This is awesome, keep up the good work! Have liked and subscribed =)
After this section…
> Ultima VII was in development from 1990 to 1992 (shipping in April ’92), and even though software 3D was taking off at the time, it hadn’t been designed as a 3D game (even though it used a 3D world) and that contributed to its issues.
> But software-rendered 3D games with isometric perspectives started coming out very soon after Ultima VII, and every time I saw one I thought, “This is what Ultima VII should have looked like.”
…there are clips from three games: Dungeon Keeper (June 1997), Myth II (Dec. 1998) and Grandia (Dec. 1997). Not sure if that really counts as coming out 'very soon' after Ultima VII!
Reminds me a little of the Ultima V - Lazarus[1] project, where volunteers re-implemented the entire game in the Dungeon Siege 3D engine. They also added tons of new characters and dialog, side quests, a richer plot, and new artwork and music. They did all this and managed to keep the major plot and game elements the same. They actually managed to greatly improve on what is unarguably :) the best Ultima of the series.
How do they handle hidden dialogue options? One of the most amazing things about the series before 3d was you just talked to people about things and often they had something to say about the topic. Like you can ask just about anyone about the avatar or blackthorn. There’s a donkey that figures out he’s inside a video game, etc.
I think Lazarus is one of the greatest game mods ever made. They even added the option to become an evil Avatar and side with Blackthorn.
And if anybody's looking for a new game with the Ultima vibe, I highly recommend Moonring, a free indie game from one of the creators of Fable: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/
Wow. Thanks. It’s amazing that games like these exist for years on Steam and never surface when I search for new games with those tags.
I never played the Ultima games but I did have a crippling Ultima Online addiction in high school for two years.
This video definitely brought back some memories.
Same! I played a ton of UO and met many friends on it. Never played any of the single-player series for more than a few minutes. Played some Ultima Underworld which appeals to me but it didn't stick.
I have played a lot of Ultima-inspired games though. The Exile and Avernum series by Spiderweb Software [1] are childhood favourites. I also really loved Arx Fatalis [2], a love letter to Ultima Underworld.
“Eat that kal vas flam and have a side of in nox you PK sob!”
Being a PK (as well as a thief/PK hybrid) in UO is some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. There's nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of being a fugitive and surviving, picking people off and scavenging what you can before the fuzz arrive.
PKing had a deleterious effect on the community -- I'll admit -- but I had fun as both a PK and as a victim trying to escape or exact revenge. UO (pre-Renaissance) remains the multiplayer game with the richest social dynamics I've ever played. When they finally got rid of non-consensual PKing they totally destroyed this richness. Instead of behaving like real people in a community who work together to solve their own problems they had the benefit of inviolable game mechanics to protect them.
So people's reliance on one another disintegrated and they stopped engaging with each other. Without the threat of violence to settle things, people became anti-social and had no problem being very rude to one another. It was tragic!
Ultima VII ran in real mode and it wanted every single kilobyte of memory that it could steal away from DOS.
They had some fancy optimized version of HIMEM that worked a little bit better than the stock DOS one and people started using it on all of their boot disks not just the one for Ultima VII.
Ultima VII doesn't run in Real Mode, it runs in Unreal Mode.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode
Still real mode, just a variant.
Dear Larian Studios,
I have been a very good boy this year, and for Christmas I would like...
this is just a recreation, not an expansion, but xu4 is playable on linux without wine.
This is remarkable. I tried to replay U7 over the pandemic and it was just too clunky, even with Exult. This looks like it addresses my issues while perserving the original aesthetic.
AI voice acting on-the-fly from in-game text would be slick.
Tangent - Do any games let you set a speed multiplier for in-game speech? I'd love to run dialog at 1.5x like I do for podcasts.
It’s still isometric, luckily. I always wanted to have Ultima VII with Ultima VIII perspective, and this is kind of a superset of that.
I gave up on Ultima VII when some wolves attacked my party in the forest and I couldn't find my downed party member.
That was the day and age when you only had the manual to help you figure out UI problems instead of asking people on The Internet. By the time I had access to somewhere to ask I was too busy playing Starflight. Which for the kids is the second version of No Man's Sky, or No Man's Sky is the third version of Starflight.
Just uninstalled Akalabeth, Ultima 1, 2 and 3 last week. I was planning to play again but couldn't find any time because of many reasons. Plan was to continue with the rest of the series afterwards. If you're looking for them, GOG is your friend.
On a totally irrelevant note, I know at this point it doesn't mean much to Broadsword to invest more into UO, but I really can't justify the lack of macOS client.
Akalabeth was my first experience as a kid seeing a dungeon crawler game and I still feel the excitement and wonder of it.
Did anyone else ever get the glitch where the game switched from color to red and black? That was truly sinister.
Ultima online was my one and only Ultima and it’s weird to get pangs of nostalgia from Ultimas that I’ve never played.
IIRC the UO alpha looked even more like U7
Related:
Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems
See also related discussion from yesterday:
Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140645 (48 comments)
Would any code from the Exult project be useful to help implement the gameplay?
Looks cool. I loved Ultima II and III as a kid. Even wrote some text walk-throughs back then. Played them on Apple //e and //c, the last Apple products I ever owned (or ever will). I also ditched all Windows about 25 years ago.
I suppose to play on Linux though, I would need to run some Wine setup huh?
DOSBox if you want to run them locally, or a web browser if you want to play them immediately: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Ultima_III_-_Exodus_1983