While Exult basically matches the graphics of the original game, this is closer to "3D Ultima VII", with rotatable views and more interactivity in the game. It gives it what looks like a kind of voxel-ish look, mixing in original sprites with newly-modeled 3D objects.
The 0.1.0 release video also has addition segments about feature improvements [1] with some examples of the 2D to 3D conversion process that are quite impressive.
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=25 0:25 to 0:40 has a bunch of the small scale objects being replaceable, rotatable, and animatable in 3D.
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=48 0:48 to 1:06 has bulk replacement of scene objects with personally chosen substitutes. (3D rotatable)
With the current state of the engine, and the extensive personal editing features, much like the comment from VariousPrograms, it could be used as a platform for doing other games, modified quests, and multi-player MMO style games.
So funny to see this here, I was just looking into Ultima remakes last night, and saw this one among others. Looks really awesome. I never played any of the Ultima games back in the day, and have bounced off them when trying in later years. This should make Ultima VII a lot more accessible and playable.
Not good, I imagine; IMO part of the magic of a game from the era is that blocky aesthetic. I'm reminded of how Dracula X Chronicles completely sucks all the joy out of Rondo of Blood with ugly 3D models and weird arrangements of the compositions with 'real' instruments (or just a different synth).
The PSP SotN was different enough than the NA PSX release, including a new Maria mode (different than the Saturn one), and a new translation (technically better, but retranslates some iconic lines).
I played them (starting with 4) back in the day. And 35 years later, I fixed a bug in the ScummVM version of U4. I discovered it while showing the game to my kid.
I couldn't have predicted that back then. Although as a kid, I did fix a "bug" in Ultima that required the floppy disk when you had it installed on HD.
There's a YouTuber that's been going through and making in-depth retrospectives of each Ultima game that some here may find interesting. I've found them a pleasant watch and I don't usually go for this type of content. I never played the Ultima series until Ultima Online so I don't have the nostalgia goggles that I'd need to go back and play games this old (sorry, it's the truth) so these videos are as close as I'll probably get.
As someone who played these back in the day and enjoyed them, I don't think I could even recommend them to myself today. Ultima VII is everything the other comments say it is... but it's also one staggeringly large nested fetch quest, with nothing much breaking it up.
I'd recommend some combination of the Bethesda open world games and the JRPG genre today. They're not the same, nothing really quite fills the Ultima gap that I know of, but between those two I'd call it close enough.
I keep meaning to go and play the Underworld games, since I love the subgenre they pioneered (Immersive Sim). I'll get around to it... one day.
It's like you say, not exactly the same, but for CRPGs it's hard to go wrong with Baldur's Gate 3. It's similar enough to later Ultima in some ways that it might scratch the itch.
Elsewhere in thread is mentioned an Underworld remake.
I do not have the same complaint about them as I do Ultima VII. A good remake could still be an interesting experience today, with little more than a graphical overhaul and modern controls. Both of them have a mixture of exploration, combat, and conversation that keeps them engaging over time.
Ultima VII's problem is that it's just... one big fetch quest. The combat is a non-entity (in the original game, I gather some of the remakes have tried to address this but they're starting way, way behind the eight ball), and there just isn't much else there.
Ultimas prior to VII don't have that problem because combat is functional, so the essentially multi-genre nature of an RPG where each subgenre keeps the other from becoming painfully tedious is there, but by modern standards, probably still fairly unplayable. Neat ideas, you can see how later games picked up the ball and ran with it in various directions, but very hard to play by modern standards. For instance, Ultima 4 combat has modern TRPG combat in it to some extent... except no even remotely modern TRPG game makes "moving one space" an entire action on par with "make one attack", and for good reason.
I'm a huge fan of Majuular, these videos are amazing. I like that he dives deeply into the history behind each game as well - like the company, Richard Garriott (Lord British), etc.
His other videos on other games are great as well!
Any thread about Ultima remakes is incomplete without mention of the highly ambitious Ultima V - Lazarus project[1], which re-made (and significantly expanded) the game onto the Dungeon Siege engine. A true labor of love!
Vaguely related but there is this whole set of videos on the production of the Ultima series on Youtube by Majuular that I've been playing while working out. Just such a different time, I almost regret missing it.
His video on 7 and serpent's isle brought back a lot of memories (although my preferred origin game was Wing Commander)
Rise your hand if you remember how long you had to tinker around to get enough EMS to load the game plus sound card drivers loaded into memory when being in DOS!
Wait play the game? I am fiddling my config.sys and autoexec.bat just right and making sure I could get to 610k. Using 4DOS to have a pick a path adventure of which configuration to load as it was starting up to run each game. Then I might play a game here and there.
I definitely remember the collection of boot disks I used to load the right autoexec.bat/config.sys settings for the Ultima and Wing Commander games, and how long I spent tuning these settings. I was just a kid then, but I remember the whole exercise being pretty complicated!
I remember getting "The Complete Ultima VII" on CD and never figuring out how to get it running. I think I've still got the box, but I think the disc has been missing for years. I bought it on GOG some time ago, though.
Other than Ultima 7 I only know of Zone66 as another game that used Unreal mode. Early versions also didn't like v86 mode but later versions added support for DPMI or in some other way started to play nicely with EMM386
I never played an Ultima game, but I remember that many years ago, there was a period where Ultima VII was commonly mentioned as "the best RPG of all time" by PC players. Nowadays it seems Ultima is rarely talked about anymore compared to classic SNES RPGs like Final Fantasy VI, which came out two years later.
JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all the manuals and taking detailed notes[1]. Even doing that, they are quite hard. Nearly every single Final Fantasy game is easy to beat just by taking a bit of time to grind levels whenever you get stuck.
There is a blogger who teaches a class on old games (I can't remember who) and Ultima IV was one that his students bounced off of immediately because they didn't read the manual cover-to-cover, which is a prerequisite for not being totally lost.
1: Or using a walkthrough, I guess, but IMO the main point of the Ultima games of this era was the sense of discovery.
The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You just pick a car and start driving. There's no tutorial or opening cinematic. If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.
Not saying one style is good or bad. But it's definitely changed since the 80s and 90s, when every game came with a printed 50 page manual full of crucial information. Which often doubled as copy protection. I remember firing up King's Quest 6 and having it challenge me to type the 15th word in the second paragraph on page 26 or whatever.
> If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.
The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.)
GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.
They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page.
Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.
I guess back in the day, PC RPGs like Ultima were more targeted toward high-IQ nerds, while JRPGs were targeted toward kids or more average adults.
Nowadays RPGs are pretty much always as accessible as the JRPGs of old. Or more accessible, as even random encounters and turn-based combat are increasingly perceived as not streamlined enough.
The question is whether the hand-holding approach makes certain types of games impossible now. For example, if an old RPG derived its appeal from executing successful note-taking, the game can't be made approachable by taking out the note-taking requirement (e.g. with automatic quest logs, quest markers, in-game hints etc) without removing the core of the gameplay.
Though I'm sure there are many other clunky aspects that could be streamlined today without loss.
Some of the earlier JRPGS were pretty unintuitive. Probably because the developers didn't really know what they were doing yet.
Mother 1 doesn't give you any plot guidance on what to do and is insanely overly difficult due to poor balancing.
I believe Phantasy Star 1 was designed to be played while using grap paper to map the dungeon. A modern re-release has the game do this for you automatically.
Even in Playstation era games like Suikoden there's this problem where if you put the game aside for a week and return to it and forget where to go next there's often no way to re-show the dialogue telling you where to go and no quest log.
Suikoden 2 makes you collect 108 characters for the good ending. You definetly would need to take notes to try to do this without a guide. But it's poorly designed because you can miss one of them due to RNG during a mandatory fight scene with no way to know this.
Many of the JRPGs that made it to the US were targeted for kids (or sometimes made easier when translated).
A major influence on RPGs in Japan was Wizardry, which was probably even more popular in Japan than in the US. Influences from it can be seen in many early JRPGs.
Dragon Quest was intentionally made simpler than Wizardry both to reach a wider audience and to be easily playable on the Famicom; it's probably the easiest of the first 3 DQ games still has some "hunt for the right square" puzzles.
The best RPG of all time should be either Ultima IV, Chrono Trigger+, that's it, with the Plus patch or Pokémon Crystal (a hacked ROM) with improving patches, such as:
- all mons ingame
- level cap
- no trading
- improved Battle Tower
Ultima VII shines with the in-game simulation, but today Cataclysm DDA:Bright Nights curb-stomps U VII in that area. Pokémon, well, it's about battling with your favourite mons, the game story it's just a placeholder with nice Japanese pixelated vistas.
Also, I'd put Slashem on par, too. Because it's damn silly and fun to raise a Samurai with Yakuza weapons, an anachronistic madness like the Discworld series (and OFC you have the Tourist role from the books too). More than strategy, Slashem/Nethack it's about lateral thinking and doing crazy stuff to advance into your goal. Throwing potions as weapons? Done. A Doppleganger Kung Fu monk doing DBZ-like attacks while using your Wand of Digging against rock based foes? OFC, done.
Another RPG that is praised a lot is Disco Elysium (2019). Though I guess this one is quite different from the ones you mentioned. "RPG" is a wide term.
This is pretty neat. There have been multiple attempts at something like that in the past, and of them, this is by far the best-looking one.
However, I think some artefacts can never be properly resolved (see for example the marble statue to the left at 1:53 in the video), which makes it look veird and break immersion (also the flat roofs that are supposed to be slanted/angled roofs)
Also, the U7 engine is a very complex beast so to properly implement it will take a lot of work and fine-tuning (although I guess they can use Exult as a start, which is by now pretty feature-complete)
Later releases of U8 fixed jumping so it was less pixel-precise. It was still a clumsy mechanic, and the game still felt unfinished. But TBH I had a much worse reaction to Ultima IX, which capped off the series with a giant steaming turd. When I managed to get U9 to run at all after several years, I bounced out after a couple hours of playing. Still the only Ultima game I never finished.
The recent Wizardry remaster encouraged me to go back and play other nostalgic games - finished Ultima I and II, but the nostalgia wasn't strong enough to keep going through the busywork and UI impedance of others.
I'll keep this one on my list for when nostalgia strikes again...
I forget whether it was Ultima III or IV but that turned me off of adventure games. The busy work being asked of me was offputting. May have just been a shift of interest once reaching maturity and turning interests to Women and Music. I still liked some other games but more for study breaks and occasional arcade sessions than constant activities. Gen X here checking in.
Let me go find my collection of floppy disks, then I'll need a 32 pin connection adapter for the drive. I remember U7 was my favorite game for a long time. I received U7 Serpent Isle as a gift, but at least one of 15 of the 3.5" disks was corrupted, ordering a replacement disks cost $14 dollars per disk, and I wasn't sure how many disks might be corrupted. I gave up on the game. I should just buy it on GoG.
On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play.
BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.
Tbf though, Exult kept the original fixed 2D overhead perspective which is a bit hard to grock when used to what has now become the 'traditional' camera angle for isometric games.
Revisited moves the entire game world into 3D and it looks magical:
Ultima 4 was good story wise, but the combat was extremely tedious with each in your party only being able to take a single step per turn. This was particularly annoying when facing easy to beat foes. The SSI AD&D games which only came out a little after U4 had a superior system, where each character in the party could move multiple steps (depending on stats) and so could the mosters. That system, while also repetitive, was much faster for combat, not to mention much more strategic and fun.
Later Ultimas, like U7 instead went for a streamlined realtime battle which was much better. That went overboard with the at the time infamous U8
There are a couple of references to earlier games, but if you read the manual then you know enough to just get started with QotA (Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar). QotA, WoD (Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny), and TFP (Ultima 6: The False Prophet) kind of make a trilogy (the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' trilogy) and you can port your character over between one game and the next, but they're perfectly playable by themselves. While TFP has the best story of the 3, I consider QotA my favourite because I love the concept of an RPG without a big evil villain. It's a story of a normal person cleaning up their act and becoming an exemplar of virtue and I love it.
Ultima VII is again perfectly playable by itself, but, yet again, it's best if you thoroughly read the manual for all the background information you need. There's an old joke of Bethesda introducing a new feature for one of the Elder Scrolls games (NPCs have schedules and go about their daily life! You can bake bread!) and the response being that Ultima VII already did that back in 1992.
pretty sure scummvm pulled in one of the ultima remake projects. Think it was exult but I could be wrong.
Do you need to play the prev ones? hmm I would say if you play 6 and 7 together you should be ok. You could get away with them standalone probably. I would not play the expansion packs of 7 without playing the base first though. the extra 6 ones you could play standalone. But you would probably want to play savage empire before martian dreams.
Out of those my personal fav was savage empire for some reason. A remix from origin using the ultima 6 engine.
I remember playing Ultima VII back in '94 (or was it '95?). When the game started up, I could only feel wonder. It was so far ahead of the competition at the time.
The only other instance where I got the same "this game is way ahead of everyone else" feel was when I first played Morrowind.
My first thought was "How is this different from Exult?" (which is a relatively vanilla reimplementation of the game).
Some of the video segments here make differences clearer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4
While Exult basically matches the graphics of the original game, this is closer to "3D Ultima VII", with rotatable views and more interactivity in the game. It gives it what looks like a kind of voxel-ish look, mixing in original sprites with newly-modeled 3D objects.
That's a lovely art style, kind of Runescape Classic vibes.
Or some Ultima Online clients (Iris3D?).
The 0.1.0 release video also has addition segments about feature improvements [1] with some examples of the 2D to 3D conversion process that are quite impressive.
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=25 0:25 to 0:40 has a bunch of the small scale objects being replaceable, rotatable, and animatable in 3D.
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=48 0:48 to 1:06 has bulk replacement of scene objects with personally chosen substitutes. (3D rotatable)
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=67 1:07 to 1:25 has fixing broken geometry and creating fully textured 3D replacements.
With the current state of the engine, and the extensive personal editing features, much like the comment from VariousPrograms, it could be used as a platform for doing other games, modified quests, and multi-player MMO style games.
Whiplash warning: seeing the portal in the video just threw me back 30 years!
So funny to see this here, I was just looking into Ultima remakes last night, and saw this one among others. Looks really awesome. I never played any of the Ultima games back in the day, and have bounced off them when trying in later years. This should make Ultima VII a lot more accessible and playable.
There's also a remake of Ultima Underworld being made in Godot: https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldGodot
Hoping for these projects to succeed, both U7 and UU sound like incredible games that deserve to be accessible to modern gamers.
The updated camera angle is the killer feature for me. That’s the only issue I have with the original and I had that same issue when it came out.
UU was teh shizz. I wonder what it would look like with photorealistic renders.
Not good, I imagine; IMO part of the magic of a game from the era is that blocky aesthetic. I'm reminded of how Dracula X Chronicles completely sucks all the joy out of Rondo of Blood with ugly 3D models and weird arrangements of the compositions with 'real' instruments (or just a different synth).
The only reason to play that version is the SotN unlock for the PSP and even then, easier to just download the PSX iso.
The PSP SotN was different enough than the NA PSX release, including a new Maria mode (different than the Saturn one), and a new translation (technically better, but retranslates some iconic lines).
Perhaps most notably, the "What is a man?" scene was completely retranslated
I guess if you have/had a PSP this isn't an option but they did release a collection for the PS4 called Requiem that has these changes packed in.
Ultima Underworld also came out before Doom!
You can play Arx Libertatis today with the assets bought from GOG (Arx Fatalis). The game is really close to UU.
I played them (starting with 4) back in the day. And 35 years later, I fixed a bug in the ScummVM version of U4. I discovered it while showing the game to my kid.
I couldn't have predicted that back then. Although as a kid, I did fix a "bug" in Ultima that required the floppy disk when you had it installed on HD.
There's a YouTuber that's been going through and making in-depth retrospectives of each Ultima game that some here may find interesting. I've found them a pleasant watch and I don't usually go for this type of content. I never played the Ultima series until Ultima Online so I don't have the nostalgia goggles that I'd need to go back and play games this old (sorry, it's the truth) so these videos are as close as I'll probably get.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL16yfJJxAM6g-4YxKGI-1...
As someone who played these back in the day and enjoyed them, I don't think I could even recommend them to myself today. Ultima VII is everything the other comments say it is... but it's also one staggeringly large nested fetch quest, with nothing much breaking it up.
I'd recommend some combination of the Bethesda open world games and the JRPG genre today. They're not the same, nothing really quite fills the Ultima gap that I know of, but between those two I'd call it close enough.
For years, Ultima VII was the buggiest RPG I ever finished the main quest on. Then I played Daggerfall.
I keep meaning to go and play the Underworld games, since I love the subgenre they pioneered (Immersive Sim). I'll get around to it... one day.
It's like you say, not exactly the same, but for CRPGs it's hard to go wrong with Baldur's Gate 3. It's similar enough to later Ultima in some ways that it might scratch the itch.
Elsewhere in thread is mentioned an Underworld remake.
I do not have the same complaint about them as I do Ultima VII. A good remake could still be an interesting experience today, with little more than a graphical overhaul and modern controls. Both of them have a mixture of exploration, combat, and conversation that keeps them engaging over time.
Ultima VII's problem is that it's just... one big fetch quest. The combat is a non-entity (in the original game, I gather some of the remakes have tried to address this but they're starting way, way behind the eight ball), and there just isn't much else there.
Ultimas prior to VII don't have that problem because combat is functional, so the essentially multi-genre nature of an RPG where each subgenre keeps the other from becoming painfully tedious is there, but by modern standards, probably still fairly unplayable. Neat ideas, you can see how later games picked up the ball and ran with it in various directions, but very hard to play by modern standards. For instance, Ultima 4 combat has modern TRPG combat in it to some extent... except no even remotely modern TRPG game makes "moving one space" an entire action on par with "make one attack", and for good reason.
I'm a huge fan of Majuular, these videos are amazing. I like that he dives deeply into the history behind each game as well - like the company, Richard Garriott (Lord British), etc.
His other videos on other games are great as well!
A YT'er named 'Spoony' also made a thorough, entertaining retrospective of the Ultimas, and even caps it off with an interview with Lord British!
Any thread about Ultima remakes is incomplete without mention of the highly ambitious Ultima V - Lazarus project[1], which re-made (and significantly expanded) the game onto the Dungeon Siege engine. A true labor of love!
1: https://www.u5lazarus.com
Vaguely related but there is this whole set of videos on the production of the Ultima series on Youtube by Majuular that I've been playing while working out. Just such a different time, I almost regret missing it.
His video on 7 and serpent's isle brought back a lot of memories (although my preferred origin game was Wing Commander)
https://youtu.be/0NyaGRNH2zE
The one on Ultima Underworld is my favourite. What an incredible game, so ahead of its time.
Rise your hand if you remember how long you had to tinker around to get enough EMS to load the game plus sound card drivers loaded into memory when being in DOS!
:-D
Wait play the game? I am fiddling my config.sys and autoexec.bat just right and making sure I could get to 610k. Using 4DOS to have a pick a path adventure of which configuration to load as it was starting up to run each game. Then I might play a game here and there.
I definitely remember the collection of boot disks I used to load the right autoexec.bat/config.sys settings for the Ultima and Wing Commander games, and how long I spent tuning these settings. I was just a kid then, but I remember the whole exercise being pretty complicated!
I remember getting "The Complete Ultima VII" on CD and never figuring out how to get it running. I think I've still got the box, but I think the disc has been missing for years. I bought it on GOG some time ago, though.
Haha this XD... I couldn't figure it out on my own and asked my Mom for help, luckily she was able to get it running for me :D
I recall that it was possible to squeeze a disk cache in too, which made a nice difference for performance.
Oh yeah, I had to unload the CD driver and move the mouse driver to himem just for this...
the game didn't run with EMS. You needed XMS
Fun fact. Ultima 7 was one of the few commercial titles ever made that used "Unreal" mode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode
It wasn't particularly popular as it couldn't play nice with protected mode environments.
Other than Ultima 7 I only know of Zone66 as another game that used Unreal mode. Early versions also didn't like v86 mode but later versions added support for DPMI or in some other way started to play nicely with EMM386
Raise
This is really nice work. It compels me to plug my attempt at an ultima vii -inspired project: https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim
This looks great. I see a Linux version; do you happen to know if anyone has tried it on a Steam Deck?
I think someone did but with an earlier build. If it doesn't work, drop me a note on itch.io and I'll see what I can do. Thanks!
Very excited about this project, U7 was my favourite game for a long, long time. These days we have BG3, and I'm dying for more of that.
I never played an Ultima game, but I remember that many years ago, there was a period where Ultima VII was commonly mentioned as "the best RPG of all time" by PC players. Nowadays it seems Ultima is rarely talked about anymore compared to classic SNES RPGs like Final Fantasy VI, which came out two years later.
JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all the manuals and taking detailed notes[1]. Even doing that, they are quite hard. Nearly every single Final Fantasy game is easy to beat just by taking a bit of time to grind levels whenever you get stuck.
There is a blogger who teaches a class on old games (I can't remember who) and Ultima IV was one that his students bounced off of immediately because they didn't read the manual cover-to-cover, which is a prerequisite for not being totally lost.
1: Or using a walkthrough, I guess, but IMO the main point of the Ultima games of this era was the sense of discovery.
The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You just pick a car and start driving. There's no tutorial or opening cinematic. If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.
Not saying one style is good or bad. But it's definitely changed since the 80s and 90s, when every game came with a printed 50 page manual full of crucial information. Which often doubled as copy protection. I remember firing up King's Quest 6 and having it challenge me to type the 15th word in the second paragraph on page 26 or whatever.
> If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.
The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.)
GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.
They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page.
Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.
Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon did that, and the thing about railway enthusiasts is that they go encyclopedic on that.
They could identify any of the locomotives and probably tell you every pixel of them that was wrong.
I can probably still answer most of the copy-protection questions from Wing Commander. e.g. Maniac is 23 years old.
I guess back in the day, PC RPGs like Ultima were more targeted toward high-IQ nerds, while JRPGs were targeted toward kids or more average adults.
Nowadays RPGs are pretty much always as accessible as the JRPGs of old. Or more accessible, as even random encounters and turn-based combat are increasingly perceived as not streamlined enough.
The question is whether the hand-holding approach makes certain types of games impossible now. For example, if an old RPG derived its appeal from executing successful note-taking, the game can't be made approachable by taking out the note-taking requirement (e.g. with automatic quest logs, quest markers, in-game hints etc) without removing the core of the gameplay.
Though I'm sure there are many other clunky aspects that could be streamlined today without loss.
Some of the earlier JRPGS were pretty unintuitive. Probably because the developers didn't really know what they were doing yet.
Mother 1 doesn't give you any plot guidance on what to do and is insanely overly difficult due to poor balancing.
I believe Phantasy Star 1 was designed to be played while using grap paper to map the dungeon. A modern re-release has the game do this for you automatically.
Even in Playstation era games like Suikoden there's this problem where if you put the game aside for a week and return to it and forget where to go next there's often no way to re-show the dialogue telling you where to go and no quest log.
Suikoden 2 makes you collect 108 characters for the good ending. You definetly would need to take notes to try to do this without a guide. But it's poorly designed because you can miss one of them due to RNG during a mandatory fight scene with no way to know this.
Many of the JRPGs that made it to the US were targeted for kids (or sometimes made easier when translated).
A major influence on RPGs in Japan was Wizardry, which was probably even more popular in Japan than in the US. Influences from it can be seen in many early JRPGs.
Dragon Quest was intentionally made simpler than Wizardry both to reach a wider audience and to be easily playable on the Famicom; it's probably the easiest of the first 3 DQ games still has some "hunt for the right square" puzzles.
The best RPG of all time should be either Ultima IV, Chrono Trigger+, that's it, with the Plus patch or Pokémon Crystal (a hacked ROM) with improving patches, such as:
- all mons ingame
- level cap
- no trading
- improved Battle Tower
Ultima VII shines with the in-game simulation, but today Cataclysm DDA:Bright Nights curb-stomps U VII in that area. Pokémon, well, it's about battling with your favourite mons, the game story it's just a placeholder with nice Japanese pixelated vistas.
Also, I'd put Slashem on par, too. Because it's damn silly and fun to raise a Samurai with Yakuza weapons, an anachronistic madness like the Discworld series (and OFC you have the Tourist role from the books too). More than strategy, Slashem/Nethack it's about lateral thinking and doing crazy stuff to advance into your goal. Throwing potions as weapons? Done. A Doppleganger Kung Fu monk doing DBZ-like attacks while using your Wand of Digging against rock based foes? OFC, done.
Another RPG that is praised a lot is Disco Elysium (2019). Though I guess this one is quite different from the ones you mentioned. "RPG" is a wide term.
Yes when I was a kid we didn't have Minecraft, we had to built forts in Ultima 7 out of logs :D
Looks cool! I wonder if they reworked/fixed the terrible font. I find it borderline illegible in the original! (example https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/31070-ultima-vii...)
It was a little more readable on CRT. But yes, not really great.
I also bounced off the original due to the weird camera angle
That qualifies as illegible? Maybe at the Tt mark but otherwise very clear. tL maybe?
I loved U7 and 7.5, but those were the last ones I played because the series somewhat went off the rails after that. Pity.
This is pretty neat. There have been multiple attempts at something like that in the past, and of them, this is by far the best-looking one.
However, I think some artefacts can never be properly resolved (see for example the marble statue to the left at 1:53 in the video), which makes it look veird and break immersion (also the flat roofs that are supposed to be slanted/angled roofs)
Also, the U7 engine is a very complex beast so to properly implement it will take a lot of work and fine-tuning (although I guess they can use Exult as a start, which is by now pretty feature-complete)
The one that comes to mind for me is Exult: https://exult.sourceforge.io/. It is still being actively developed to this day: https://github.com/exult
If you want to scratch that nostalgia itch, I recommend https://lparchive.org/Ultima-VII-The-Black-Gate/
If only someone would properly finish U8 ...
And if there were less jumping in U8. Visiting the air elemental was cause to rage against a village.
Later releases of U8 fixed jumping so it was less pixel-precise. It was still a clumsy mechanic, and the game still felt unfinished. But TBH I had a much worse reaction to Ultima IX, which capped off the series with a giant steaming turd. When I managed to get U9 to run at all after several years, I bounced out after a couple hours of playing. Still the only Ultima game I never finished.
It was also kind of creepy that a very good way to level up was to kill that pack of aggro children north of town.
Really impressive work! I'm not sure I like the perspective any better than the original game, but the lighting makes for a nice aesthetic!
I'll take this opportunity to mention another engine-upgrade to a classic Origin game that got me excited: https://github.com/Howard-Day/WCUnity
My first job ever was as a scripter on U7. Great times, and wonderful to see that there's still such an enthusiastic community
The recent Wizardry remaster encouraged me to go back and play other nostalgic games - finished Ultima I and II, but the nostalgia wasn't strong enough to keep going through the busywork and UI impedance of others.
I'll keep this one on my list for when nostalgia strikes again...
I'm holding out for Wiz 2 & 3 being remade. Wiz 4 would be fun for 30 minutes or so before I give up in frustration
Queuing up Spoony's retrospective while checking this out :3
archive breadcrumb: https://archive.org/details/spoony-ultima-retrospective-orig...
I forget whether it was Ultima III or IV but that turned me off of adventure games. The busy work being asked of me was offputting. May have just been a shift of interest once reaching maturity and turning interests to Women and Music. I still liked some other games but more for study breaks and occasional arcade sessions than constant activities. Gen X here checking in.
What's the busy work like in Ultima? I've never played it.
Neat, let me just find those old DOS U7 files…
GoG got you covered, and it's even on sale currently (I wonder if they scan HN heh)
https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_7_complete
Let me go find my collection of floppy disks, then I'll need a 32 pin connection adapter for the drive. I remember U7 was my favorite game for a long time. I received U7 Serpent Isle as a gift, but at least one of 15 of the 3.5" disks was corrupted, ordering a replacement disks cost $14 dollars per disk, and I wasn't sure how many disks might be corrupted. I gave up on the game. I should just buy it on GoG.
Serpent Isle was fantastic.
Exult did this decades ago :).
On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play.
BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.
> Exult did this decades ago :).
Tbf though, Exult kept the original fixed 2D overhead perspective which is a bit hard to grock when used to what has now become the 'traditional' camera angle for isometric games.
Revisited moves the entire game world into 3D and it looks magical:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4
Ultima 4 was good story wise, but the combat was extremely tedious with each in your party only being able to take a single step per turn. This was particularly annoying when facing easy to beat foes. The SSI AD&D games which only came out a little after U4 had a superior system, where each character in the party could move multiple steps (depending on stats) and so could the mosters. That system, while also repetitive, was much faster for combat, not to mention much more strategic and fun.
Later Ultimas, like U7 instead went for a streamlined realtime battle which was much better. That went overboard with the at the time infamous U8
There are a couple of references to earlier games, but if you read the manual then you know enough to just get started with QotA (Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar). QotA, WoD (Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny), and TFP (Ultima 6: The False Prophet) kind of make a trilogy (the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' trilogy) and you can port your character over between one game and the next, but they're perfectly playable by themselves. While TFP has the best story of the 3, I consider QotA my favourite because I love the concept of an RPG without a big evil villain. It's a story of a normal person cleaning up their act and becoming an exemplar of virtue and I love it.
Ultima VII is again perfectly playable by itself, but, yet again, it's best if you thoroughly read the manual for all the background information you need. There's an old joke of Bethesda introducing a new feature for one of the Elder Scrolls games (NPCs have schedules and go about their daily life! You can bake bread!) and the response being that Ultima VII already did that back in 1992.
I also remember churning enough butter to fill backpacks in Ultima VI. (don't recall offhand whether bread was doable)
Not sure about VI, but I definitely spent an afternoon baking bread in Britannia in Ultima VII
Did you make make your own starter from flour and water? Inquiring bakers want to know!
Mos def. Well it’s more like: place flour on surface, place water on flour, instant dough! Place dough in oven until it turns to bread.
You can jump right into U7 but U4 and 5 are some of the best games ever created. 6 is skippable; just read the plot between 5 and 7.
pretty sure scummvm pulled in one of the ultima remake projects. Think it was exult but I could be wrong.
Do you need to play the prev ones? hmm I would say if you play 6 and 7 together you should be ok. You could get away with them standalone probably. I would not play the expansion packs of 7 without playing the base first though. the extra 6 ones you could play standalone. But you would probably want to play savage empire before martian dreams.
Out of those my personal fav was savage empire for some reason. A remix from origin using the ultima 6 engine.
Nuvie, the Ultima VI engine recreation (also runs SE and MD afaik) is what scummvm absorbed.
This brings back so much memories!
Great initiative.
This is nice and all, but I want to revisit I, II and III!
Edit: Ask, and ye shall receive https://archive.org/details/ultima-1-gfx
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I remember playing Ultima VII back in '94 (or was it '95?). When the game started up, I could only feel wonder. It was so far ahead of the competition at the time.
The only other instance where I got the same "this game is way ahead of everyone else" feel was when I first played Morrowind.
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LLM spam