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Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step

• Alex3917 6y ago
  It only killed the franchise if you don't count Ultima Online, which is probably one of the most important games in video game history.
  • fatsdomino001 6y ago
    Ultima Online is the best gaming experience I ever had. In my opinion, nothing has come close to it in regards to game dynamics, was a proper open-world sandbox. As I never found anything close to Ultima Online, I basically stopped gaming entirely. UO raised the bar too high.
    • dstick 6y ago
      Same here - though Dark Age of Camelot came close. It wasn’t sandboxy but the RvR did scratch the PvP itch!
      • andrepd 6y ago
        Star Wars Galaxies was another absolute gem at its prime. I never played it, but reading stories about the game makes me feel it's the one game apart from UO which truly came close to fulfilling the promise of a "virtual, persistent, shared world".
        • bovermyer 6y ago
          I played SWG from its release until its final shutdown, though I had several months-long breaks during the run. I posted a few articles on my blog after it was shut down in 2011. Here's one of them, going into the crafting system: https://benovermyer.com/post/2012/star-wars-galaxies-crafting/ https://benovermyer.com/post/2012/star-wars-galaxies-craftin...
          • syoc 6y ago
            Just want to say that I really liked the blog posts. Very insightful.
            • bovermyer 6y ago
              When I wrote the post I mentioned, it felt like just writing down my feelings on an extant system. Now, ten years later, it feels like I documented a part of history that hasn't replicated itself. I can't help but feel really sad about that.
        • myko 6y ago
          Raph Koster had a lot to do with both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In some ways he's as influential as Lord British in this space. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/ https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/ He has a book called Postmortems where he compiled essays (many found on his web page) about his early days writing MUDs and developing fantasy worlds, including UO and SWG.
      • waynesonfire 6y ago
        Nothing has come close and nothing ever will. Mainly due to the fact that it wasn't just the game mechanics; but that all player types had no other option except to play UO. This, combined with the game mechanics, is what made UO a one-of-a-kind experiences. I feel blessed and honored to have had the opportunity to be a part of it. After so many years failing to find a UO replacement; I've accepted this conclusion as reality and as result, have stopped searching.
      • matwood 6y ago
        DAoC had some of the better PvP mechanics of that generation of MMOs. I played DAoC for years, and eventually moved to WoW for a little while. WoW always felt too easy and never really gave me the same rush that DAoC did. I still remember the day I gave a friend of mine my DAoC accounts. He later sold them when he quit, and gave me some cash back :)
    • andrepd 6y ago
      It's incredibly sad that by far the best MMO experience --- indeed one could say the only game which lived up to the promise of a shared, virtual, persistent world --- was also one of the first. It was all downhill after WoW. It was a great game, but it was precisely because it was so good that it soon hegemonised everything. Rather than being one possibility out of many, it became "the" MMORPG, in that due to its success every subsequent game copied WoW, often superficially, and maybe even sometimes accidentally. Its specific conventions became the genre itself.
      • meheleventyone 6y ago
        EVE Online as well but that’s quite a different flavour. I played loads of UO back in the day and spent four years working on EVE. Very few games come close to touching either in terms of being so complex, almost to the point of being real spaces to navigate and live in.
        • avdlinde 6y ago
          I'd just like to point out the 'played UO' and 'working on EVE' =] I love EVE, I just can't find the time to work on it anymore.
          • meheleventyone 6y ago
            Haha, in my case I literally worked at CCP making EVE rather than the second job it can become playing it. Still some of the best community moments were with that job and the awesome people that play EVE. I had several great Fanfests.
    • NickBusey 6y ago
      There are plenty of great, free Ultima Online servers to play on. No need to stop playing!
    • milofeynman 6y ago
      It was a great experience. And I'll cherish it. Free servers aren't the same. Might setup a server on my local network some day to play with my kid.
    • matheusmoreira 6y ago
      Tibia comes pretty close The older versions, anyway. Apparently it even started as a copy of Ultima. Never found anything close to it either. Every kid in my school played this game... It was like an IRC client with a fun game embedded in it.
      • pkorzeniewski 6y ago
        Tibia was absolutely HUGE in my country (Poland) around 2002 and it was my first and last major experience with MMO. I remember it was the only time back then I voluntarily woke up early in the morning long before the school because the servers were usually empty at that time and the spawn locations were full of monsters which meant quick exping :-) Trying to sign in after the school usually took a looong time but once you did it, it truly felt like going to a different universe. Some time ago I got a craving to play the Tibia version from my childhood and it turns out there's an active server called [1] Classictibia where you play using the 7.1 client version on a faithful recreation of the world from that time - a real blast from the past! [1] http://classictibia.com/ http://classictibia.com/
    • gpderetta 6y ago
      I played UO on an unofficial RPG shard for about one year. The server was was only up only a few hours during the evening (and would often crash), most of the mechanics weren't implemented, and those that were were often buggy. It still was one of the best (if not the best) gaming experience I ever had as well.
    • jedberg 6y ago
      I only very briefly play UO. I'm curious if you could give more details of how how it was different to make it the best experience you ever had. What are games today missing?
      • fatsdomino001 6y ago
        It was a incredible world to discover and explore (especially custom servers with custom maps and content). There was no 'point' to the game, i.e. no final destination or quest to complete... in fact there were barely any quests at all. It was all just up to you. However you wanted to play you could. I.e. you could just have a blast logging in and hanging out in a player's house which they converted into a bar and play chess chatting about w/e. I even played some great roleplaying shards which were legit, e.g. a LOTR one and it was soo epicly awesome. Good pvp dynamics. I did love the ruthlessness of losing everything when you died. I loved how custom shards could tweak so many of the variables pretty easily. I just have so many absolutely golden memories, hilarious and absurd memories. Idk... it's just really hard to convey how the game was the best. I think a lot of is just because it let you do whatever you wanted, but also provided you with fun PvE, PvP, roleplaying, etc. What are games today missing? They're not persistent open-world sandbox games. Sure we have open-world games, but they're not sandbox and often not persistent, and we have sandbox but they're not open-world and often not persistent too. I can't do it. I can't adequately describe what games today are missing which UO had. It's a quality of the combination of all the features UO had that just resulted in the best memories and fun I've had when gaming. I just don't see enough support for player-generated content as UO had, which I suspect is a big part of it too.
        • jedberg 6y ago
          Thanks for the writeup!
      • kingaillas 6y ago
        Not the OP and I didn't play UO, but I did play a peer game out at the same time, Asheron's Call. AC, UO, and of course EQ were the big 3 early MMOs. Anyway, there was definitely more community back then, if only due to how there were basically no modern quality-of-life considerations. No auto-group finder, minimal instancing (no instancing?), loss of items on death... you had to lean on others to help you out and they would, because eventually they'd need your help. A classic example is doing a corpse run to recover your items. In a modern MMO, you die and can rez at some convenient spot with all your items. No real loss or penalty for tough fights, no risk. In AC, you lost xp on death, lost items on your corpse, and had to make your way back to your body to erase the xp penalty and get your stuff back. I think the timer was something like 3 hours before your corpse would decay and either anybody could loot your body or time items disappeared. I think UO and EQ were the same. Some of the most memorable corpse runs where when you lost your armor and had to get some friends to come with you since you were now half naked and perhaps weaponless.
    • agentultra 6y ago
      It's being revived: https://uo.com https://uo.com
      • jackstraw14 6y ago
        They've tried so many times to "fix" it. At this point, I think UO Outlands is probably the best UO experience you can get.
    • User23 6y ago
      I earned my college spending money arbitraging UO real estate between in game gold and Ebay prices. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but I recall earning well over minimum wage per hour.
  • datalus 6y ago
    UO was my #1 gaming experience and sadly like others have mentioned: probably won't have that exceeded by an MMO again. However, there was a brief moment when Sierra had more control over the LOTR MMO (known as Middle Earth Online) and it looked very similar to early UO.
    • Alex3917 6y ago
      > probably won't have that exceeded by an MMO again It'll happen once VR takes off, even if that takes another 20 years to happen.
    • vpilcx 6y ago
      I've always been searching for another MMO experience. Eve Online was close but not quite the same. While not exactly an MMO experience, Rust is the closet modern approximation that I've experienced.
      • orbital-decay 6y ago
        ARK: Survival Evolved is a much better example of a game in the UO/Eve Online spirit. While also being a cutthroat PvP sandbox like Rust, it has complex politics and power games between massive inter-server tribes, making it more MMO-ish.
  • kowlo 6y ago
    UO was great. Lots of games from long ago that were good: - legend of mir 2 - phantasy star online (dreamcast) - lineage - myth of soma - ragnarok online - many more
    • matheusmoreira 6y ago
      Yeah. Had friends who played Ragnarok. So many memories of dead games... How many are still online? I know Tibia still is, they emailed me a free week of premium last christmas.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • dlitvakb 6y ago
        Ragnarok Online is still alive and evolving, there's also a non-complete, but still super fun and playable mobile version, which is not the cash-grabby kind of mobile MMORPG (even though... of course you can pay to advance faster)
  • jerf 6y ago
    If you zoom up a bit from the level this article is in, as I understand it, while Ultima was on the rocks anyhow, it was Ultima Online that comprehensively killed the franchise by being too successful. Rational business logic said to pour the effort into the moneymaker UO and the single-player Ultimas couldn't compete for resources. IMHO, there would still have been a lot of winds against the series anyhow. The exponential increase in the difficulty of technology was not playing well with Origin's high level of aggressiveness on that front. And perhaps a bit more controversially, the series just wasn't headed in a good direction; after the impressive founding of the series' reputation on the virtue system in 4 and 5, the series was headed ever faster into a nihilistic undercutting of its own foundations. (And I'd highlight the undercutting aspect over the nihilistic aspect; while I'll cop to being less impressed with nihilism than probably the average HN reader, nihilistic RPGs aren't intrinsically a bad thing, but in this particular case it undercuts the foundations.) Even a fully-realized Ultima 8 was never going to fit the series very well, and IMHO could even have ended up with a worse story in some aspects than we got.
    • kbenson 6y ago
      Well, I distinctly remember there being a lot of hype a while after Ultima IX came out that Ultima X would be a reimagining of UO in 3D. I'm not sure how much of that was wishful thinking on the part of gamers that were looking for a silver lining in the steaming pile that was Ultima IX (me included) and how much of that was founding in fact, or at least the plans of Origin/EA. One would think if UO was so successful they would want to funnel people into something new with even more longevity. On a side note, Ultima IX was not only not a good game, it's the only game I know of that ever sent me a complete set of new CDs with an updated version on them months after release without me even specifically requesting it. I still remember the mostly (entirely?) blank white tri-fold (or quad fold?) cardboard CD enclosure it came in with all new disks. I don't think I ever used them, partly because I already had that version or one better from the internet prior to it arriving, and partly because the game still had such horrible performance on my moderately good system that I had already given up on it because the gameplay itself wasn't nearly good enough to make me subject myself to that.
  • duxup 6y ago
    Due to an unstable modem connection during the UO timeline I never could play. UO always seemed like more of a sand boxy 'lets see what happens' kinda world. Meanwhile MMORPGs all seem to be more 'lead you by the nose progression'. I miss more of the 'lets see what happens' kinda games.
    • castwide 6y ago
      MMORPGs have always been a mix of both. UO was definitely one of the most sandboxy, but it also demonstrated why a sandbox full of children needs a supervisor.
  • Shivetya 6y ago
    UO was definitely a new direction, considering for online you had MUDs or limited graphical games like The Shadow of Yserbius. However it was quickly eclipsed by Everquest which came in 99 and I would say is far more important to the MMO landscape than UO ever was. Asheron's Call quickly followed EQ and while it never had the numbers was the first no zone MMO - you could travel anywhere and no load except into dungeons which were nothing like what people are used to today. It was certainly a time for experimentation to see what players liked and disliked and for all sorts of fun bugs if not exploits in each game to rile a community.
  • debaserab2 6y ago
    UO is the only game that allowed players to completely dictate the social norms between players and didn't allow players to box themselves into their own segregated safe experiences. It's easy to understand why MMO's evolved away from this approach as they attempted to reach the masses, but there's an entire audience looking for something else that got abandoned. It's a shame, really.
    • nemo44x 6y ago
      Shadowbane allowed this too. Was a great experience with the natural politics emerging since resources were fairly scarce and you needed to stick together to survive and not get your things taken from you.
    • Alex3917 6y ago
      > didn't allow players to box themselves into their own segregated safe experiences For the first year or two at least.
  • musicale 6y ago
    > It only killed the franchise if you don't count Ultima Online, which is probably one of the most important games in video game history. And Ultima Online has been running since 1997 and is still going ?!?! https://uo.com https://uo.com That it is still "Online" with active players is an extraordinary accomplishment. It really is one of the most important games in video game history. (Note FFXI and WoW are also remarkably long-lived MMOs.) Also imagine playing a full MMO on a 233 MHz CPU with 32MB of RAM and downloading updates via blazing fast 56kbps dial-up internet... GameSpot gave it 4.9/10. ;-)
    • IntelMiner 6y ago
      With the pace of technology today UO is probably just running in a VM on some machine somewhere, barely taking up enough resources to notice It's effectively "free money" for EA now I suppose
    • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      Everquest is still alive too, and it is older than WoW or FFXI.
  • rrivers 6y ago
    Just hopping in to agree about UO, one of the primary gaming experiences of my life. A fascinating culture, community, and experience. Chesapeake baby.
  • AzzieElbab 6y ago
    I couldnt make myself play that and eq. The amount of repetitive tasks was just daunting. It felt like these games were designed by sadists
    • ryanbrunner 6y ago
      The thing I really loved about Ultima Online is you could have fun without caring about that. I mostly just hung out in the "town" my guild created and built furniture / organized our resources and managed our vendors. Most of my skills didn't ever get far beyond newbie level. That's unthinkable in WoW - the game is 100% focused on progression and advancement.
      • vharuck 6y ago
        >Most of my skills didn't ever get far beyond newbie level. This is the best test for whether a game really allows freedom in player interaction. If players can have fun and build characters without ever relying on game-mechanical progression, they have true freedom. I made more money in UO running dice games next to the bank than running dungeons.
  • rootw0rm 6y ago
    UO was incredible. I learned ASM and how to use a debugger because of that game. Released open source tools to patch all 100+ versions of the game client. Some day I'll make a proper sequel. There's been no better balance of risk vs. reward since UO...I think a couple titles have come close, but nothing has captured the magic of T2A.
  • dalu 6y ago
    I tried to like it again and again but I just couldn't. It was always a super boring experience. I preferred Meridian 59 and later DAOC. EQ wasn't my thing either, so much downtime. 1 minute of fighting 5 minutes of waiting. UO endless whacking of rocks and chopping of wood. One time I did that 3 days only watching the screen and I wrote an automation script to do that. After that I never looked back. Ultima Underworld however was awesome and when thinking back was a true gem.
• briandarvell 6y ago
  I was a huge Ultima VII fan and played the game for hundreds of hours. I remember getting Ultima VIII and playing it for an hour or two and never playing it again. But until reading this article I didn't understand why Ultima VIII didn't capture my interest like VII did.
• blibble 6y ago
  > But then, for the eighth game in the mainline Ultima series, Origin decided to try something just a little bit different. They made a game in which you played a thoughtless jerk moving on rails through a linear series of events; in which you never went to Britannia at all, but stayed instead on a miserable hellhole of a world called Pagan; in which you spent the whole game adventuring alone (after all, who would want to adventure with a jerk like you?); in which the core mechanics were jumping between pedestals like Super Mario and pounding your enemies over the head with your big old hammer. ah, so this is where Blizzard got the idea for the travesty that is modern World of Warcraft
  • andi999 6y ago
    Actually Ultima 7 serpent Isle also felt like being on rails (didn't finish it), maybe later it's better.
    • Klwohu 6y ago
      SI was also clearly unfinished on release, presaging Pagan's disastrous debut. And it was never properly finished, either. http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/nitpicks_u7si.htm http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/nitpicks_u7si.htm
• haolez 6y ago
  Me and my brother, we loved Ultima VI and Ultima VIII. I guess we were an exception :)
  • muro 6y ago
    I loved Ultima VIII. It had a great story, cool lore. There were parts that seemed missing, but it added to the mystery of the world. I really liked how you could master the various elemental schools, yet there was never enough resources or time to cast spells in many fights and water was completely impossible to master. I ended up mostly running away from most fights and still remember the exciting side track to fetch a maze from underground. I couldn't fight any monsters there, they were too difficult, but managed to grab the mace and escape. Was a great start of the adventure.
    • giobox 6y ago
      In a similar vein, there was a chap who would appear and end your game very quickly if you stole anything from shops. However, the game let you drag items in stores 1 or 2 pixels without triggering the "crime ghost" (I forget who he was) who would end your game. Eventually we worked out you could drag an item to the door, pixel by pixel, then pick it up and run away without being caught. I may be remembering aspects of this wrong, it was a long time ago!
      • haolez 6y ago
        In the same vein, if you kill (later in the game) the "omnipresent guard", next time you stole something you would be attacked by him regardless, but now his sprite/skin was that of a zombie :) cool easter egg (or bug!).
    • haolez 6y ago
      It was one of those old DOS games where the gameplay sucked, but it kind of contributed to the difficulty and ambience of the game somehow. Fun times.
  • bdowling 6y ago
• gavanwoolery 6y ago
  April 16, 1992 - Ultima 7 is released September 1992 - Origin Systems acquired by EA for $35m March 15, 1994 - Ultima 8 released ... I will credit Garriott and Molyneux as being some of the most [overly] ambitious game designers, and this is not at all a bad thing in my opinion. Not everything they did worked, but when it did, they created history. And even when it did not work, at least they attempted to break new ground.
  • mschaef 6y ago
    > Not everything they did worked, but when it did, they created history. This reminds me of Seymour Cray... he had his share of setbacks, many due to ambitious designs, but when he succeeded, it was historic. (CDC6600, 7600, and Cray 1 come to mind immediately)
  • tibbydudeza 6y ago
    Ultima 8 was the end - the jumping Super Mario mechanics and crappy story.
• mnd999 6y ago
  Lost me when they said Ultima was more expensive to make than Wing Commander. I mean Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell can’t have been cheap.
  • speeder 6y ago
    Well, you should then read the entire article again, since you stopped reading, and you stopped reading in a part you read wrong, since nowhere in the article he says Ultima was more expensive to make than Wing Commander, he only mentions "cheaper" Wing Commander "spin offs", and didn't said cheaper in relation to what... it could be cheaper than the original wing commander, that notoriously is credited as being the first AAA game ever (Wing Commander was the first game that splurged millions to make, and it not even broke even, ever. Only reason it is considered a success was that the franchise as whole ended being very profitable and eventually paid off the costs of the first game).
  • aidenn0 6y ago
    These games all predate wing commander III (which was the first with FMV). Wing Commander I and II both had two expansions that sold well, so it was 6 games with one engine, and with the exception of the base WC 2, had little more novel animation than e.g. Ultima VII.
  • CountSessine 6y ago
    That was Wing Commander 3, which hadn't been made yet. Wing Commander 2 was mostly just using the Wing Commander 1 game engine, which is probably why Snell liked it so much. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams were the "Worlds of Ultima" series of CRPGs, and were based on the Ultima VI engine - very little new programming involved - just new content. That was probably pretty cheap too.
• depingus 6y ago
  I can see why they took the risk to change with the times. Spending 4+ years to create a game targeting the (at the time) smallest audience doesn't sound like a great business venture. Though maybe they should've made it an Ultima spin-off like Underworld, instead of the official VIII. Interestingly, we've seen some great success stories of franchise games shifting play style. Off the top of my head: Yakuza 7 Like a Dragon, Final Fantasy VII Remake and FFXV.
  • haolez 6y ago
    I think the biggest success story of a shifting play style is GTA. The first ones were 2.5D games with a very different feel.
  • mywittyname 6y ago
    FF7R... :( It sold well, so I guess it is technically successful, despite not really feeling successful in terms of being a better game.
• curiousllama 6y ago
  > This classic passive-aggressive apology — “I felt awful that I had let down so many people in my effort to be loyal and learn from EA” doesn’t exactly ring out with contrition — isn’t even internally consistent; if the development team loved their game so much, why was Origin’s management forced to devise stratagems to keep them from going home out of the fear that they wouldn’t come back? Nevertheless, it does contain a fair amount of truth alongside its self-serving omissions Ugh - those omissions are not self-serving. The reality (which we all see) is that the dev team f*cking hated the game, probably gave up on quality, and everyone knows it. But saying so is an attack on the people Garriott screwed when he screwed up; the omissions are of other people's contributions to his faults, not his faults themselves. The apology was _incredibly_ well-written: it highlights all of garriott's mistakes, in detail, and places the blame squarely on his own shoulders: he could say "EA is evil because they enforce business discipline," but instead said "they did their job as a business, and I didn't so mine as a creator." If anything, this was probably _too_ self-blaming (we all know EA would just replace him if he didn't bow down, accomplishing nothing). But don't criticize him for failing to throw his team under the bus. Knowing very little, I'd love work for this guy, based on that apology alone.
  • tubularhells 6y ago
    EA also killed Nox and Westwood, and we have some bits and pieces of anecdote about how that went, so I tend to believe what Garriot had to say about that.
    • m463 6y ago
      I don't know, I think when someone is acquired, there are two things going on: - people have finally cashed out so motivations are changing - an investment has been made, so people start accepting business goals are important. So reading this story I wonder if EA is the villain here, or human nature. Now I do blame EA for popcap. I'll never forgive Plants vs Zombies 2 with literal pricetags in dollars on all the plants.
      • groby_b 6y ago
• brobdingnagians 6y ago
  > Origin came up with a relativistic jumping system whereby the length of your leap would be determined by the distance the cursor was from your character when you clicked the mouse, rather than opting for the more intuitive solution whereby you simply pointed at and clicked on a would-be destination to attempt to jump there My father had all the Ultima games, when I was younger I tried playing VIII and couldn't figure out how to jump properly, which meant I couldn't go anywhere interesting, so I quit. It is very unintuitive to click and hold to jump on a desktop game.
  • giobox 6y ago
    Exact same experience here. Ultima 8 came free on a CD-ROM that I think accompanied a Creative Sound Card my father had purchased? The same disc had Wing Commander 2... Anyway, I played Ultima 8 to death as a child - explored the map obsessively. Eventually I hit first jump puzzle and "abandoned" any attempt to play it properly after that.
• Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  The only ultima games I played before seeing VIII were Underworld games I and II, and they were pretty great. (Probably, I is my second-favourite RPG from the 1990s, bested only by the great Betrayal at Krondor.) 8 was a huge disappointment. I couldn't figure out how to do _anything_, the movement and controls were so thoroughly broken, that I gave up in 30 minutes, completely frustrated, not being able to figure out how to do anything.
  • ekianjo 6y ago
    Underworld were not real Ultima games. At least the first one was a different game on which they stamped Ultima for brand recognition
    • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      Since I experienced Underworld first, it was the reverse to me: other Ultimas felt not real Ultims games.
    • dfan 6y ago
      Underworld developer here. We certainly started it before we got the deal with Origin, but a lot of the design was done afterwards with the fact that it was an Ultima in mind. I'll grant that its Ultima-ness was thinner compared to many of the games with Roman numerals on them. Ultima Underworld II, of course, was designed to be an Ultima game from the start.
      • nickthemagicman 6y ago
        Just so you know those games were badass! I had so much fun playing them. Elder Scrolls came out later and that was the first fantasy FPS game that I has as much fun with as underworld.
      • Tornhoof 6y ago
        I still remember the uncountable hours I played Underworld I & II. Thank you for these games.
• lanevorockz 6y ago
  Ultima VIII was an excellent game and many friends spent hours into the game doing things completely unrelated with the quests. It was such a classic that it followed into the Ultima Online which was the first truly successful MMORPG which events went to be copied WOW. Unless you say WOW is also terrible and the end of the Warcraft franchise, no amount of revisionism can change reality.
  • pavlov 6y ago
    Are you thinking of Ultima VII? It was indeed an excellent game where you could do endless things unrelated to the main quest, and was the precursor to Ultima Online (set in the same world, mostly similar game engine). This article is about Ultima VIII, a very different experience.
    • fatnoah 6y ago
      I played every Ultima from IV through UO. I have such fond memories in VII of finagling a cannon into the back of a cart and driving around with my own artillery. Aiming was tough, but it was fun. I had a great time in UO and spend a surprising amount of time making and selling furniture. My career ended when I entered the game, only to discover that a house had been placed on that location and I was unable to open the door to exit. :(
      • nickthemagicman 6y ago
        I had a buddy who had gotten to max level poisoning and he would just go around poisoning fishsticks and leaving them innocently on the ground for people to find and innocently eat and the die instantly. The amount of crazy things you could do in UO when it first came out was awesome.
        • aksss 6y ago
          In UO, I once suckered a new player into buying a dragon that wasn't even mine, just with proper timing of pretending to give commands and its natural behaviors. Player was maaaad when realized she'd been taken. But it was kind of neat to realize a whole new dimension of player interaction had opened up with UO. And it scratched a bit of the Ultima 7 itch. At some point the game turned into a grind though, and a lot of players were grinding more than I ever would. The pattern got kind of boring. Have a friend that still plays it though.
• rbtprograms 6y ago
  I mean, Ultima Online was out there at the time and had a great playerbase. It's not hard to imagine that most of Origin's focus had shifted toward the MMO platform they helped invent.
  • ryanbrunner 6y ago
    Ultima online came out 3.5 years after Ultima VIII. I think it's unlikely that serious development effort went into UO during Ultima VIIIs development (Ultima IX and Ultima Online were definitely developed in parallel though).
• HugoDaniel 6y ago
  I loved Ultima VIII because of the little details, like the sounds of the Avatar steps changing according to the surface that he was walking on.
• kcb 6y ago
  Spoony's Ultima retrospective is an absolute classic. Heres VIII https://youtu.be/wpui9EKNTzE https://youtu.be/wpui9EKNTzE Recommend finding the whole series.
• diragon 6y ago
  Except for Ultima 9 and UO, I finished every other Ultima, starting from III. In fact, Ultima 3 was either the first game, or at least one of the first games I ever played. The game world in every game was amazing in their time, the most interesting combination of ideas and stories I have ever known. Every game in the series attempted to be a pioneer in some way or another, and almost every one succeeded at it. Which makes it triply sad how fast and how deep the series fell after 8. Even though very different, 8 was still solidly Ultima. It tasted like it. It also tasted like it was not quite Ultima, and of course now we know why. The bean counters ruined it, like they ruin most artistic things. Well, ultimately Garriot ruined it, because he sold Origin Systems. And now we have Shroud of the Avatar, in which Garriot and the whole management team became bean counters as well and the game is, well, not very good. It probably too tried to pioneer something but I'm not sure what that is.
  • hinkley 6y ago
    The only one I played was Ultima VII. Found a few easter eggs, then one day I'm walking through the woods and get attacked. Two of my people are on the ground, bleeding out. They are completely clipped behind trees and I couldn't figure out how to heal them. And that was the end of that. Older me probably could have worked out the UI (maybe clicking on the character image) but young, post-fight me got lost and felt helpless, which is exactly the sort of thing you should not feel in an adventure game.
  • vidanay 6y ago
    I have fond memories of playing Ultima I through Ultima V on green screen Apple //e and //c computers.
    • Scramblejams 6y ago
      Monitor III for the win! I'll never forget looking at Ultima through that monitor's silk-like anti-glare texture while being serenaded by the restful tones of a Mockingboard...
      • jsrcout 6y ago
• gekkonier 6y ago
  It was my first role playing game. I went into every house and stole everything I could find. Then the kids in town started to throw rocks at me. After that I deleted the game, because a deinstallation routine was not necessary. Great times!
• pantelisk 6y ago
  Ultima 6 and 5 have been remade by modders for the Dungeon Siege engine (full remakes with functionality and systems not just a re-skin/tribute) Ultima 6 - http://u6project.com/wp/ http://u6project.com/wp/ (sorry for non-https link) Ultima 5 - https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_V:_Lazarus https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_V:_Lazarus Worth a shot if somebody finds the originals too difficult to get into now. (Though gameplay is brutal regardless, I keep running out of food when adventuring - the map doesn't show your position, you need to use landmarks (eg; follow the edge of this lake) and the compass to orient yourself) (disclaimer: I did some map/dungeon building some 15 years ago for the U6 one)
  • mysterydip 6y ago
    For you and those that played any of the 4-7 for comparison, how was the change in map scale compared to pace of wilderness? I was reading this https://simblob.blogspot.com/2014/05/map-homunculus.html?m=1 https://simblob.blogspot.com/2014/05/map-homunculus.html?m=1 and it shows dev reasoning for the changes, but I'm curious how gamers actually took it. Was it better before or after?
    • bdowling 6y ago
      The single-scale, continuous world is undeniably better. It is arguably less realistic geographically, but it makes the world more vibrant and lifelike. For example, the player can follow the NPCs as they travel between towns or meet each other in the wilderness or the player can chase a creature from the wilderness into town to be killed by guards. Instead of the world feeling like a bunch of disconnected silos, everything is connected on one seamless map. Also, even though the wilderness is geographically smaller in the single-scale games, it feels bigger because the player has to traverse the wilderness at 1X speed. Also, to make travel more interesting and to encourage exploration, the developers fill the wilderness with secrets, side-quests, hidden items, creatures, etc. The wilderness becomes part of the game, whereas in the older games the wilderness was just a bunch of blue or green on a map.
  • bdowling 6y ago
    There are also the open-source Ultima game engine remakes: Nuvie (for Ultima 6, Martian Dreams, and Savage Empire) - http://nuvie.sourceforge.net http://nuvie.sourceforge.net Exult (for Ultima 7 and 7.5) - http://exult.sourceforge.net http://exult.sourceforge.net Pentagram (for Ultima 8) - http://pentagram.sourceforge.net http://pentagram.sourceforge.net, now merged into ScummVM - https://www.scummvm.org https://www.scummvm.org. All of these use the original game files to play the games and offer improved user interface options, higher resolutions, graphics scaling, wider fields of view, gameplay improvements, etc. These are a great way to play these old games on a modern computer.
• rado 6y ago
  I loved 8, even though it's very different to 7. Pretending to be virtuous, looting in secret and making spells by drag and drop was great.
• darkwater 6y ago
  > After acquiring Origin in late 1992, so the story goes, EA forced them to abandon all of the long-established principles of Ultima in order to reach the mass market of lowest-common-denominator players to which EA aspired. /me raises hand, I'm one of those lowest-common-denominator played who discovered Ultima with VIII and loved it a lot
• jimmyvalmer 6y ago
  I agree with "Scorpia" that Ultima IV is the greatest game of all time. I only played the occasional pirated games my brother cadged, so missed Ultimas 5 through 7. Ultima VIII did come my way, and I remember already being turned off by the 3dness. I believe I played it all of ten minutes and gave up.
• flohofwoe 6y ago
  Many years ago I started playing Ultima VIII out of a nostalgia trip, and not having been exposed much to the legendary Ultima VII before, I thought VIII was a fun game for the most part. Can't remember much of it today, but a really bad experience would have made a more lasting impression ;) But I also liked Ultima IX (the 3D Ultima), despite being plagued by bugs and terrible performance in the beginning, it was eventually brought into pretty good shape by enthusiasts.
• IronWolve 6y ago
  I was playing the Ultima and related rpg games on my c64 (and later Amiga) way back then, auto duel, Moebius, bards tale, wasteland. The closest thing to those in modern games that I've really enjoyed was Witcher 3 and DLC, Far Cry 5, and most recently the Panam quest line in Cyberpunk 2077. GTA and other games are more about repeatable grind and forcing users to buy in game currency, less of a story line and game play. Look at what they did to Cyberpunk 2077, forced it to be released and it has the same repeatable side quest issue. Watch Dogs Legion story was mediocre story line, but the gfx are pretty darn good. Control had a very interesting story line and good gfx. Death Stranding was interesting but boring walking around. World of Warcraft is all over the place, its really trying to force people into guilds, and the casual aspect isn't as fun, and the gfx are really outdated. Its almost like, the games out now are super high quality gfx with shitty story lines. Or outdated gfx and good story lines. Is there any game people are even looking forward too anymore? Really feeling let down in the story/gfx department of newer video games.
• the_af 6y ago
  Wow. Is Pagan universally reviled? Perhaps because I was never an Ultima fan (didn't play the series) I actually liked Pagan: the graphics, the huge world, and the plot in which there was some sort of conspiracy of fake elemental "gods". I wasn't emotionally involved with Britannia, so I didn't care that the game wasn't set there. It's news to me that this game was a disappointment to fans. Unsurprisingly given what I wrote above, I absolutely loved Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire. Also not set in Britannia but in a pretty cool pseudo Aztec world.
  • gameswithgo 6y ago
    Same, I had played 7, which was AMAZING, and 8 was fun. But I was young and not a long time fan of the franchise.
    • pixelpoet 6y ago
      Ultima 7 utterly blew my mind as a kid. I remember one evening coming downstairs to dinner after playing it all day, and realised my whole sense of reality was somehow altered... there was an entire living world in that computer. That feeling completely changed me. U8 was pretty great too, but somehow not the same as U7; what was gained in graphics quality was lost in sheer scope and detail.
      • aksss 6y ago
        Same, but I quit after Ultima 7.2. I remember trying 8, and just never getting into it. Huge disappointment, as 7.2 had improvements over Black Gate, and I just expected 8 to be an iteratively better new adventure. I wanted Ultima 7.3 and instead got Diablo 0.1.
  • SavantIdiot 6y ago
    Well, the PC was truly booming when U8 dropped and I hoped it would recapture the Garriot touch from the 1980's. U3 was my intro which was a huge world and an epic grind for gold. U4 blew us all away with its depth. Remember at the time titles like Bards Tale and Wizardry were the main go-tos for party based RPG. So U4 was truly epic with it's NPC interaction and depth of plot. But this was still the 1980's when Apple //e's mostly dominated the computer game scene. The big switch to PC happened around U5, but for those of us still shelling out money for the franchise, it became repetitive with U6 and U7. Odd that Garriot would blame EA for the NFL cycle when Ultima started to feel like it. Ultima Underworld was a fun preview of 3D and a refreshing departure from the tops down U# series, but U8 just ... hurt. I had bought my first Pentium machine and was quite disappointed with how much of a departure it was. You literally leveled up by whacking things, anything, thousands of times. The plot was lame, the game play was uninteresting. But I was already bored of Ultima titles by that point, so it was more tedious than reviled. I think until UOnline, U4 was the high watermark, IMHO. Great article though, it was written with care by a fellow enthusiast of times long gone.
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Origin reminds me of what happened to Bioware , selling out to EA that is used to reselling filler paste games like Madden XX or FIFA XX is just the death of a gaming studios. I am glad that Steam/GOG/Xbox/Sony with digital downloads lowered the barriers to entry for independents to make and publish fun quirky and enjoyable games again.
• CamouflagedKiwi 6y ago
  I feel like a lot of this comes from an "Ultima fan" perspective where Ultima VIII "ruined it" because it was too different. Conversely, I played it first, and enjoyed it; it did many things no game I'd played before had tried, although was not short of many flaws (which tbf the post-release patch resolves quite a few of). Playing other Ultimas later, they were in many ways good but also felt a bit trite in their morality. I don't think it's trivially an awful game. I've heard a lot about how wonderful Ultima VII is, but more recently I get the impression (after reading articles like http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/08/ultima-vii-black-gate-summary-and-rating.html http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/08/ultima-vii-black-gate...) that there's another side to it: also dramatically flawed in many ways, maybe less obviously so than Pagan but the writing may have already been on the wall. Assuming everything just went terribly at the end and blaming on "the bean counters" seems a bit lazy to me.
  • jdlshore 6y ago
    > I feel like a lot of this comes from an "Ultima fan" perspective I think that's selling The Digital Antiquarian (filfre.net) short. It's an impressive body of scholarship. If the author has a fandom bias, it's for text adventures, not Ultima.
  • Gimpei 6y ago
    I agree. I liked Ultima 8. Don't get me wrong. 7 and 7.5 were better, but 8 was still enjoyable. I was disappointed when they didn't release an expansion pack.
  • megameter 6y ago
    Both Ultima VI and VII are divisive points for series fans. The issue comes down to what level of detail and scale is really desired. The earlier games do a better job of staying coherent to their main questlines: while there's some NPC interaction, you're expected to be in puzzle-solving mode for the bulk of it, looking for hints to the next item or location. This presentation of the game as a "solvable puzzle" was the norm for 80's gameplay, since the capacity for simulation was so limited. With VI, suddenly the gameplay occurs at a single uniform scale and camera perspective. It's still using tiling compression to achieve that scale, so there is visible repetition, but the effect is that now it's easy to get lost. This is carried forward into the interactions, which now have a larger depth and persistence to them, and not everything is puzzle-centric. Ultima VI is coherent to Origin's motto of the time, "we create worlds", but at the expense of being a consistent "questing" experience. The increase in detail rather adds new "and now the hero must go to the toilet" style moments that break with the scenario. Ultima VII just goes even farther down this path - it's very much a world, to the point of still rivaling AAA experiences of more recent years, albeit at a fraction of the graphical fidelity, with the absolute minimum of animation that could suffice. Playing it for long periods can leave you with a headache because the perspective and scale and detail combine into composited scenes of dense, tiny pixel blobs all representing various objects - the eye never gets a chance to rest. While the game is not overtly that tricky, it still draws on many of the tropes of older RPGs in this highly detailed setting, which adds a sense of unease: Sometimes a thing triggers in a dungeon and you're just not quite sure if it was a programming bug or it was intended as a trap. And it's so hard to stay focused on the main quest in VII without being systematic about it that most players will likely have their fill long before that. Besides the issue of getting lost and having trouble finding an NPC when they move around on a schedule, there's still no quest tracking(this just wasn't a thing yet), but it does automatically give you keyword topics, so you can blunder around, trigger a lot of things and then forget what happened, where previously you were going to have to take notes anyway just to know what topics to type in. And Ultima VII has some of the simplest, least gratifying combat in the series - there's no more turn-taking and it nearly plays itself, with the tactical decision making coming mostly in preparation and various gimmickry with the engine. The combat is a small element supporting the world instead of a definite thing explored on its own terms. Lastly, in a literal sense Britannia started getting smaller with VI and VII, when you look at how much the towns are getting crammed together. The sense of "travel" isn't there because the landscape is truncated. So in that light, VIII is a continuation of several trends. It's more graphically intense(actual animation now), but it made further cuts to the RPG framework, and further pushed the detail instead of the overall worldbuilding scope. I think the main issue Ultima had with these later games was with making the increased detail cohere well. It made the programming more fragile, stretched the asset counts, and pushed people's PCs to the limit while being less of a straightforward dungeon crawl each time and a little more of a tech demo, and then with VIII finally hitting a point where the production process didn't get to fully flesh it out. The baton of detailed worldbuilding was passed to Ultima Online, which I do think deserved all its success.
• op00to 6y ago
  I loved Ultima VIII. Played it for hours and hours and hours.
• viseztrance 6y ago
  A departure from the series, but it doesn't change the fact tha Ultima VIII was a gem and easily one of the best rpgs I ever played. There was something absolutely amazing about how little hand holding it provided, especially playing back when I had no internet to help me out.
• bstar77 6y ago
  This was a brutal takedown of Garriott, which I think is fair. The guy was a visionary, but lost touch with what made Ultima great after Ultima VII. What's not mentioned is that Ultima Online destroyed any chance that the Ultima franchise would ever come back as a single player game. So much was left on the table after Ultima VII that this is really a shame. I'm working on something that is highly inspired by Ultima 6 & 7, but is it's own thing. These are my takeaways of what I set out to share and improve upon (from the U7 model): - shares the skewed 45* orthographic view... I love this perspective. - world is much larger than Ultima 7's, underworld is substantially larger. - NPCs have needs (think Tropico) and that will influence what they do - story driven, but many in game events are unscripted - similar inventory style to Ultima 7 (bag if items), but much easier to organize - everything is interactive (bake bread, forge a sword) but not streamlined like a modern crafting system - camera view is further out, so the game feels much larger than Ultima 7 ever did - more consistent pixel art (not a mix of scanned graphics and hand drawn pixel art) - real-time pausable combat- combat un U7 is terrible and a step back. I'm attempting to make it less chaotic, but not take away from the immersion. - the world has a stability factor, so good and bad events can happen if the conditions are right I think, if done right, one can take the spirit of the Ultima series forward from where Ultima 7 left off. What I'm doing is currently at the stage of mechanics building, but I encourage anyone to make the development effort if they are so inclined. There's a great game to be made if someone can take the torch from Ultima 7 and made a proper modern inspired game.
  • nickthemagicman 6y ago
    Also, another thing is how almost everything was able to be put into your inventory and moved around. Forks, Plates, Curtains, Candleholders, Chairs, etc. I remember taking over a house in the first town and stealing so much stuff from everywhere to decorate it. I haven't seen that kind of dynamic item management in a game engine I don't think ever since. The worlds have become super static. I think that lent a lot of magic to the game as well.
    • bstar77 6y ago
      This was a core feature in Ultima Online as well as Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar. I'm not going to Criticize Ultima Online, but it was never my thing as pivotal as the game was. Garriott tried to create this level of immersion in Shroud of the Avatar, but it was absolutely done to a fault. I hated going into towns, everyone's houses looked silly and out of place. Cities just looked like giant swap meets. Gamers are terrible designers. In Ultima 7, it was single player so you weren't there to impress anyone or get a laugh. It was pure immersion. I had such a fun time as a kid discovering all of the weird things I could do in the game.
• Klwohu 6y ago
  Pagan was pretty bad. I was one of the superfans at the time, I had played every Ultima on my Apple II and then my PC. I was one of the first people to beat Ultima VI and still have my award certificate from Lord British which I got in the mail. I spent late nights tweaking my autoexec.bat and config.sys to get Ultima VII to run properly. Pagan was unplayable on release, it was actually impossible to across the stones leading across an underground river without falling in. Later they released a patch which fixed the most glaring issues and I completed the game, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. What REALLY killed Ultima was the absolute state of Ultima IX. Also released in an unplayable state, the patches rolled in. Finally after about two months, it was playable but as one progressed in the game, incongruities almost immediately popped out. The lore had been changed, sometimes substantially. And this wasn't the worst thing - it became clear after not too long that the game wasn't done at all. This was later admitted by an Origin team member who released the real plot, and later on people attempted to fan-patch the game to make it more like it had been planned originally. Of course, EA is to blame for all of this, but Garriott shares this blame for allowing them to take too much control away from his organization and okaying the releases before they were ready. http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/nitpicks.htm http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/nitpicks.htm Hacki's page is still THE internet resource for the pissed off former Ultima fan.
  • josephorjoe 6y ago
    Ultima VIII was the first (and only) Ultima game I played. There was so much hype for the franchise and I had never played, so I bought it new and had high expectations... ooof. i tried to play it but got into some boring dead end where i didn't know what to do next and figured i missed something but realized i just didn't care and would rather do some chores than keep playing. i was just confused that anyone liked ultima at all and forgot about it. kind of interesting to see the story behind that game (i forgot about it so much that i never bothered to look into why it sucked so much before today).
    • Klwohu 6y ago
      If you're still up for gaming UVII is one of the greatest classic games ever made, IMHO it's still the best open world game and it feels more alive than say, Morrowind or Skyrim or Fallout 4 or anything really. I saw somebody closing their shutters over their windows before going to bed in UVII when I first played the game, so I double clicked the same shutter a minute later and it opened again. As I sat there, just marveling at what I had done and the level of life and interactivity in the game, the woman came back and CLOSED THE SHUTTER AGAIN. The game is chock full of astounding details like this. Feeling poor? Just thresh some wheat, take it to the mill and grind it into flour and bake some bread and sell it.
• codezero 6y ago
  I'm kind of amazed in retrospect how readily they adapted a late 80s game into a mid 90s MMORPG - and it looks almost exactly the same. It wasn't until the first expansion pack I think, that they added better/real 3D isometric graphics. I never liked the new graphics either, I really wish there were easy to play modern UO worlds, it was quite a fun game :)
• scythe 6y ago
  >"Richard", they told me, "your release of games is extremely unreliable". They wanted us to change our development process to meet their deadlines. The game we were developing when we sold Origin* was Ultima VIII; EA wanted it on the shelves in time for the following Christmas.* versus >Yet the actual EA executives in question have vociferously denied micromanaging the project, insisting on the contrary that it was conceived, created, and finally shipped on terms dictated by no one outside of Origin. Someone is lying. Either a new deadline was imposed on an existing project by EA executives or it wasn't.
• YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  >> Many of our programmers had worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week for ten months. We would bring dinner in for them because we were afraid if they left, they might not come back. The last month or so we gave them every other Sunday off so, as one of them pointed out, they could see their family or do some laundry. And they shipped a terrible game after all that? Incredible!
• ondrek 6y ago
  Everytime someone mentions UO, my heart start racing. I spent several years within this world, met hundreds of friends I already forgot, tried countless tournaments, fights and lived so many memories. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but this game showed me, what it means to love something you spend your free time with. Maybe it even transfered somehow to programming later on.
• FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  This was the first RPG I played, which may have played a part in me not liking RPGs to this day. The manual was amazing though, with the cool descriptions of the world and all the different types of magic. Game publishers/developers really knew how to make manuals those days. But the game itself just didn't make sense.
• einpoklum 6y ago
  What do I do if I want to play the Ultima series from I to VII? And - can I somehow do this on Linux rather than Windows (without a Windows VM)? e.g. perhaps with DosBox?
  • Inhibit 6y ago
    I beat Ultima 1 on an HP 200 LX. It barely has a number before the (86) on the processor :) Fun fact: it ran fine on half height CGA. You should be fine with DOSBox.
  • ajxs 6y ago
    As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Ultima VII has the Exult project (http://exult.sourceforge.net http://exult.sourceforge.net) which makes playing Ultima VII on modern platforms extremely simple. I'm guessing the earlier games are much easier to emulate using programs like DOSBox.
• musha68k 6y ago
  Ultima IV is maybe my most favourite game of all time. I still really liked Ultima VIII. It had a great story and was just very different, which I also respected (IMHO sequel-ism is something that often plagues modern games). This article is an interesting opinion piece though. I hadn’t read about the development background of VIII by Lord British so far, worth reading for that alone.
• sova 6y ago
  EA please let coders take their time with their masterpieces and stop ruining games. Coders, stop taking EA money
• otikik 6y ago
  I understand how fans of the series got disappointed by it. To me, a total neophyte to the series, u8 served like a nice introduction. The linear plot makes it easier to not get lost (this was pre-internet, if you got stuck you bought a paper guide). The graphics were nice, well animated (for the time). The jumps were not great but not a huge hassle, at least not for someone used to platformers, as I was. I found the different kinds of magic interesting, and I liked the titans. The inventory management system, with bags for reagents, and keys hidden behind cushions in drawers, was something I had never seen before. My favorite bit was the fire mage that would teleport to your location and insta-kill you if you attacked a citizen. I had an honest good time with it.
• totaldude87 6y ago
  This is the icing in the cake >> In truth, jumping in Ultima VIII wasn’t “kind of busted” at all; it was completely, comprehensively busted. Figuring out where any given jump would land you was a black art, thanks to the sloppy mouse cursor and the impossibility of accurately judging depths in the game’s canted isometric view. The only way to get anywhere was to save before each jump and give it a try, then reload and adjust until you got it right. After four or five attempts, you might just manage it if you were lucky. Then you got to rinse and repeat for the next jump, out of what might be a dozen or more in all to get across a single obstacle. In order to fully appreciate the horror of all this, you have to remember that every single save or restore would have taken on the order of 30 seconds back in 1994.
• KingOfCoders 6y ago
  Ultima IV is free on GOG.
• lawik 6y ago
  The only Ultima game I was exposed to. I found it cool and exciting. Very frustrating, certainly. But I'd not played anything quite like it. I never back-tracked through the series.
• choeger 6y ago
  It might be worth mentioning that in later additions of the game the jump mechanics have been much simplified. Also the game engine was used in Crusader if I am not mistaken.
• peter_d_sherman 6y ago
  >"Tens of thousands of eager Ultima fans, some of whom had been buying every installment of the series for ten years or more, rushed home from their local software stores with Ultima VIII: Pagan in their hot little hands. An hour later, they were one and all sitting there scratching their heads and asking themselves what the hell had happened. Had they bought the wrong game entirely? No, it said “Ultima” right there on the box!" PDS: Here's what happened, (in one word no less!): Corporation. >"Richard Garriott invented a system of ethics, and then each game challenged or threatened that system: Ultima IV – The Virtues are Confronted Ultima V – The Virtues are Corrupted Ultima VI – The Virtues are Attacked Ultima VII – The Virtues are Ignored Ultima VIII – The Virtues are Abandoned Ultima IX – The Virtues are Inverted" PDS: Now where have I seen this pattern before?