9 ms·

Ultima IV

151 points by kryptiskt 12y ago

drcode 12y ago
I think one essential part of the Ultima formula was its geometric discreteness- The world was one in which the physics is broken into motion in orthogonal directions through discrete cells, and everything in the game leveraged this fact for maximum effect. It led to a really different gameplay feel than many modern games. Other games of that era had that as well, of course, but not many really leveraged it as well (Boulderdash and Archon would be two other highlights) Some modern games of course also use this approach to physics (Advance Wars comes to mind) but it is far less common.
- jeffmk 12y ago
  As someone who's never played this series, can you give more detail about what this means?
  - math0ne 12y ago
    I think this is just the most complicated description of "grid system" I have ever heard.
- bentcorner 12y ago
  There were many "Gold box" DND games that also used this approach. How far you could walk and how your enemies were positioned were very important. I recall interesting tactics like standing on a downed troll so it couldn't regenerate. Most modern tactical RPGs use a similar approach. Shadowrun Returns, X-COM, Final Fantasy Tactics, and SpiderWeb's RPGs come to mind. Advance Wars adds an interesting resource control strategy to the mix. Personally I found it sometimes so difficult it bordered on a puzzle game.
jkarneges 12y ago
"I love to think about it, love the fact that it exists, that Richard Garriott had the courage to make it — but just thinking about playing it makes me tired. Like a work of conceptual art, to some extent the real power of Ultima IV today is just the fact of its existence." I played the NES version, which was probably a little more tolerable. Even though it's a slog, it is one of my favorite games at least in concept. I love how the air vehicle is a hot air balloon that you can't control other than cast spells to change wind direction. Good times when you run out of MP. The game is up there with Inindo for the SNES, which is another game that is a chore to play, but is one of my favorite concepts.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Nit: MP was rapidly regenerated in U4. However, you could run out of Wind Change spells. ;) I'm a dork.
  - jkarneges 12y ago
    Ah yes, and I remember it not being so much the MP but the herbs needed in conjunction to cast. Can't make anything simple. :)
ascotan 12y ago
I loved Ultima IV. I think I still have the original cloth map and ankh somewhere. I believe it came with 5 1/4" floppys for the C64. You have to remember that at the time, that there were really 3 game media back then. A) board games like DnD, B) the 8-bit Nintendo/Gameboy and C) the PC. The Nintendo was cool and fast paced and was great to play with your friends, but the PC had all the adventure games. Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Bard's Tale II, Zork, etc. PC Adventure games were all MUCH more involved that today's stuff. All the DnD games had decoder wheels and 500 page journals. You were expected to play it slow, read the journal entries, and immerse youself in the game. The closest thing I can think of today that comes close is Skyrim. Most PC games today are built for kids with ADHD that aren't going to sit down long enough to use a decoder wheel. Heck, how many people actually read the quest text in world of warcraft? Ultima IV actually had pretty good graphics for the time. The UI layout was really great. Most of the other games of the time were based on the old "wolfenstein maze" view of a game. Having an top down map was quite innovative. There was a lot of 'searching' in Ultima IV. You had to find party members, you had to find secret doors. You had to find hidden items. You had to run around do /say job, /say name, /say health, /say quest.. to every npc in the game to see if they'd tell you something. Anyway loved the game, but it was built for a different time.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I'm going through all the Ultimas now. (Currently on U5 but I've been busy for a few weeks.) The sense of world-building is the series is fascinating. With a minimal amount of space a wide world was developed and it feels to persist a lot more than in any modern game, where a bunch of spaz happens and then the game is over. I'm not sure if having to write down notes in a notebook is something beneficial to game play, or just a limitation we had to live with. In a modern game you don't have to remember shit. If Joe tells you to ask Bob, you get a Quest Item reminding you to see Bob, and Bob has an exclamation point over his head to remind you to go to him. (About the article: it bugs me when people alphabetize the virtues instead of the proper order of HCVJSHSH. ;> )
  - rstupek 12y ago
    Where did you get your copies of the games?
danielweber 12y ago
the only place where Ultima IV does even lip service to the idea that there can be conflicts between its virtues, debate about their merits, is in those questions that open the game There are some actions in game where you might have to choose one virtue over another. Such as running from battle versus being victorious in it. If you weak enough, you might have to take some karma-hits on the chin.
tunesmith 12y ago
Ultima IV and Infocom's Sorcerer are the only two games I remember solving/finishing without taking any hints. I remember both as hugely satisfying experiences. I even called the company to ask for an extra ankh so I could give it to my girlfriend. :-)
- danielweber 12y ago
  I came really close to finishing U5 without any outside help whatsoever, but I didn't even realize there was a harp puzzle. :/
  - djur 12y ago
    The 'bad ending' to U5 is probably the cruelest in video game history, considering how hard Dungeon Doom is, and how you have exactly one chance to learn about the very existence of the sandalwood box from a single character that you're not supposed to trust and who will only talk to you if you tell them a password you get by doing something extremely unvirtuous... I'm pretty sure that you were intended to get through the entire game without finding the sandalwood box, get the bad ending, and go back and replay the whole thing the right way. That's how you got value for your dollar in those days. The sandalwood box in U5 is right up there in the pantheon of obscure paths to victory in games, along with the numerous unwinnable states in King's Quest V (eating the pie, not saving the mouse) and the legendary Grandmaster Ending in Wizardry IV (itself arguably the hardest RPG in gaming history).
    - danielweber 12y ago
      At least in U5, if you clear a dungeon room it stays cleared, so the next time through Dungeon Doom is lot easier. U4 really kicked us in the crotch, though, with its "INFINITY" riddle ending. There was only an extremely vague way of figuring it out: each time you would get an eighth, a runic letter would be put on the screen. But reading runes wasn't really required for U4, so at the time I didn't even recognize them as runes. Entirely by coincidence, I had a card where I had all the virtues listed horizontally, and I manually drew the "weird symbols" I saw at the bottom. When you play U5 you get good enough to read runes by heart, and I glanced at that card once and immediately saw the answer leaping out at me.
deleted 12y ago
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- jerf 12y ago
  It's staggeringly difficult compared to modern games mostly because of the lack of affordances, a dodgy UI by modern standards, and despite the classic nature of the game, some bad design decisions (like the way the combat scales to the number of characters in the party, as mentioned in the article, which turns casual overworld encounters into a real pain). The opacity of the actions that led to what virtues is also quite difficult. For instance, in my playthrough I didn't work out that killing a fleeing animal is uncompassionate until I cheated by borrowing somebody else's save that had all eight virtues and losing my compassion then. (In real life, "putting a badly injured animal out of its misery" is at least debateably compassionate itself.... and we're talking about "snakes" that just took a good run at killing an armed warrior, I admit I can't easily work this into the 8 virtues per se but surely I shouldn't just let such things roam the countryside?) Speaking as someone in a very similar situation... I bet it took you a long time, though. Starting the game not even knowing to say "name" and "job" to absolutely everybody is a heck of a disadvantage to start. There must have been some way to be reminded in game, somewhere, because I worked it out too eventually, but we're talking hours of loss there. If you can get past all that, and write everything down, and understand the flow of the game, it becomes a simple game in concept, as befits its era. (Eight times, you must: Attain the virtue, acquire the mantra, locate the shrine, acquire the stone. There's some other quests you must do, a couple of optional ones, but not that many.) Were it not for the interminable combat and the general resource scarcity, it would not be a hard game today, especially if we spot you a couple of swings at a FAQ to pick up a trail you lost or the answer to one or two of the hardest puzzles (the answer to the very last question, again as answered in the article, being a very difficult one). In a way, the game must be hailed as being perhaps the most successful games of the time at hiding just how small it really is.
  - djur 12y ago
    > For instance, in my playthrough I didn't work out that killing a fleeing animal is uncompassionate The manual, Hawkwind, and a number of random NPCs tell you not to kill non-evil creatures, and the manual actually specifically says which creatures are considered evil.
thisjepisje 12y ago
I have Ultima: Runes of Virtue for game boy lying around somewhere. Worth checking out?
- jerf 12y ago
  Mostly no. Ultima has a couple of bizzare cash-in games in the console world (in addition dodgy ports of the mainline series). Apparently that one isn't atrocious (... for a Gameboy game...), but it's not a good introduction either.
- mratzloff 12y ago
  Ultima IV and Ultima VII: The Black Gate are widely regarded as the high points of the series. The Runes of Virtue games are mostly forgotten afterthoughts, but they're supposed to be decent games for what they are (action-adventure games). They're not representative of the mainline series, however.
acomjean 12y ago
The game stands in contrast to Ultima 3 (which I loved as well). Ultima 3 you could go into a city fight and loot, then leave and go back again, and everything would be back to the way it was before. I remember exchanging hints with friends also playing.. I can't believe I finished it. Those games where hard. Some of the difficulty (and complaints in the article) was the lack of hand holding and guidiance the game gave you. Given the limited hardware of the time (64K memory...cpus of 1 -10 megaHz) these games were astounding.
- clubhi 12y ago
  I beat Ultima 4 when I was 13 on my Amiga 500. I found the game to be much easier than some other RPGs that I played when I was a kid. Bards Tale 1 comes to mind as about the hardest.
- danielweber 12y ago
  U4 reset cities, too, although the virtue penalties to massacring a town could be severe. In U5, you could permanently kill off city residents, even residents who still hadn't given you a critical piece of information or equipment.
- pimlottc 12y ago
  I remember how, after winning the game and maxing out my party, I would go clear out Montour East and Montour West (both of which were loaded with guards) just for kicks. > Cast Spell! Wizard spell-P Ah, good times.
samstave 12y ago
My first ever computer game that I got into was Utima II on the Apple ][e. I have played every Ultima since. I was also in beta and then a long time on UO -- which for me was my golden age of gaming as I worked in the Intel Game lab and played 4 accounts on 4 machines side-by-side on what was one of the fastest corporate inet connections at the time! I still reminisce about Ultima and UO a lot. I still think I have the Ultima V cloth map somehwere... I used to be fluent in the Rune Alphabet when I was in 7th? grade and my buddy morgan and I would write school notes in the Runes... EDIT: in one of the Ultima games, I recall finding a bug where you could dupe ships -- I had oceans full of ships that I could use to bridge between continents/islands... Anyone recall this dupe bug and how it was done?
- davidjhall 12y ago
  I seem to remember you could board enemy ships at sea? Something like you would sail out, X-It your boat and stand on the enemy ship and then board it. The enemy ship would still be there "underneath" and you would have another ship you could use.
  - xipho 12y ago
    This! I remember it as well. Edit -> pretty sure it was II, or III... hell I don't remember, can picture it though. What about dropping a coin in the lake in I to get a random weapon, do it enough times and your puny starting character gets a blaster (most powerful weapon).
    - danielweber 12y ago
      In U2 you get ships by having some item that lets you "take over" the ship, and then by a pretty easy bug[1], duplicate the ship repeatedly. [1] It was hard to not exploit the bug.
- wiredfool 12y ago
  I remember 2 useful bugs in Ultima IV on the Apple //e -- * If you readied a weapon that you already had readied, one would get added to your store. Which you could then sell. * If you exited the balloon without landing, you could walk anywhere (over mountains and through forests without slowing down) and see anything to the edges of the screen.
snake_plissken 12y ago
The only Ultima game I played was Ultima VII. I love that game. It's one of the high water marks in computer gaming. I recall being around 7 or 8, playing it with my younger brother, both of us completely obsessed, but at the same time unsure of how really to play it. The game-play and world were for the most part completely open, and immense; you could either talk to every person you cam across and progress through the game, or you could explore the woods, dungeons or go to random islands complete with pirates to battle. Then there were the character development aspects of the game, like if you steal too many things, your companions will leave you. I loaded it up again a few years ago after seeing it for sale on GoG. It is timeless in every way. And now I am feeling very nostalgic :] Also, was there a secret way to kill Lord British in Ultima IV? I know of two ways to do it in Ultima VII. You can either surround him with like 8 barrels of gun powder, or double clicking this anvil thing in his castle while he stands under it at 12:00 PM every day.
- mratzloff 12y ago
  > Also, was there a secret way to kill Lord British in Ultima IV? The Ultima Wiki actually has an entire page devoted to killing Lord British in the various games: http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British
bcRIPster 12y ago
Ultima IV was awesome. Here's text maps that were passed around from when the game first came out. Designed for 80-column, tractor-feed output. Just print them out, and tape them together. Woot! =) World maps: http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_1.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_2.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_3.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_4.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... City maps: http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__city_maps__part_1.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__city_maps__part_2.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV...
xiaoma 12y ago
Of all the 1000+ games I've played from the original Nintendo games on, if I had to pick a list of five favorites, Ultima IV would be on it. The Ultima games were impressively ahead of similar games such as the Wizardry series. All of Wizardry I on consisted of building characters with stats, navigating a menu-based town with no graphics, taking steps through a first person perspective dungeon, and fighting monsters. Ultima I on the other hand, had equivalent dungeons, many towns with top down views and people to talk to, an overland world a space ship and more. The difference was staggering! In terms of plot, early Ultima IV was a quantum leap from its predecessors. Here were the goals in each game: Ultima I - Kill an evil wizard. Ultima II - Kill that wizard's evil apprentice. Ultima III - Kill an evil monster. Ultima IV - Become an avatar who symbolizes the eight virtues and inspires the people of the land! Needless to say, against the backdrop of RPGs with rigid or non-existent plots, it was refreshing and immersive in a way that would be very hard to replicate in today's flooded game market. In some ways the frustrating nature of the game that the author mentioned, like the conversation system actually made the game more immersive. Since any stray word in a conversation could be the keyword to unlock further secrets in a conversation with someone else, I hung on every word. I filled a notebook with notes—"Talk to this person about mystic armor", "Ask that person about navigation", "Ask the mage in the woods at Yew about deep magic", and so on. I can certainly see how modern gamers wouldn't want to go through all of that note-taking or draw their own maps of dungeons. I probably wouldn't either, now that I'm not eight. Nonetheless, Ultima was an impressive work of art I'll never forget. I lived and breathed Richard Garriot's fantastic world for months until I finally made it to the final question at the bottom of the Stygian Abyss, ready to open the Codex of Ultimate Knowledge. And I kept getting the damned answer wrong, which resulted in me being sent back up to the surface and losing hours of work. Stuck within a single word of victory I finally gave up. For three years, I didn't play the game. And then one day, somehow all of the game conversations I'd burned into memory came together and I had it! I felt confident knew the answer to the last question. I booted the game back up, fought through the 8 levels of the Abyss, got to the final riddle, and with trembling fingers, entered my answer.
- danielweber 12y ago
  The raw answer never appears in the game, AFAIK. Smith The Horse was supposed to tell it to you, or a critical clue, but they forgot that part of the game. His two talk prompts are both "A" "A". Smith became a running joke after that; in each game, he would tell you something critical for the previous game.
reboog711 12y ago
I loved all the Ultima games. But, as others have said; I can't imagine putting in that much time today. [Because I'm old with responsibilities and can't spend 8-10 hours a day on a game for weeks at a time]. A few others mentioned cloth maps; so at the risk of tooting my own horn; here is the "Jewel" of my collection; a cloth map for the First Ultima game, apparently only released in Japan and very rare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMprGHococ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMprGHococ
pimlottc 12y ago
Nostalgia trigger warning: Classic PC games Seriously, there should be a warning--I just lost a few working hours. I don't think I've ever seen so much well-written, well-researched content about classic PC gaming and interactive fiction on a single site. Bravo!
JeremyReimer 12y ago
This was one of the first games I ever played on my brand new Packard Bell XT, with its tiny orange monochrome monitor running SIMCGA to simulate a 320x200 4-color CGA screen. It was a cracked copy, and so I didn't have a cloth map. Instead, I would use the in-game map "gems" to show a tiny part of the map, sail a little bit further, use it again, and so forth, all the time drawing a complete map of the world in pencil. I also didn't have a manual, and so I didn't know how to mix reagents to make spells. In one town I had to get past a magical barrier and didn't know how to make the "dispell" spell. I ended up writing a poor man's map editor in QuickBasic, finding the hex code that corresponded to the wall, then using a hex editor to zap that section out of existence. I figured that was some pretty powerful magic right there. While in the hex editor I found a strange bunch of text, including the words "Note: you can't win!" and "Yvonne Yu has big balls!" The latter was in the world map and manifested itself as a giant structure in the southeast ocean consisting of dozens of writhing characters floating in the sea. I took painstaking notes, writing down every possible hint I received from every person in every city. It took months. I became somewhat obsessed with the game, thinking about it during all hours. At one point I realized I wanted to equip all my party members with magic bows. I did this by going to the bridge just to the east of Castle Brittania and walking over and over until trolls appeared. Shoot, get treasure, walk back to Britain and sell, rinse and repeat. Over and over. I did get those bows though. Eventually I made it to the depths of the Stygian Abyss and faced the final question. That's when the game bugged out and would say nothing more than "It looks like you could use a good horse!" repeatedly. I figured this was Yvonne Yu's handiwork. Damn you, Yvonne Yu, wherever you are! A few years later I saved up enough to buy the Ultima 1-6 collection, which included all the games on a single CD with manuals and many of the cloth maps, and a single token (the metal coin with the virtues symbol on it from Ultima V). Disappointed that it wasn't the ankh, I went and bought an ankh on a chain from a street vendor and wore it a couple of times before it started feeling a bit weird. Anyway, I went back, using my handwritten notes, and finished Ultima IV completely, getting the end scene noted in the article. Ultima IV was my favorite game for a long time. Even then I knew there was something special about it.
- saraid216 12y ago
  > Eventually I made it to the depths of the Stygian Abyss and faced the final question. That's when the game bugged out and would say nothing more than "It looks like you could use a good horse!" repeatedly. I haven't played the game, but this struck me as suspiciously relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8022817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8022817
morsch 12y ago
CRPG Addict is replaying all computer RPGs - yes, all of them -- in chronological order and writes about his experiences. Here's his first post of many on Ultima 4: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/2010/04/game-16-ultima-iv.html http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/2010/04/game-16-ultima-iv.html If you've got any other 80s era CRPGs you want to read about, the likelihood of him having played it and written about it in-depth is pretty much 100%.
hyperion2010 12y ago
Damn, it would seem that I need to play this. After playing Fallout 2 my dream was the play a game like that set... in a fictional renaissance Italy with more tech and maybe some magic. There would be no evil in the world. Just the possibility to raise one town or family above the others and at the end of your life/game have a retrospective on how your actions made a difference in the world. Maybe dwarf fortress can get us close to this, because to pull it off you need a reference history (or rather set of histories) from which to compare. But the idea of being able to see whether you as an individual can actually make an impact on a simulated world seems incredibly valuable and educational. Sadly most cRPGs today have completely forsaken the idea of truly simulating the world in favor of narrow story telling. What happened to games made by programmers?

151 points by kryptiskt 12y ago

I think one essential part of the Ultima formula was its geometric discreteness- The world was one in which the physics is broken into motion in orthogonal directions through discrete cells, and everything in the game leveraged this fact for maximum effect. It led to a really different gameplay feel than many modern games. Other games of that era had that as well, of course, but not many really leveraged it as well (Boulderdash and Archon would be two other highlights) Some modern games of course also use this approach to physics (Advance Wars comes to mind) but it is far less common.

jeffmk 12y ago
As someone who's never played this series, can you give more detail about what this means?
- math0ne 12y ago
  I think this is just the most complicated description of "grid system" I have ever heard.
bentcorner 12y ago
There were many "Gold box" DND games that also used this approach. How far you could walk and how your enemies were positioned were very important. I recall interesting tactics like standing on a downed troll so it couldn't regenerate. Most modern tactical RPGs use a similar approach. Shadowrun Returns, X-COM, Final Fantasy Tactics, and SpiderWeb's RPGs come to mind. Advance Wars adds an interesting resource control strategy to the mix. Personally I found it sometimes so difficult it bordered on a puzzle game.

jkarneges 12y ago

"I love to think about it, love the fact that it exists, that Richard Garriott had the courage to make it — but just thinking about playing it makes me tired. Like a work of conceptual art, to some extent the real power of Ultima IV today is just the fact of its existence." I played the NES version, which was probably a little more tolerable. Even though it's a slog, it is one of my favorite games at least in concept. I love how the air vehicle is a hot air balloon that you can't control other than cast spells to change wind direction. Good times when you run out of MP. The game is up there with Inindo for the SNES, which is another game that is a chore to play, but is one of my favorite concepts.

danielweber 12y ago
Nit: MP was rapidly regenerated in U4. However, you could run out of Wind Change spells. ;) I'm a dork.
- jkarneges 12y ago
  Ah yes, and I remember it not being so much the MP but the herbs needed in conjunction to cast. Can't make anything simple. :)

ascotan 12y ago

I loved Ultima IV. I think I still have the original cloth map and ankh somewhere. I believe it came with 5 1/4" floppys for the C64. You have to remember that at the time, that there were really 3 game media back then. A) board games like DnD, B) the 8-bit Nintendo/Gameboy and C) the PC. The Nintendo was cool and fast paced and was great to play with your friends, but the PC had all the adventure games. Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Bard's Tale II, Zork, etc. PC Adventure games were all MUCH more involved that today's stuff. All the DnD games had decoder wheels and 500 page journals. You were expected to play it slow, read the journal entries, and immerse youself in the game. The closest thing I can think of today that comes close is Skyrim. Most PC games today are built for kids with ADHD that aren't going to sit down long enough to use a decoder wheel. Heck, how many people actually read the quest text in world of warcraft? Ultima IV actually had pretty good graphics for the time. The UI layout was really great. Most of the other games of the time were based on the old "wolfenstein maze" view of a game. Having an top down map was quite innovative. There was a lot of 'searching' in Ultima IV. You had to find party members, you had to find secret doors. You had to find hidden items. You had to run around do /say job, /say name, /say health, /say quest.. to every npc in the game to see if they'd tell you something. Anyway loved the game, but it was built for a different time.

danielweber 12y ago
I'm going through all the Ultimas now. (Currently on U5 but I've been busy for a few weeks.) The sense of world-building is the series is fascinating. With a minimal amount of space a wide world was developed and it feels to persist a lot more than in any modern game, where a bunch of spaz happens and then the game is over. I'm not sure if having to write down notes in a notebook is something beneficial to game play, or just a limitation we had to live with. In a modern game you don't have to remember shit. If Joe tells you to ask Bob, you get a Quest Item reminding you to see Bob, and Bob has an exclamation point over his head to remind you to go to him. (About the article: it bugs me when people alphabetize the virtues instead of the proper order of HCVJSHSH. ;> )
- rstupek 12y ago
  Where did you get your copies of the games?

danielweber 12y ago

the only place where Ultima IV does even lip service to the idea that there can be conflicts between its virtues, debate about their merits, is in those questions that open the game There are some actions in game where you might have to choose one virtue over another. Such as running from battle versus being victorious in it. If you weak enough, you might have to take some karma-hits on the chin.

tunesmith 12y ago

Ultima IV and Infocom's Sorcerer are the only two games I remember solving/finishing without taking any hints. I remember both as hugely satisfying experiences. I even called the company to ask for an extra ankh so I could give it to my girlfriend. :-)

danielweber 12y ago
I came really close to finishing U5 without any outside help whatsoever, but I didn't even realize there was a harp puzzle. :/
- djur 12y ago
  The 'bad ending' to U5 is probably the cruelest in video game history, considering how hard Dungeon Doom is, and how you have exactly one chance to learn about the very existence of the sandalwood box from a single character that you're not supposed to trust and who will only talk to you if you tell them a password you get by doing something extremely unvirtuous... I'm pretty sure that you were intended to get through the entire game without finding the sandalwood box, get the bad ending, and go back and replay the whole thing the right way. That's how you got value for your dollar in those days. The sandalwood box in U5 is right up there in the pantheon of obscure paths to victory in games, along with the numerous unwinnable states in King's Quest V (eating the pie, not saving the mouse) and the legendary Grandmaster Ending in Wizardry IV (itself arguably the hardest RPG in gaming history).
  - danielweber 12y ago
    At least in U5, if you clear a dungeon room it stays cleared, so the next time through Dungeon Doom is lot easier. U4 really kicked us in the crotch, though, with its "INFINITY" riddle ending. There was only an extremely vague way of figuring it out: each time you would get an eighth, a runic letter would be put on the screen. But reading runes wasn't really required for U4, so at the time I didn't even recognize them as runes. Entirely by coincidence, I had a card where I had all the virtues listed horizontally, and I manually drew the "weird symbols" I saw at the bottom. When you play U5 you get good enough to read runes by heart, and I glanced at that card once and immediately saw the answer leaping out at me.

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[deleted]

jerf 12y ago
It's staggeringly difficult compared to modern games mostly because of the lack of affordances, a dodgy UI by modern standards, and despite the classic nature of the game, some bad design decisions (like the way the combat scales to the number of characters in the party, as mentioned in the article, which turns casual overworld encounters into a real pain). The opacity of the actions that led to what virtues is also quite difficult. For instance, in my playthrough I didn't work out that killing a fleeing animal is uncompassionate until I cheated by borrowing somebody else's save that had all eight virtues and losing my compassion then. (In real life, "putting a badly injured animal out of its misery" is at least debateably compassionate itself.... and we're talking about "snakes" that just took a good run at killing an armed warrior, I admit I can't easily work this into the 8 virtues per se but surely I shouldn't just let such things roam the countryside?) Speaking as someone in a very similar situation... I bet it took you a long time, though. Starting the game not even knowing to say "name" and "job" to absolutely everybody is a heck of a disadvantage to start. There must have been some way to be reminded in game, somewhere, because I worked it out too eventually, but we're talking hours of loss there. If you can get past all that, and write everything down, and understand the flow of the game, it becomes a simple game in concept, as befits its era. (Eight times, you must: Attain the virtue, acquire the mantra, locate the shrine, acquire the stone. There's some other quests you must do, a couple of optional ones, but not that many.) Were it not for the interminable combat and the general resource scarcity, it would not be a hard game today, especially if we spot you a couple of swings at a FAQ to pick up a trail you lost or the answer to one or two of the hardest puzzles (the answer to the very last question, again as answered in the article, being a very difficult one). In a way, the game must be hailed as being perhaps the most successful games of the time at hiding just how small it really is.
- djur 12y ago
  > For instance, in my playthrough I didn't work out that killing a fleeing animal is uncompassionate The manual, Hawkwind, and a number of random NPCs tell you not to kill non-evil creatures, and the manual actually specifically says which creatures are considered evil.

thisjepisje 12y ago

I have Ultima: Runes of Virtue for game boy lying around somewhere. Worth checking out?

jerf 12y ago
Mostly no. Ultima has a couple of bizzare cash-in games in the console world (in addition dodgy ports of the mainline series). Apparently that one isn't atrocious (... for a Gameboy game...), but it's not a good introduction either.
mratzloff 12y ago
Ultima IV and Ultima VII: The Black Gate are widely regarded as the high points of the series. The Runes of Virtue games are mostly forgotten afterthoughts, but they're supposed to be decent games for what they are (action-adventure games). They're not representative of the mainline series, however.

acomjean 12y ago

The game stands in contrast to Ultima 3 (which I loved as well). Ultima 3 you could go into a city fight and loot, then leave and go back again, and everything would be back to the way it was before. I remember exchanging hints with friends also playing.. I can't believe I finished it. Those games where hard. Some of the difficulty (and complaints in the article) was the lack of hand holding and guidiance the game gave you. Given the limited hardware of the time (64K memory...cpus of 1 -10 megaHz) these games were astounding.

clubhi 12y ago
I beat Ultima 4 when I was 13 on my Amiga 500. I found the game to be much easier than some other RPGs that I played when I was a kid. Bards Tale 1 comes to mind as about the hardest.
danielweber 12y ago
U4 reset cities, too, although the virtue penalties to massacring a town could be severe. In U5, you could permanently kill off city residents, even residents who still hadn't given you a critical piece of information or equipment.
pimlottc 12y ago
I remember how, after winning the game and maxing out my party, I would go clear out Montour East and Montour West (both of which were loaded with guards) just for kicks. > Cast Spell! Wizard spell-P Ah, good times.

samstave 12y ago

My first ever computer game that I got into was Utima II on the Apple ][e. I have played every Ultima since. I was also in beta and then a long time on UO -- which for me was my golden age of gaming as I worked in the Intel Game lab and played 4 accounts on 4 machines side-by-side on what was one of the fastest corporate inet connections at the time! I still reminisce about Ultima and UO a lot. I still think I have the Ultima V cloth map somehwere... I used to be fluent in the Rune Alphabet when I was in 7th? grade and my buddy morgan and I would write school notes in the Runes... EDIT: in one of the Ultima games, I recall finding a bug where you could dupe ships -- I had oceans full of ships that I could use to bridge between continents/islands... Anyone recall this dupe bug and how it was done?

davidjhall 12y ago
I seem to remember you could board enemy ships at sea? Something like you would sail out, X-It your boat and stand on the enemy ship and then board it. The enemy ship would still be there "underneath" and you would have another ship you could use.
- xipho 12y ago
  This! I remember it as well. Edit -> pretty sure it was II, or III... hell I don't remember, can picture it though. What about dropping a coin in the lake in I to get a random weapon, do it enough times and your puny starting character gets a blaster (most powerful weapon).
  - danielweber 12y ago
    In U2 you get ships by having some item that lets you "take over" the ship, and then by a pretty easy bug[1], duplicate the ship repeatedly. [1] It was hard to not exploit the bug.
wiredfool 12y ago
I remember 2 useful bugs in Ultima IV on the Apple //e -- * If you readied a weapon that you already had readied, one would get added to your store. Which you could then sell. * If you exited the balloon without landing, you could walk anywhere (over mountains and through forests without slowing down) and see anything to the edges of the screen.

snake_plissken 12y ago

The only Ultima game I played was Ultima VII. I love that game. It's one of the high water marks in computer gaming. I recall being around 7 or 8, playing it with my younger brother, both of us completely obsessed, but at the same time unsure of how really to play it. The game-play and world were for the most part completely open, and immense; you could either talk to every person you cam across and progress through the game, or you could explore the woods, dungeons or go to random islands complete with pirates to battle. Then there were the character development aspects of the game, like if you steal too many things, your companions will leave you. I loaded it up again a few years ago after seeing it for sale on GoG. It is timeless in every way. And now I am feeling very nostalgic :] Also, was there a secret way to kill Lord British in Ultima IV? I know of two ways to do it in Ultima VII. You can either surround him with like 8 barrels of gun powder, or double clicking this anvil thing in his castle while he stands under it at 12:00 PM every day.

mratzloff 12y ago
> Also, was there a secret way to kill Lord British in Ultima IV? The Ultima Wiki actually has an entire page devoted to killing Lord British in the various games: http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British

bcRIPster 12y ago

Ultima IV was awesome. Here's text maps that were passed around from when the game first came out. Designed for 80-column, tractor-feed output. Just print them out, and tape them together. Woot! =) World maps: http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_1.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_2.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_3.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__world_map__part_4.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... City maps: http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__city_maps__part_1.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV... http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV__city_maps__part_2.txt http://www.kitchencloset.com/home/bryan/text_files/ultima_IV...

xiaoma 12y ago

Of all the 1000+ games I've played from the original Nintendo games on, if I had to pick a list of five favorites, Ultima IV would be on it. The Ultima games were impressively ahead of similar games such as the Wizardry series. All of Wizardry I on consisted of building characters with stats, navigating a menu-based town with no graphics, taking steps through a first person perspective dungeon, and fighting monsters. Ultima I on the other hand, had equivalent dungeons, many towns with top down views and people to talk to, an overland world a space ship and more. The difference was staggering! In terms of plot, early Ultima IV was a quantum leap from its predecessors. Here were the goals in each game: Ultima I - Kill an evil wizard. Ultima II - Kill that wizard's evil apprentice. Ultima III - Kill an evil monster. Ultima IV - Become an avatar who symbolizes the eight virtues and inspires the people of the land! Needless to say, against the backdrop of RPGs with rigid or non-existent plots, it was refreshing and immersive in a way that would be very hard to replicate in today's flooded game market. In some ways the frustrating nature of the game that the author mentioned, like the conversation system actually made the game more immersive. Since any stray word in a conversation could be the keyword to unlock further secrets in a conversation with someone else, I hung on every word. I filled a notebook with notes—"Talk to this person about mystic armor", "Ask that person about navigation", "Ask the mage in the woods at Yew about deep magic", and so on. I can certainly see how modern gamers wouldn't want to go through all of that note-taking or draw their own maps of dungeons. I probably wouldn't either, now that I'm not eight. Nonetheless, Ultima was an impressive work of art I'll never forget. I lived and breathed Richard Garriot's fantastic world for months until I finally made it to the final question at the bottom of the Stygian Abyss, ready to open the Codex of Ultimate Knowledge. And I kept getting the damned answer wrong, which resulted in me being sent back up to the surface and losing hours of work. Stuck within a single word of victory I finally gave up. For three years, I didn't play the game. And then one day, somehow all of the game conversations I'd burned into memory came together and I had it! I felt confident knew the answer to the last question. I booted the game back up, fought through the 8 levels of the Abyss, got to the final riddle, and with trembling fingers, entered my answer.

danielweber 12y ago
The raw answer never appears in the game, AFAIK. Smith The Horse was supposed to tell it to you, or a critical clue, but they forgot that part of the game. His two talk prompts are both "A" "A". Smith became a running joke after that; in each game, he would tell you something critical for the previous game.

reboog711 12y ago

I loved all the Ultima games. But, as others have said; I can't imagine putting in that much time today. [Because I'm old with responsibilities and can't spend 8-10 hours a day on a game for weeks at a time]. A few others mentioned cloth maps; so at the risk of tooting my own horn; here is the "Jewel" of my collection; a cloth map for the First Ultima game, apparently only released in Japan and very rare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMprGHococ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMprGHococ

pimlottc 12y ago

Nostalgia trigger warning: Classic PC games Seriously, there should be a warning--I just lost a few working hours. I don't think I've ever seen so much well-written, well-researched content about classic PC gaming and interactive fiction on a single site. Bravo!

JeremyReimer 12y ago

This was one of the first games I ever played on my brand new Packard Bell XT, with its tiny orange monochrome monitor running SIMCGA to simulate a 320x200 4-color CGA screen. It was a cracked copy, and so I didn't have a cloth map. Instead, I would use the in-game map "gems" to show a tiny part of the map, sail a little bit further, use it again, and so forth, all the time drawing a complete map of the world in pencil. I also didn't have a manual, and so I didn't know how to mix reagents to make spells. In one town I had to get past a magical barrier and didn't know how to make the "dispell" spell. I ended up writing a poor man's map editor in QuickBasic, finding the hex code that corresponded to the wall, then using a hex editor to zap that section out of existence. I figured that was some pretty powerful magic right there. While in the hex editor I found a strange bunch of text, including the words "Note: you can't win!" and "Yvonne Yu has big balls!" The latter was in the world map and manifested itself as a giant structure in the southeast ocean consisting of dozens of writhing characters floating in the sea. I took painstaking notes, writing down every possible hint I received from every person in every city. It took months. I became somewhat obsessed with the game, thinking about it during all hours. At one point I realized I wanted to equip all my party members with magic bows. I did this by going to the bridge just to the east of Castle Brittania and walking over and over until trolls appeared. Shoot, get treasure, walk back to Britain and sell, rinse and repeat. Over and over. I did get those bows though. Eventually I made it to the depths of the Stygian Abyss and faced the final question. That's when the game bugged out and would say nothing more than "It looks like you could use a good horse!" repeatedly. I figured this was Yvonne Yu's handiwork. Damn you, Yvonne Yu, wherever you are! A few years later I saved up enough to buy the Ultima 1-6 collection, which included all the games on a single CD with manuals and many of the cloth maps, and a single token (the metal coin with the virtues symbol on it from Ultima V). Disappointed that it wasn't the ankh, I went and bought an ankh on a chain from a street vendor and wore it a couple of times before it started feeling a bit weird. Anyway, I went back, using my handwritten notes, and finished Ultima IV completely, getting the end scene noted in the article. Ultima IV was my favorite game for a long time. Even then I knew there was something special about it.

saraid216 12y ago
> Eventually I made it to the depths of the Stygian Abyss and faced the final question. That's when the game bugged out and would say nothing more than "It looks like you could use a good horse!" repeatedly. I haven't played the game, but this struck me as suspiciously relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8022817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8022817

morsch 12y ago

CRPG Addict is replaying all computer RPGs - yes, all of them -- in chronological order and writes about his experiences. Here's his first post of many on Ultima 4: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/2010/04/game-16-ultima-iv.html http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/2010/04/game-16-ultima-iv.html If you've got any other 80s era CRPGs you want to read about, the likelihood of him having played it and written about it in-depth is pretty much 100%.

hyperion2010 12y ago

Damn, it would seem that I need to play this. After playing Fallout 2 my dream was the play a game like that set... in a fictional renaissance Italy with more tech and maybe some magic. There would be no evil in the world. Just the possibility to raise one town or family above the others and at the end of your life/game have a retrospective on how your actions made a difference in the world. Maybe dwarf fortress can get us close to this, because to pull it off you need a reference history (or rather set of histories) from which to compare. But the idea of being able to see whether you as an individual can actually make an impact on a simulated world seems incredibly valuable and educational. Sadly most cRPGs today have completely forsaken the idea of truly simulating the world in favor of narrow story telling. What happened to games made by programmers?