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On a totally irrelevant note, I know at this point it doesn't mean much to Broadsword to invest more into UO, but I really can't justify the lack of macOS client.
Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140645 (48 comments)
I never played the Ultima games but I did have a crippling Ultima Online addiction in high school for two years. This video definitely brought back some memories.
I have played a lot of Ultima-inspired games though. The Exile and Avernum series by Spiderweb Software [1] are childhood favourites. I also really loved Arx Fatalis [2], a love letter to Ultima Underworld.
Ultima online was my one and only Ultima and it’s weird to get pangs of nostalgia from Ultimas that I’ve never played.
I never played the Ultima games but I did have a crippling Ultima Online addiction in high school for two years. This video definitely brought back some memories.
“Eat that kal vas flam and have a side of in nox you PK sob!”
PKing had a deleterious effect on the community -- I'll admit -- but I had fun as both a PK and as a victim trying to escape or exact revenge. UO (pre-Renaissance) remains the multiplayer game with the richest social dynamics I've ever played. When they finally got rid of non-consensual PKing they totally destroyed this richness. Instead of behaving like real people in a community who work together to solve their own problems they had the benefit of inviolable game mechanics to protect them.
So people's reliance on one another disintegrated and they stopped engaging with each other. Without the threat of violence to settle things, people became anti-social and had no problem being very rude to one another. It was tragic!
And if anybody's looking for a new game with the Ultima vibe, I highly recommend Moonring, a free indie game from one of the creators of Fable: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/
Ultima VII ran in real mode and it wanted every single kilobyte of memory that it could steal away from DOS. They had some fancy optimized version of HIMEM that worked a little bit better than the stock DOS one and people started using it on all of their boot disks not just the one for Ultima VII.
Just uninstalled Akalabeth, Ultima 1, 2 and 3 last week. I was planning to play again but couldn't find any time because of many reasons. Plan was to continue with the rest of the series afterwards. If you're looking for them, GOG is your friend. On a totally irrelevant note, I know at this point it doesn't mean much to Broadsword to invest more into UO, but I really can't justify the lack of macOS client.
Ultima VII ran in real mode and it wanted every single kilobyte of memory that it could steal away from DOS. They had some fancy optimized version of HIMEM that worked a little bit better than the stock DOS one and people started using it on all of their boot disks not just the one for Ultima VII.
Ultima VII doesn't run in Real Mode, it runs in Unreal Mode. https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager
Still real mode, just a variant.
After this section…
> Ultima VII was in development from 1990 to 1992 (shipping in April ’92), and even though software 3D was taking off at the time, it hadn’t been designed as a 3D game (even though it used a 3D world) and that contributed to its issues.
> But software-rendered 3D games with isometric perspectives started coming out very soon after Ultima VII, and every time I saw one I thought, “This is what Ultima VII should have looked like.”
…there are clips from three games: Dungeon Keeper (June 1997), Myth II (Dec. 1998) and Grandia (Dec. 1997). Not sure if that really counts as coming out 'very soon' after Ultima VII!