8 ms·

Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems

• pixelpoet 2y ago
  Ultima 7 was for many, many years my fav game ever. Blew my mind as a kid!
  • philsnow 2y ago
    Ultima VII (and its expansions) and Star Control 2 form a core part of my childhood computer experience.
    • pixelpoet 2y ago
      I think I'd pay like 250 Eur for a massive Ultima game by Larian, in which they lean hard on the U8 style pentagram spells, you can at any point just become a baker or something, etc :D
    • ghfhghg 2y ago
      Theres a modern port of starcon2 called masters of urquan
      • chuckledog 2y ago
        Yes StarCon2 / Masters of Urquan also hold up really well
  • pridkett 2y ago
    Here’s something that still blows my mind. When I bought Ultima VII, I think I paid $69.99 for it. Depending on how you do the math, that’s like $150 today. And today I don’t buy most games unless they’re half off and under $15 on steam.
    • pixelpoet 2y ago
      The even more shocking thing is that it was worth every cent; it was the first real experience many of us had in some medium to large scale world with day / night cycles, long term social interactions (I think I even got married at some point?!), ye olde English, ... Young me figured out the rune writing after a few minutes of scribbling on paper, and after that did it purely visually (I didn't have the cloth and manual etc, got it with Creative Sound Blaster 16 CD and sadly never looked at the documentation). There were many puzzles I figured out alone and was super proud of. Those were super formative times, and Ultima 8, while cool in its own way, didn't have the same realtime speed and party control etc.
    • ekianjo 2y ago
      It had a real package with a map in it. That would be like buying a collector edition today at 200 USD
    • somenameforme 2y ago
      And devs make a lot more money for it. Modern day devs justifiably complain about having to give ~30% of their revenue to Steam or app stores, but back in the day you'd be lucky to get some sort of deal like a 20% "royalty" on sales after 100% of your publisher's costs were covered. So for each $60 spent (which as I recall was a more common price tag) something like $5-$10 would make its way to the studio. And physical media meant that as soon as your game or software was off store shelves your revenue went to $0. And even when it was on store shelves, if it was popular it'd rapidly end up in the million 2nd hand resale shops where it'd cycle through potentially multiple players and you'd again get $0. Given how studios were dropping like flies back in the day, I don't think they were gouging at $60 - it was just a very different environment.
• snickerer 2y ago
  Exult/Ultima VII is an RPG with a real story. I enjoyed it. If you people out there like RPGs, try it, if you can live with the 'retro' graphics.
• robenkleene 2y ago
  This is probably just nostalgia, as I was the right age to sink hours into the golden age of Ultima IV-VII when I was younger, but I still think these are the best roleplaying games ever made, and by an absolutely gigantic mile. Every time I try a new RPG, I initially have this feeling like, will this be like Ultima, will this be like Ultima, but I always end up disappointed. The best way of describing what makes them so great is that they avoid everything feeling like one of those fake-cardboard-cutout Western movie sets. Every other RPG I've played feels like this, the infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate (I've only played 1, not 2) being the canonical example. Everytime I run into an NPC or situation in Baldur's Gate it just feels like the characters start talking through a script that was written just for me, the player, to setup some problem for I, the player, to solve. This is of course the very definition of immersion breaking, because this artificial setup draws attention to the fact that you're playing a game, you're not actually in a real believable world. Baldur's Gate has fantastic combat (an area Ultima VII is terrible), but I think the way that the story is setup and told is boring and uninspired. And that goes similar for literally every other RPGs I've played: Mass Effect ("Hi I'm an alien from a new race you've never met, would you like me to tell you everything about how my race fits into the universe?"), Skyrim (Besthesda, masters of the anonymous, faceless NPC), the Witcher/Cyberpunk (the CD Projekt Red games are actually masters of this style of game design, because they use it as scaffolding for easily the best writing ever in video games, but they're still hampered by inherent weakness of the format: That the world feels like a prop to setup quests for the player to knock down). In contrast, the Ultima games feel like they create the world first, so that feels alive and believable. And I don't mean by writing a bunch of lore (writing has it's format already, books, use game mechanics to tell your story), but I mean by creating a world piece by piece, character by character, city block by city block, room by room, each piece of furniture, individual dresser by individual dresser. Environmental story telling, game mechanic story telling, storytelling native to the format of of games. The tavern goes here, the barber lives here, these three friends meet at this pub, at this time every day, and discuss this. Ultima does this for every town and every character in the game, for even the most trivial NPC. There's no anonymous, faceless, story-less NPCs acting as walking props like in every other RPG. And once that world feels like a real believable place, one that you could just sit and watch at have it be interesting, like people watching through cafe window--existing through an intersection of mechanics (how NPCs move, day-night-cycles, how they interact with the environment, e.g., the classic "using flour to bake bread"). Only then are the player-driven interactions then built on top of this world, e.g., if you hear a rumor that the shopkeeper seems to disappear for a couple of hours after their shop closes each night, well you can wait till 5 PM and follow them and see what they're up to. Since everything is scripted to this degree, it doesn't feel like you've entered into a pre-programmed scenario for following just this one NPC, you can follow anyone in the game this way, it just so happens that some NPCs might do something interesting after you follow them, like maybe you see them hide a key under a plant and you can go investigate. This way of having the player-driven gameplay come directly from mechanics that existed first to make a believable world, just makes for more interesting games in my opinion than anything that has come after. A game that's just a series of scripted encounters for the player to knock down is just less interesting.
• chasil 2y ago
  I remember playing the original Ultima on an Apple ][ in high school. Something about Mondain?
  • xipho 2y ago
    And you drop a coin in the pool in one of the towns and you get a random weapon. Blasters for all on first level!
  • tmtvl 2y ago
    Becoming a Space Ace because the series was rather silly before QotA turned it into something truly outstanding.
• canadiantim 2y ago
  I miss ultima online - the good ol' days. Yes you can still play it, but alas' not the same. No game has come close.
  • xurbax 2y ago
    It was amazing in it's heyday. Has any other multiplayer game since then persisted items in the game-world (i.e. dropped items and such)? I miss that. And the housing was a lot of fun.
    • axus 2y ago
      UO was the first "massive" online game I'd ever played. Getting murdered and running around as a ghost was fun the first few times. http://www.havenandhearth.com/ http://www.havenandhearth.com/ has a similar feel with less players. Plenty of housing and PKing though.
  • block_dagger 2y ago
    Playing that game was one of the highlights of my life.
  • erupt7893 2y ago
    There is the UO:1998 project https://www.uo1998.com https://www.uo1998.com
• aleyan 2y ago
  There is also Ultima VII: Revisited [1] project that reached 0.1.0 last month. It attempts to fix the weird U7 perspective by giving it a 3d engine. Between this and recent substantial progress in VCMI and HotA for HOMM3, it is an exciting time for retro PC fantasy gaming. [1] https://www.u7revisited.com/ https://www.u7revisited.com/
• uzidil 2y ago
  My attempt at creating something similar: https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim
  • pixelpoet 2y ago
    Wow, this looks amazing! :O
  • whitehexagon 2y ago
    Looks great! and seems like you have spent a lot of time on the detail, not just the graphics, but also the storyline (I started by having a read of the walk-through). Have you written your own game engine for this? anyway, well done, and I wish you success.
    • uzidil 2y ago
      Yes, the engine is written in go and uses opengl (the isometric layout uses the opengl z buffer). The game is written in bscript (https://github.com/uzudil/bscript https://github.com/uzudil/bscript). I've always been a huge Ultima fan and this was a lot of fun to work on.
      • whitehexagon 2y ago
        Cool. I spent some years with opengl and now webgl2, so I have a feel for how much work that entails, well done! I never quite got a satisfactory result with the z buffer, just a bit too much of a z gap on my geometry outlines to avoid z fighting.
  • relistan 2y ago
    This looks awesome
• danso 2y ago
  Looking back, U7 is a deeply flawed game (the combat basically provides zero challenge, the inventory system is horrendous) yet its game world is so deeply immersive that it's not at all surprising to see this kind of open source labor of love to restore it.
  • ekianjo 2y ago
    It's a deeply flawed game but thats much less flawed than other RPGs. Most of them don't even do a quarter of what Ultima VII achieved on what are now ancient CPUs.
  • nottorp 2y ago
    > the combat basically provides zero challenge Is that a problem? Do all games have to involve some kind of fighting?
    • idle_zealot 2y ago
      Of course not every game needs combat. If there is combat though, it should be included thoughtfully and serve the game's intended goals (usually by being some mix of challenging and satisfying, though not always).
    • jerf 2y ago
      Ultima traditionally had relatively deep tactical combat, at least for the time. Ultima VII's problem is that it sort of exhibits a desire from a design perspective to have that sort of combat, but in practice it's even less engaging than those mobile games where you select four of your characters from some gacha-based roster and fling them at four other characters, and the fight proceeds without you. At least in those fights you can understand what is going on. Ultima VII's combat is just the characters randomly walking around each other, playing some sword swinging animations, and then some things are dead and some things are not. Not only do you not have much useful input, you don't even have comprehension of what happened. Did you win handily? Did you scrape through? Is there something you could have done to change the outcome? None of these questions are answerable from the game. You can't even call this "realism", you have vastly less comprehension of what happened then people in real life have in real melee combat scenarios, as confusing as real life can be. It would be better off by just removing it except combat is still sort of baked into the conflict in the genre and the basic design of exploring the world. Since the ability to "read" the battles and react in any intelligent way is about nil, the game made up for it by making everything almost trivially easy, as long as you're halfway decently geared. It works against the design of the world. This is the problem. They should either be good and meaningful, or somehow removed, but Ultima VII has just about the worst possible combination of attributes for combat to be meaningful in any way, yet it is still there. At least it's over quickly. (The series kind of flamed out on the combat here. Ultima VIII's combat is also exceedingly bad, albeit in a completely different way. IX's was one of the earliest 3D "open world" games and while it may exceed its predecessors in being at least "semi-credible for the time", that's about as far as it makes it.)
• pavlov 2y ago
  I wonder if AI could soon recreate old computer games into a modern programming language. Those MS-DOS era game engine binaries are small enough to fit in LLM context. There’s ample gameplay footage available that could be used to teach the model what the output should be.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• musha68k 2y ago
  Long live Lord British and the enthusiasts of Brittania. Neat; that said: What's the general hold up with installing Ultima VII through dosbox/-x?
  • freeqaz 2y ago
    Easy for you, not easy for my Uncle or Nephew. Companies like GoG (Grand old Games) have done a lot to "polish" the DosBox experience but it's still ... rough. Small things like mouse movement just feeling jank make a big difference. A game can be _functional_ but if the UX is so poor/dated that it doesn't hold up, then I think projects like this make a lot of sense. Having high quality buttons, config menus that match modern UI expectations, and HiDPI font rendering goes a long way towards getting my non-technical family members to stick around. It just makes it more accessible. But maybe my take is spicy. Anybody agree/disagree?
    • generic92034 2y ago
      I had great fun playing many old games in DosBox. Most of the time these were games I have played in DOS times before, decades ago. But I cannot say I generally had a worse experience in DosBox. YMMV.
    • jszymborski 2y ago
      *Good Old Games
  • g939763 2y ago
    exult is part of the early 2000s tradition of from scratch rewrites of beloved retro videos games to make them work on linux. I played it a lot back then, and there was definitely a window when you had much better time playing rewrites rather than attempting to dosbox
• LAC-Tech 2y ago
  I've long been curious about the Ultima series. Would this be approachable for someone in 2025? I've played stuff like Chrono Trigger and dig 2D graphics. But 90s games always tend to have a lot of weird inconvenient stuff that makes them hard to play.
  • snickerer 2y ago
    That's why there are modern projects like Exult. Exult makes the playing experience more convenient for players without gray beards.
• BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  In the same spirit, for Heroes of might and magic 3: https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi Using it on Ubuntu to play with my brother who is on a Mac in another country and it already works quite well. We hit only one bug so far.