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Ultima VII Revisited

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Re: Ultima VII Revisited

#11
Exult did this decades ago :).

On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play.

BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.

Re: Ultima VII Revisited

#12
post #11

Exult did this decades ago :). On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play. BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.

Ultima 4 was good story wise, but the combat was extremely tedious with each in your party only being able to take a single step per turn. This was particularly annoying when facing easy to beat foes. The SSI AD&D games which only came out a little after U4 had a superior system, where each character in the party could move multiple steps (depending on stats) and so could the mosters. That system, while also repetitive, was much faster for combat, not to mention much more strategic and fun.

Later Ultimas, like U7 instead went for a streamlined realtime battle which was much better. That went overboard with the at the time infamous U8

Re: Ultima VII Revisited

#14
post #11

Exult did this decades ago :). On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play. BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.

There are a couple of references to earlier games, but if you read the manual then you know enough to just get started with QotA (Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar). QotA, WoD (Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny), and TFP (Ultima 6: The False Prophet) kind of make a trilogy (the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' trilogy) and you can port your character over between one game and the next, but they're perfectly playable by themselves. While TFP has the best story of the 3, I consider QotA my favourite because I love the concept of an RPG without a big evil villain. It's a story of a normal person cleaning up their act and becoming an exemplar of virtue and I love it.

Ultima VII is again perfectly playable by itself, but, yet again, it's best if you thoroughly read the manual for all the background information you need. There's an old joke of Bethesda introducing a new feature for one of the Elder Scrolls games (NPCs have schedules and go about their daily life! You can bake bread!) and the response being that Ultima VII already did that back in 1992.

Re: Ultima VII Revisited

#15
post #6

Vaguely related but there is this whole set of videos on the production of the Ultima series on Youtube by Majuular that I've been playing while working out. Just such a different time, I almost regret missing it. His video on 7 and serpent's isle brought back a lot of memories (although my preferred origin game was Wing Commander) https://youtu.be/0NyaGRNH2zE

The one on Ultima Underworld is my favourite. What an incredible game, so ahead of its time.

Re: Ultima VII Revisited

#18
post #11

Exult did this decades ago :). On Ultima VII, can you play the 7th series without playing the previous ones? I mean, are these games standalone? Because Ultima IV it's always praised to be an incredible RPG to play. BTW, Scummvm will happily play Ultima 4, 6 and 8 games too, with better controls and support.

> Exult did this decades ago :).

Tbf though, Exult kept the original fixed 2D overhead perspective which is a bit hard to grock when used to what has now become the 'traditional' camera angle for isometric games.

Revisited moves the entire game world into 3D and it looks magical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4

Re: Ultima VII Revisited

#19

My first thought was "How is this different from Exult?" (which is a relatively vanilla reimplementation of the game). Some of the video segments here make differences clearer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mbJcOEwKJ4 While Exult basically matches the graphics of the original game, this is closer to "3D Ultima VII", with rotatable views and more interactivity in the game. It gives it what looks like a kind of voxe…

Whiplash warning: seeing the portal in the video just threw me back 30 years!
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