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[LordHogFred]

If people want me to I can upload Ultima 7 Pt 1 and 2 with both expansions. Or just Pt 2 and expansion if thats all thats needed .

Ultima is just THE BEST set of of games ever period. I play Ultima Online and it is by far the best MMORPG out there it has everything in an Ultima universe what more could you want :bleh:.

I've played Black Gate and Serpent Isle and both are great. I also played Ultima 1 just cos I'm weird :whistle:

[Borodin]

Originally posted by LordHogFred@Jan 7 2005, 09:29 AM
I've played Black Gate and Serpent Isle and both are great. I also played Ultima 1 just cos I'm weird* :whistle:

It was the first game I saw demo'd in a store, but it was on a Commodore. When I asked the clerk (this was in 1981) whether it would be available on the PC, he said, "Probably in about a decade or so." Talk about trying to make a sale based on lies. :whistle: I think the series really picked up with Ultima IV, and each succeeding title was a huge leap forward through both parts of Ultima VII. With Ultima VIII, it was clear that the developers had lost interest in RPGs and moved onto action titles (something which was generally true in Origin Systems' other games around that time), but they persisted in mislabeling Ultima VIII and IX in the hopes of gaining an extra audience. It didn't work for them, but it certainly did when Blizzard's PR picked up and reversed the concept for their minimalist action title, Diablo, which they marketed as an RPG.

[MasterGrazzt]

Diablo was like a Roguelike with about 11/12ths of the interactivity removed.

You can really tell that Borodin here is right about Ultima 8 when you look at the fact that Crusader: No Remorse and it's sequel No Regret, (both awesome games by the way) two hardcore action titles are based on the U8 engine.

Ultima 8's idea was very interesting. Strand the Avatar in a hostile world. See what he would do to get out. Explore his dark side. Too bad they didn't focus on fleshing out the plot and concept of the game instead of jumping from platform to platform. And also, they forced you to be bad. At the very least they should have made the less virtuous actions the absolute last resort and have the Avatar express regret about the whole thing.

[Borodin]

Originally posted by MasterGrazzt@Jan 7 2005, 03:06 PM
Ultima 8's idea was very interesting. Strand the Avatar in a hostile world.* See what he would do to get out. Explore his dark side. Too bad they didn't focus on fleshing out the plot and concept of the game instead of jumping from platform to platform. And also, they forced you to be bad. At the very least they should have made the less virtuous actions the absolute last resort and have the Avatar express regret about the whole thing.

What you suggest--doing evil to progress, and considering the implications--would have been perfect: very much the kind of moral dilemna that Garriott was trying to put players in back in Ultima VI and VIIa. It's too bad as you point out that he decided to concentrate on non-stop activity. And such poor choices of activity, too: dying if you jumped and missed a rock in a small stream you had to cross; getting killed if your messy inventory backpack (which couldn't be organized, remember) didn't open correctly to have the right random attack spell scroll immediately available--since inventory checking occurred in realtime.

This wasn't anywhere near as bad as Ultima IX, though. Do you remember the insulting way monsters would walk around humming and whistling if you checked your inventory? Garriott's way of telling you how un-RPGish in his opnion your actions were. Breaking the illusion of reality to condemn players probably isn't the best way to sell a title, in my experience. And we won't even go into the braindead AI, aboslute linearity of the title, dull dialogs, absence of a party, and horrific bugs...

[Borodin]

Another troll heard from. Back to the subject at hand...

I think Ultima VII would be far better known if Origin Systems' games at that time had not employed a form of proprietary memory management. This was towards the end of DOS, before the battle of the graphical user interfaces, and expanded and extended memory were necessary to handle all the coding in this huge game. As Garriott did with his other games, however, as soon as things changed, support was dropped. Origin Systems re-released Ultima VII, but they never bothered creating more than a sheet of suggested advice for a workaround. It's only thanks to the Exult people that we can really get the full flavor of the titles, today.

[MasterGrazzt]

I think another feature needed for U7 is inventory management of some sort. I'm not sure what kind, though

[Mad-E-Fact]

It's called realism. When you drop everything in your backpack you don't expect it to be magically sorted. The way to do it is to have different bags, for food, armor, weapons etc...

Nice feature with exult is you have the keyring from SI throughout the whole game, that already helps a lot.

[Borodin]

Originally posted by Mad-E-Fact@Jan 9 2005, 10:13 AM
It's called realism. When you drop everything in your backpack you don't expect it to be magically sorted. The way to do it is to have different bags, for food, armor, weapons etc...

That was how Garriott felt, too. But for all his claims of realism, they're flawed. First, by the assumption that people keeping things in their backpacks would not use some kind of arrangement and order for quick access. Second, by assuming his selection of portions of physical reality to include a game were automatically the right ones everybody would want. And third, by not realizing how constant access to an unsorted inventory with dozens of items for each party member would lead to buidling frustration on the part of players.

This also figures into Ultima VII's aggravating implementation of food needs. Healthy team members don't require it, but each will continually and individually shout for food as you wander until you give them some to consume. That's not realistic; that's annoying.

Nice feature with exult is you have the keyring from SI throughout the whole game, that already helps a lot.

Amen to that.

[MasterGrazzt]

Iolo: "Avatar, feed me! I am incapable of reaching into my own pack and consuming what I have myself! In fact, I'm going to need you to move my jaw with your hands to chew for me!"

[Mad-E-Fact]

Hmm, I don't recall having to feed partymembers constantly. I only played U7 with exult though, maybe that "feature" is not implemented there?