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Ultima (2012)
- sedatk 3y ago> Like so much in Garriott’s early games, simply because it sounded cool; certainly this title has no more bearing on the game’s plot, such as it is, than does the name Ultima. I mean, the name doesn't even have a bearing on the game's genre, let alone its plot. I'd say Ultima was a space shooter if I'd only heard its name.
- jakderrida 3y agoYou mean like an 8-bit space shooter like Gradius or Blazing Lazers for Turbo Graphix? If so, I definitely agree. Actually sounds way more dope as a space shooter, tbh. Like the "ULTIMAte" fighter spaceship. Would also explain why even a novice pilot with an NES controller can still annihilate 100 other ships before going down.
- pvg 3y agoUltima 1 does have a space part where you need to become a space ace by shooting down bad space things that look like TIE fighters.
- thom 3y agoThere's also a later Easter Egg that implies it's in the same universe as Wing Commander.
- CamperBob2 3y ago>I do wonder that no one thought of it in even the relatively brief history of videogames prior to Ultima; it does seem a fairly obvious approach, after all. On the other hand, I can’t point to a specific example that would give me grounds to really challenge the claim. ... Ultima‘s tile-graphics engine was not so much the work of Garriott as of a friend of his who was the only other person to have a significant role in the game’s design and implementation: Ken W. Arnold (not the Ken Arnold who created Rogue). I'll comment briefly on this as someone who spent a couple of years trying to build an Ultima-esque tile graphics game on the Apple II. Ken had a clever insight that eluded me completely: "Don't try to draw the tiles one at a time, dummy." Ken's code was fast enough to be useful in an interactive fullscreen game because it drew an entire row of 280 pixels at once, then went back over the same row of map data, reusing the indexes for the next 14 lines in that row of tiles. There was less indirection and practically no overhead compared to drawing individual 2-byte-by-14-row block shapes. Conversely, anyone trying to draw one tile at a time would have ended up with a low update rate, or would have been forced to draw the map in a small window. Either way, a worse gameplay experience would have resulted, especially if you were (as I was) comparing your work to Ultima.
- pengaru 3y ago> A good example of the same kind of thinking, much later, would have been Abrash's exploration of the undocumented "Mode X" on the MCGA cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X), without which Wolf3D and Doom would have been much less awesome. Neither Wolf3D or Doom used Mode-X, they're both 320x200 "Mode-Y" games IIRC.
- CamperBob2 3y agoThanks -- I'll remove that postscript, as it appears to be wrong. A quick search doesn't make the story 100% clear, so it's better not to spread potential misinfo.
- pengaru 3y agoConveniently both your examples have received technical deep dives by Fabien Sanglard, who has made both the relevant texts freely available in PDF form [0][1]. Mode-X was an annoying video mode to actually make use of without a performance hit. So despite its highly desirable combination of square pixels and 256-colors, it didn't see much use in games from the DOS days. 13h (320x200x256) was far more common because of its contiguous, linear frame buffers. Mode-X needed annoying bank switching where the first bank had pixels 0,4,8... and second bank pixels 1,5,9... and so on. The VGA was such a PITA. [0] https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbwolf3d.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbwolf3d.pdf [1] https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf
- hoten 3y agoThe start implies there may be a prior article, is there?
- Sniffnoy 3y agoThe previous articles appear to be these: https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/lord-british/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/lord-british/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/akalabeth/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/akalabeth/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/california-pacific/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/california-pacific/
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- DylanSp 3y agoThere's also followup articles on all the subsequent Ultima games (except IX), the Worlds of Ultima games, and Ultima Underworld on the same site - search https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ for "Ultima". Garriot and Origin in general also come up in some of the other posts, mainly in the posts on Wing Commander.
- block_dagger 3y agoUltima VII: Part 2 is one of the best games ever made imo. I still remember waiting for the UPS truck to deliver it to my rural childhood home. One of the great things about these games is that they were packaged with real maps, ankhs, sometimes coins and other artifacts. Really pulled me in as a youth. I wore an ankh as a necklace for several years and still consider Garriott a personal hero.
- Implicated 3y agoU7 was my original introduction into what I now consider "good" games. Changed everything for me :D
- johndhi 3y agoSame experience with Ultima 9 - except I never got to play it because my computer wasn't up to the task. I had the map on my wall for years though.
- hinkley 3y agoMy computer was barely up to playing U VII and unfortunately I played it over summer break the year it came out, and a bit the following, and never finished it. Instead I got all the spoilers for Starflight from Usenet and finished it.
- conception 3y ago7:2 is amazing but I’d put 5 over it. Five was the last of being able to “talk” to the game. Something that we haven’t been able to do really in mainstream games until now with LLMs. I’m really hoping for an updated 5 style with really conversations here soon that gives the same sort if magic 4 and 5 did for me then.
- thom 3y agoYeah this is one of the things that made me sad when dialogue heavy - especially voice-acted - games became the norm. Wizardry VII was another good example, it really increases immersion when you have to remember things and prompts aren't just multiple choice. But I suppose people said that about drawing your own maps too, and I'm not sure I want to go back to that. :)
- TillE 3y agoIt's difficult to overstate just how influential D&D was in video games, I don't think there's anything else remotely at that scale. Ultima and Wizardry would inspire the creation of the first JRPGs, and on it went. Maybe it's partly because D&D was becoming popular among nerds just as personal computers were becoming semi-affordable. And it's not even just RPGs, literally any game with the concept of experience points and levels ultimately owes some small debt to Gary and Dave.
- mtillman 3y agoEarly DnD CRPGs are really good too IMO. Eye of the Beholder 2 & Ravenloft were great.
- D13Fd 3y agoEven before those, the gold box games were great too. Pool of Radiance, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, all of the Krynn games, etc.
- livrem 3y agoStill grinding my way through the Goldbox games. Same party as I started with in Pool of Radiance ~1995 is now somewhere halfway(?) through Pools of Darkness. Not sure if I am going to try to complete the rest of the Goldbox after that, or continue with something more modern. My queue of CRPGs to play "once I'm done with the Goldbox games" is getting ridiculous. Put all the games in a git repo, scripts to launch the games in Dosbox, all the game-files and documents installed from GOG (originally the ones from the old Wizworx CDROM). Version-control is great, since there is a limit to number of saves in the game. And keeping notes of every thing I do, every time I load or save, really helps keep my sanity in the branching alternative time-lines that are created when savescumming through a CRPG.
- aidenn0 3y agoCurse of the Azure bonds was IMO the best.
- acomjean 3y agoWe loved ultima 3 growing up. A bunch of us were playing it in middle school and we'd occasionally swap hints about how to advance. Before the internet thats all we had. Out of our group, at least one of us had a real copy of each game, making the spell books and instructions available... The cloth maps were fun, but I don't think we used them during game play. The games were a bit of grind, but we didn't care. I do like the Ars Video on how they spent all this time on the "ultima online ecosystem" only to have it not work out.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
- TacticalCoder 3y agoUltima III had this weird quirk where you could draw a "path" across the map by killing monsters and not opening the chest they'd drop. We'd do that between towns / important locations: we'd surround our desired line with unopened chess all around or path, leaving only one "square" line (a line with a width of one square). That way it'd be very rare that monsters would spawn in our path and we could travel across the map really quick. That trick wasn't working in Ultima IV anymore. As a sidenote, I find this one mindboggling: an Apple ][e with a MIDI interface which Ultima V supported back in... 1988. The Apple ][e is hooked to old Roland gear. It looks and sounds georgous, amazing stuff (skip to 12m to hear a demo): https://youtu.be/aJMwspc-5wk https://youtu.be/aJMwspc-5wk
- cpeterso 3y agoHow did the unopened chests affect monster spawning? Did new monsters not spawn near unopened chests? Or did the chests form a protective wall?
- chuckadams 3y agoThey were a wall: monsters couldn't occupy the same tile as a chest. Of course there was no such thing as pathfinding, monsters just made a beeline for you and got hung up on the first obstacle.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
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- dekhn 3y agoAs a kid I was thrilled to meet Lord British at the Apple Fest in Boston (1985, I think?). I told him all about how I loved his game and he said that since I liked it so much why didn't I present at his kiosk? Later I realized that I was telling him I loved his game which was unreleased and already being copied illegally. I was pretty obsessed with learning enough Apple IIe assembly to reproduce the tile graphics of ultima but never got close. These days... there's a community dedicated to reverse engineering the source code for Ultima and fixing bugs: https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ https://xu4.sourceforge.net/ and even a team that made a modern Apple IIe Ultima-like (https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html) Another thing I realized, playing Nox archaist, is that much of the modern game mechanics already existed at that time: it was key to pay tons of attention to arming your fighters and using the right spells by your cleric and magician. I never knew I was supposed to optimize my builds when I was a kid, so my teams always ended up wimpy and dying. I learned how to hex-edit my player's disk sectors to give them 99 HP, which made the end game much easier.
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoI'd recommend read the CRPG addicted blog as well as the CRPG book.
- PostOnce 3y agoYou forgot to say it's free and it's amazing, top right link to PDF here: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/ https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/ but also for sale in a hardcover (not sure if they're all sold) It really is comprehensive.
- dekhn 3y agoI read the book (well, up to a point; I stopped playing CRPGs in early 90s to concentrate on school). I did not know about PLATO, which hosted wizardry-like games before Wizardry existed, and the authors of Wizardry played those games.
- Dwedit 3y ago14x16 tiles were used because 14 pixels wide is the native resolution of two bytes on the Apple II.
- conception 3y agoFor those wanting to play in the universe https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com is still running and still getting regular updates.
- ajxs 3y agoWhenever I feel nostalgic about the glory days of UO, I think of this comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174386 I just felt I'd share this, as I feel it really hits the nail on the head.
- jghn 3y agoThat poster is right, although I think their take is overly simplistic. There are a lot of reasons, and a lot more nuance. But it really was one of those perfect moment in time type things. It couldn't have happened exactly that way any earlier, nor later.
- amatecha 3y agoYeah, that's how I feel about early WoW too (vanilla/TBC), it just was how it was then, and that'll never happen again. Gotta love it where it was, and remember those good experiences. It was a really cool time to be a gamer with a decent computer and net connection and family/friends to play it with, and that's good enough to look back on and appreciate. Like so many things in life, "you can't go back", even if all the game code and infra still runs exactly the same.
- bhauer 3y agoI highly recommend Michael Coorlim's video series on Ultima [1], which balances some playthrough with background on the game's design. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFCs_cDvTi4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFCs_cDvTi4
- jakebasile 3y agoWatched the first couple of these. Good way to get the feel of the games (some came out before I was born, wow) without having to dedicate a lot of time to grinding. Thanks for the link!
- lnxg33k1 3y agoI’ve played ultima a lot since i was 10 until I was like 15, emulating it with wine on linux I think has contributed to my ability to troubleshoot issues
- WillAdams 3y agoEnjoyed playing a friend's copy of Ultima 1 so much, I bought Ultima 2 for my Mac and played it through in black and white --- which was quite the contrast to the full-colour cloth map (which I really wish I still had).
- musictubes 3y agoHeh. I remember putting the underworld disk in the 1541 while on the surface. When you moved out of the sector the map would update with chests and monsters strewn about above ground. Putting the regular disk in again it would right itself eventually. The c64 with Ultima III and IV brought my D&d dreams to the screen. Was a wonderful thing to pursue during summer vacation.
- shadowtree 3y agoUltima 7:2 taught me more about DOS memory management than anything else. Had to handcraft a menu-driven autoexec.bat / config.sys monster to get that thing going. HIMEM.SYS ... oh the memories. A single KB too much in a mouse driver and you were unable to start the game. Oh you want sound? Roland MT-32 or Soundblaster Pro? But how will you load all those drivers in those first 640K of RAM? Shivers...
- LanzVonL 3y agoI ended up doing the same thing, eventually I had a menu which would boot a minimal DOS, one with all the bells and whistles, one for going straight to doss hell, another for Windows, games, etc. Cool that others independently arrived at this solution.
- ajxs 3y agoI remember having specific 'boot disks' with the right autoexec.bat / config.sys combinations for a bunch of different Origin Systems games. I know I definitely had them for Ultima VII, and Wing Commander Privateer. Another amazing game I put many, many hours into.
- StanislavPetrov 3y agoJust wanted to chime in that that IMO the first 4 Ultimas looked way better on the Atari 8-bit than they did on Apple or any other systems.
- clemensnk 3y agoI've been enjoying playing a single-player/small-scale multiplayer mod of Ultima Online inspired by the early Ultima games called Ruins & Riches. If you have nostalgia for Ultima and/or Ultima Online I strongly recommend it. It doesn't have a dedicated webpage anymore, but there's some reddit posts describing it's current state, see e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/10axsri/ruins_riches_an_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/10axsri/ruins...
- maxglute 3y agoI feel like the only person who enjoyed ultima VIII on release.
- davetron5000 3y agoI loved U1-4 on the C64. If you like this sort of thing I created an ultima-inspired in browser game https://starlightdawn.online https://starlightdawn.online It’s an interactive story and not a CRPG but there is a goal.
- roody15 3y agoThe surprising depth and insight into the ophidian belief system in Ultima VII part 2 still holds up to today https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Ophidian_Virtues#:~:text=The%20whole%20Ophidian%20belief%20system,the%20anti%2Dprinciple%20of%20Balance https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Ophidian_Virtues#:~:text=The%.... Forces of Order and Choas and concept of balance is just outstanding in how it is presented in the texts and gameplay.
- darthrupert 3y agoRichard Garriott was clearly a genius world builder at least when he was younger. Alas, we all grow old...
- trashface 3y agoWhat I liked about U4 was the "morality" system required to advance the game. Sure it was kind of canned and could be gamed - in fact you had to grind out the last few virtues you need to elevate, but as a kid it felt meaningful compared to standard hack and slash. Don't know of any other game that tried to do something like that. Great thing about U4 was that it did and it doesn't really drag down gameplay. In later ultimas the system existed to some extent, but was watered down and kind of muddled. Of course you could also say screw that, rip off the blind reagents vendor and make cheap fireballs to kill everyone in town and take their gold, but you then couldn't win the game or even get the best weapons - the mystics. Even today the 8 virtues are probably still a halfway decent ethics system to follow IRL, though you'll never be able to whack your enemies with a mystic sword.