Another great game like this is–can you guess?–Guild Wars. Get to 20 and it’s just a pool of skills and attributes which affect the power of those skills.
Then there’s the Gothic series.
But Ultima, Ultima was one of the first games to embrace this idea, the notion that anyone should be able to play an RPG. Imagine that! No longer was it solely the domain of nerds who owned too many dice or were used to calculating hundreds of numbers for the best overall min-maxed result. No, now anyone could enjoy it! This was true of the majority of Ultima games, as I recall, more Ultima VII than any, but it applied to them all to a degree.
Don’t know anything about RPGs? That doesn’t matter, you can still play this game!
If anything, Ultima proved that the only thing that puts non-RPG fans off an RPG is the archaic system, filled with arcane numbers and endless permutations and calculations, it wasn’t about character progression, it wasn’t even so much about acting, it wasn’t about a great story, it was just Mathematics: The Game.
To talk of pen & paper again, when it got over its number-crunchiness and realised that it didn’t need to do that, it pulled in a completely different breed of roleplayer: they could write, they could act, they were bloody thespians, they were fun to have in a group, and generally it became a thing of joy rather than a game where people got angry at some equation they hadn’t accounted for.
And as an end-result, you could do anything in those games that you could in a number-crunchy one, but due to their clear-cut nature, they were much easier to balance, just as Guild Wars is more balanced than Baldur’s Gate, for example (in Baldur’s Gate, a sole Warrior has zero chance up against a Sorcerer of the same level). And that brings us back to games.
Ultima showed us that we didn’t need number-crunchiness in games, we could be like those groovy pen & paper systems that used streamlined approaches and attracted genuinely fun and entertaining people to play. And throughout Ultima, there was always this omnipresent sense of fun, again, this culminated in Ultima VII.
For example:
Serpent’s Hold: This place was a cleverly disguised rendition of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it wasn’t immediately recognisable like the pop culture references of today, and it was very cleverly written as a whole. My favourite part of this, to this day, is still Sir Denton. No one has ever seen Sir Denton out of his plate armour, you know?
The Unicorn: Unicorns in Ultima VII only react well to virgins, and when the Avatar (the bloke or lass the player plays) manages to freely walk up to and pet one, the party bursts out with consolations. “Don’t worry, milord,” comforts Iolo, “I’m sure many things change in thy body in the crossing over from our own World to Britannia.”, a few other sentiments are offered, and then that lovable bastard Dupre bursts out with “I would like to pet the Horsey, Avatar, but he seems much more comfortable with thee than he would be with me!” This is met with fits of raucous laughter. Git.
Dupre’s Tavern Review: When searching for Dupre, we find he’s been Knighted, and his Knighthood has been abused, apparently he’s running a Lord British sponsored review of all the taverns in the land (but he’s not been authorised to do that), and thus he’s been getting free food, drink, and lodgings all over the place, much to the chagrin of the barmen of the land.
The Crashed Kilrathi Ship: There’s a crashed Kilrathi ship in a field, and on approaching it a theme from Wing Commander plays. The people of the town talk about an old farmer named Mack who’s all ways watching the skies, the people think he’s crazy, but he’s not. Talking with him is a truly jubilant and entertaining experience. “And suddenly a Tiger-Man leapt out of the wreckage, I knewest not what he desired, but I didst hear him ask that I ‘Kill Rrathy’, I knowest not who this Rathy person is or why I shouldst kill him. But suffice it to say, the Tiger-Man leapt at me, only to find himself impaled on mine Hoe of Death. He made for a delicious meal!”
The Hoe of Death: Apparently Mack took his Hoe to an enchanter to have its qualities improved, and at the same time a Warrior took a particularly potent sword in for the same treatment, the enchanter was old and easily confused, and the Warrior ended up with a sword that was only good for cutting grass, and Mack received a Hoe that was perhaps one of the most powerful weapons in the land. Suffice it to say, the enchanter is no more.
The Fox: There’s a fox wearing a ribbon who constantly likes to talk about himself and how pretty he is, and mocks the party for not being as pretty as he is. I love that fox.
The Pixie: There’s a naked pixie (no, really) hidden away in one part of the game, she flies around after the Avatar constantly proclaiming her love for him, this does not stop until the party leaves the area, on and on she goes about her plans for the Avatar, it’s quite creepy, but very funny.
The Cheater: There’s a bloke in Britannia who’s cheating on his wife, if you follow him around, at a certain time he meets up with his illicit lover (all NPCs in the game world have schedules, every last one, even the guards wander around turning the lamps on before going to bed), and you can bust up their little meeting and tell him you’re working for his wife. This leads to hilarity.
The Great Bank Robbery: You can follow the bank clerk to her home, and when she’s asleep one can creep in there and grab her keys from the little sideboard she puts them in, with these, most of the rooms of the bank vault open up. She keeps one on her body at all times though, and this is where it gets interesting. If you kill her and loot her quickly, you can get all the keys, then you have to run like mad from the guards. Later, you can come back (avoiding the guards) and resurrect her. All is well again. These keys can open all the doors of the vault. Any gold bars can be exchanged with that selfsame bank clerk for gold, adding to the amusement value of the heist.
And that’s just a small sample of it, there are countless other brilliant little things in Ultima VII. Ultima VII was a fun RPG, and left me with many memories of things I was endlessly amused at. But not only that, it had a linear story within a non-linear world (how can that work?!), endless amounts of crafting opportunities (baking!), really fun quests, a decent storyline full of intrigue, some genuinely memorable characters, a flying carpet(!), and a generally fun world to explore with lots of hidden secrets.
Oh, and you had to actually feed your characters too, otherwise they’d start complaining about being hungry and start dropping over from malnutrition eventually.
Iolo: “How long dost thou wish to sleep, milord?”
[0 hours.]
Iolo looks at you exasperatedly, “As thou dost wish.”
The moral of this story: It’s particularly telling that the most fun RPGs aren’t laden with heavy number-crunching, and the only fun RPG I can remember that used the D&D system (or a similar heavy system) was, of course, Mask of the Betrayer. But MotB was fairly light on necessary combat so that didn’t make it too bad. I’m hoping that the lessons of Ultima are ones that future developers will take to heart.
Moar systems like Bloodlines, Gothic, and Ultima, please.
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i enjoyed it ;)
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ultima online: To this day I couldn’t tell you why it was so much fun perhaps because it was one of the first games I played with real player driven gameplay. Oh and who can forget endless hours prefecting your macros.
“Vendor Buy The Bank Guards!”
Good times :)
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I have fond memories of the Ultima Universe, stemming from Ultima 3: Exodus on the Commodore 64. As my memory serves me, it was a bootleg copy; I remember the manual being a black and white photocopy that appeared washed out with pages mis-aligned. I remember waiting impatiently as the loading screen, which had some little tiny figures fighting a dragon. I suppose one had to be there, but there was a fantastic sense of wonder when you got ready to press that J key to “Journey Onward”. At the time, it felt like there was a little world going on inside the computer, replete with secret passages (which were identifiable by a sprite with a missing segment in their “brickwork”), characters that wandered around going about their business (even if it was only predefined paths over and over), plus the player could use a parsed text interface to talk to them (of course everyon remembers NAME, JOB, HEALTH, BYE), shopkeepers that could be attacked and robbed, etc. Spells involved collecting reagents and recanting power words, AN FLAM and the like.
I didn’t have the attention span at the time (and nor do I now) to play all the way through it, but I think everybody knew of “some guy who got to the end”, though. It’s a little difficult to separate the nostalgia from the experience, but I remember it fast became a favourite series, even though I never was able to finish 3, 4, or 5. I never went back and played Ultima 1,2 either, but I had heard stories from others about the laser guns, and air cars and other weirdness, and I was intrigued.
Ultima 4 was notable in terms of focusing on a philosophical motive, and as far as I’m concerned it has earned the reputation as a landmark game for that reason. I remember the chants OHM OHM OHM, and the like, to up one’s abilities at Shrines. And the whole Bard’s Tale connection, as others have mentioned, was interesting. I can remember playing a Bard’s Tale, walking around in the faux 3D environs of Skara Brae and thinking, “Am I supposed to be in Britannia?”
I recall walking into a town in 5 and the message coming up saying, “you have acquired an air of so-and-so”– and a mate saying he had managed to steal the sceptre and crown and escaping without any of the Shadowlords touching him (impossible as far as I was concerned since they could easily move through walls). I remember looting ships and leaving them in the ocean– and others speaking of how they would spend all day creating a little “bridge” of vacant ships across the sea.
The first Ultima I actually finished was 6, which to my knowledge was the first “IBM PC and compatibles” Ultima. I remember the CGA/EGA graphics seemed so much more evocative. The player starts off in a gypsy caravan, answering some questions which would ultimate decide what kind of character you’d be playing. I rember there was a graphic that showed a picture of Britannia, with a knight (presumably you, or the Avatar), arms outstretched reflected in the waters below. Obviously the image stuck with me so, it must have had quite an effect at the time, once again giving me the impression that this otherworld called “Britannia” existed parallel to our own (at least in my fevered mind). I think it was mainly due to the intro, which introduced the concept that the player was living a normal life on Earth, and he somehow went into this other world to play the game.
Anyway, after that, came digitised voice and a nemesis with Ultima 7. While the gameplay seems completely clunky by today’s standards, there was pathfinding, night and day cycles, etc. Despite the fact that the other members of your party had an annoying inability to feed themselves, I managed to get through the game to the ending (both parts, although the expansion was a little less satisfying), but I was still totally and completely immersed. I loved the fact that your “companions” had become long time recurring characters, and they became woven into the backstory of this little parallel universe. The whole story arc of the Guardian was genuinely interesting, and the best bits of the game were when he was inside your head as you played, mocking you at every turn.
8 was a bit of a miss for me, although I had greatly anticipated it, and didn’t completely mind the new perspective and action RPG mechanics, it was tedious and a little off track. 9, at least as buggy as 8 had been, if not more so, and as an early 3D title even for the time it looked a bit grim, it still had a great opportunity to cap the series off– unfortunately it didn’t meet that expectation, but it was nice to see the progression from 2D sprites to a then “fully realised 3D world”. I had well and truly become the fanboy by that time and bought the big ass boxed set with all of the trinkets (the best part about buying the actual games was the cloth maps and stuff that came with).
When UO came along, I jumped at a chance to try the Beta, but it fell a little flat for me. Still, it held my interest until the game was actually released. It was a bit too mired (as many modern MMOs are) in the old MUDs, MUSHs that preceded them, but let’s face it– we probably wouldn’t have WoW in its current incarnation (for good or ill) if it weren’t for UO.
The “futuristic” Ultima MMO follow up looked a bit naff, and it died early on, but unfortunately so did the interesting premise of Ultima X: Oddyssey– at the time, an MMO for casual players, which made it easy for friends to meet up, warp to one another and just adventure sounded right up my street, but, alas, it was sh*tcanned for unknown reasons.
In short, if you’ve bothered to read this far, Britannia/Sosaria and the Ultima series are near and dear to my heart and it would be great if it could be resurrected in some non-crappy form, but for the moment I’m content to leave it as happy memories from a gaming childhood gone by.
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I have yet to this day play the Ultima games. That being said, basically some of my first experiences with video games in general were played out in Ultima Underworld 2.
My childhood memories of that game drove me to pick it up off abandonia. Playing through it again, I’m perplexed what the industry has lost if a game from 1993 is able to so soundly beat such modern interpretations as Oblivion ( being almost the only suitable example that I know of).
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My friend with older brothers who had a VIC-20 and then a Commodore 64 had Ultima III. I thought it was coolio. Then I got an Atari 130XE (Commodore 128 clone) and my own copy of Ultima IV – Quest for the Avatar.
So much time spent fighting the wind and timing the moon gates…
SO.
Much…
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I had a Commodore 64 as my first computer and I must have seen Ultima III: Exodus in the local computer store. The box sucked me in and I played all of them from there on out, even going back to 2 and 1. I loved the exploration of this whole new world and all of the secrets it held. I loved the manuals and the cloth maps as well. I still have most of my games as well as the maps of dungeons that I painstakingly drew out. Ultima III, IV & VII are probably my favorites, though I am also one of the few that loved VIII & IX(though I never got around to finishing it). I actually bought the monolithic collectors edition of IX, man it was huge!
My latest best memory is concerning Ultima IV: Avatar. I was lucky enough to have Felicia Day sign it at the last Dragon Con ;)[because of the Avatar tie in in case you have been under a rock ;)]
http://clydefrogsblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/back-from-dragon-con-2009.html
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Yes! Those complex interactions were great, and that’s something that Ultima Underworld had too.
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I still play Ultima – I’ve got both Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 and Ultima 7 on my legacy gaming box (complete with a Roland MT-32).
My first experience of Ultima was with the I-VI box set. At that point I was running a 12MHz 286, so anything older than VI was a bit smelly, to be perfectly honest. VI was a revelation despite the slightly dated graphics – atmospheric music, great plot and a fantastic unexpected ending. I particularly liked going through (non 3D) dungeons to retrieve a dragon egg, wearing invisibility rings and a torch with limited range – it was rather tense when the rings ran out just when I was grabbing an egg, in the middle of a load of dragons!
I briefly had a go of IV and V but never got into them to the same extent, although I did get a reasonable way on V.
VII was astounding; I wandered around the world slowly working out the plot instead of following the pre-determined path, loving the asides of all the inhabitants. If VII was good, then VII part 2 is still the pinnacle of Ultima, in my opinion. The banquet scene with banter between characters and sudden revelations was truly excellent, the world was vast and the plot fairly original.
Other than VII (and even that doesn’t exactly qualify), it’s notable than the games are not precisely about killing the bad guy. It may, to be fair, have been the original intention – but it never turns out to be the ending.
VIII seemed a bit lifeless, despite the moodiness and the improved graphics. The Avatar was reduced to a fairly generic character instead of a paragon of virtue. It’s not a bad RPG, but it’s a poor Ultima.
The same continued with Ultima IX – graphically it’s not bad, and has some good Ultima moments, but in general it’s Ultima perverted.
In some ways I do wonder if Ultima could ever have properly evolved. Even by the time of Ultima VII, a degree of reality was being introduced into the world that could possibly be excessive. There’s a reason why many RPG settings are a morally black and white faux medieval setting – introducing too much reality tends to raise uncomfortable questions about why one hero is saving the world instead of a properly run democracy.
I still haven’t finished either of the excellent Ultima Underworld I or II and really must make time to do so. It’s a pity it tends to be forgotten, despite the fact it was released a year before DOOM and was a vastly superior game, at least technically (the genres are obviously very different).
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Oh yes, I also can’t forget some of the completely awesome hidden sidequests :
The ‘Smith’ quests, although understanding the joke does require playing previous games..
I can’t remember if the huge treasure hunt in U6 was also the Smith quest, but it was lots of fun.
The random treasure quests around U7.
Casting armaggedon in U7 and then speaking to Batlin was awesome.
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Are you sure there’s no news about Ultima yet?
https://www.lordofultima.com/
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By the way, my first contact with Ultima was Ultima IV Quest For The Avatar on the Commodore 64. I was playing it back then locked into my room between Christmas and New Year 1985/86.
Ultima VII and Underworld convinced me to switch over to that pompous PC architecture. I loved both U7 with their respective add-ons. U8: Pagan was also something I liked very much. However U9 and Ultima Online were both a bitter disappointment to me.
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what the heck.
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My first adventure game purchased was Ultima III. I used to read computer gaming magazines and saw many advertisements for Ultima III, and the art looked so cool. So I bought it for my Atari 800XL only to find out that didn’t work. I was so bummed but soon found there to be a patch floppy disk to fix it. The game was amazing, along with the music and the manual + cloth map. It definately put me in the mood to play this adventure game.
I finished 3 an went to Ultima 2. Then 4 through 9. And I actually enjoyed 9. Sure it was buggy as hell but I was amazed at the environments. I loved how the look of the sky changed from sunrise to sunset.
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