This is really nice work. It compels me to plug my attempt at an ultima vii -inspired project: https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim
This looks great. I see a Linux version; do you happen to know if anyone has tried it on a Steam Deck?
Ultima VII Revisited
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#82[flagged]
I remember playing Ultima VII back in '94 (or was it '95?). When the game started up, I could only feel wonder. It was so far ahead of the competition at the time.
The only other instance where I got the same "this game is way ahead of everyone else" feel was when I first played Morrowind.
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#83There's a YouTuber that's been going through and making in-depth retrospectives of each Ultima game that some here may find interesting. I've found them a pleasant watch and I don't usually go for this type of content. I never played the Ultima series until Ultima Online so I don't have the nostalgia goggles that I'd need to go back and play games this old (sorry, it's the truth) so these videos are as close as I'll…
As someone who played these back in the day and enjoyed them, I don't think I could even recommend them to myself today. Ultima VII is everything the other comments say it is... but it's also one staggeringly large nested fetch quest, with nothing much breaking it up.
I'd recommend some combination of the Bethesda open world games and the JRPG genre today. They're not the same, nothing really quite fills the Ultima gap that I know of, but between those two I'd call it close enough.
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#84There's a YouTuber that's been going through and making in-depth retrospectives of each Ultima game that some here may find interesting. I've found them a pleasant watch and I don't usually go for this type of content. I never played the Ultima series until Ultima Online so I don't have the nostalgia goggles that I'd need to go back and play games this old (sorry, it's the truth) so these videos are as close as I'll…
As someone who played these back in the day and enjoyed them, I don't think I could even recommend them to myself today. Ultima VII is everything the other comments say it is... but it's also one staggeringly large nested fetch quest, with nothing much breaking it up. I'd recommend some combination of the Bethesda open world games and the JRPG genre today. They're not the same, nothing really quite fills the Ultima g…
For years, Ultima VII was the buggiest RPG I ever finished the main quest on. Then I played Daggerfall.
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all the manuals and taking detailed notes[1]. Even doing that, they are quite hard. Nearly every single Final Fantasy game is easy to beat just by taking a bit of time to grind levels whenever you get stuck. There is a blogger who teaches a class on old games (I can…
The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You jus…
> If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.
The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.)
GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#86If you want to scratch that nostalgia itch, I recommend https://lparchive.org/Ultima-VII-The-Black-Gate/
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#87So funny to see this here, I was just looking into Ultima remakes last night, and saw this one among others. Looks really awesome. I never played any of the Ultima games back in the day, and have bounced off them when trying in later years. This should make Ultima VII a lot more accessible and playable. There's also a remake of Ultima Underworld being made in Godot: https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldGodot Hopin…
UU was teh shizz. I wonder what it would look like with photorealistic renders.
Ultima Underworld also came out before Doom!
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all the manuals and taking detailed notes[1]. Even doing that, they are quite hard. Nearly every single Final Fantasy game is easy to beat just by taking a bit of time to grind levels whenever you get stuck. There is a blogger who teaches a class on old games (I can…
The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You jus…
They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page.
Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#89My 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…
The 0.1.0 release video also has addition segments about feature improvements [1] with some examples of the 2D to 3D conversion process that are quite impressive.
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=25 0:25 to 0:40 has a bunch of the small scale objects being replaceable, rotatable, and animatable in 3D.
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=48 0:48 to 1:06 has bulk replacement of scene objects with personally chosen substitutes. (3D rotatable)
[1] https://youtu.be/Nmy4ClXXI84?t=67 1:07 to 1:25 has fixing broken geometry and creating fully textured 3D replacements.
With the current state of the engine, and the extensive personal editing features, much like the comment from VariousPrograms, it could be used as a platform for doing other games, modified quests, and multi-player MMO style games.
Re: Ultima VII Revisited
#90This is really nice work. It compels me to plug my attempt at an ultima vii -inspired project: https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim
This looks great. I see a Linux version; do you happen to know if anyone has tried it on a Steam Deck?
I think someone did but with an earlier build. If it doesn't work, drop me a note on itch.io and I'll see what I can do. Thanks!