as an outsider, what's the appeal of the Ultima series?
writing? combat? exploration?
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 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
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As an outsider, what's the appeal of the Ultima series?
as an outsider, what's the appeal of the Ultima series?
writing? combat? exploration?
|
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
|
freedom
kek
This dude: got it. That and interactivity.
First of it's kind as well as a lot of freedom and choice making. Ultima 4 was doing shit that you still can't do in modern games
>Ultima 4 was doing shit that you still can't do in modern games
Which is funny, because Ultima actually inspired modern games. The creators of the first Grand Theft Auto said they were inspired by the freedom found in the Ultima games such as Ultima III (in particular) where the player had the freedom to go wherever they wanted to, kill or rob any npc they wanted to, etc.
When Ultima III was new, parents of children (that frankly had nothing better to do) actually sent letters to Origin saying that the game was too violent, not for any graphical reasons, (just look at it) but just the idea that their children could kill any character in the game. This is why
Ultima IV has the ethical mechanics and the premise of finding and fulfilling the "Eight Virtues." The idea of designing the game around morality was itself a response to the moral backlash that Ultima III received.
Then in a stroke of brilliance, Ultima V turned the morality feature itself on its side: when Blackthorne overtakes Britannia, the Avatar personally witnesses the consequences of the Eight Virtues when they are distorted and forcibly imposed on the populace
Ultima IV, V, VI and VII are the peak of the series. The Ultima games were not only landmark games for the role-playing genre and the most influential games of that genre, they utilized their intricate world and game mechanics to do things with the story and interactivity you couldn't experience from a non-interactive medium.
This isn't about an Ultima game, but read this blog post. You'll understand the appeal.
http://beyondfomalhaut.blogspot.com/2021/01/beyonde-nox-archaist-hottest-apple-game.html
In short, they're open world games more open than any Elder Scrolls shite ever was. Giant worlds, giant underworlds, lots of characters with whom you actually meaningfully interact, etc. For an example, you actually type what you say to characters and they react to keywords. In order to advance the plot, you need to actually learn and understand things. Somebody mentions a dungeon, so you talk to someone else about dungeons, and one of the characters mentions the legend, so you talk about legends and someone tells you the legend where the dungeon is named. Now you can talk about the dungeon's name and find someone who's heard about someone from another town where it might me located. Ask about the town you've just learned about and travel there with your bros. You can't get this kind of adventure experience from any other game series to this day.
Sounds really kino. One of the most poignant things pic related ever said was that people don't want convenience in games, they only think they do. Having to go through all that to find a dungeon sounds incredibly exciting.
Not retro, but it's one of the reasons why I turned on pro-mode on my first Breath of the Wild playthrough.
Your e-celeb sounds like he's missing a bit of nuance there. Convenience a.k.a. optimization is necessary up to the point it starts cutting into fun gameplay. This kind of quest system would work much worse in a game that didn't have as much world to immerse yourself in along the way (like Daggerfall).
>Your e-celeb sounds like he's missing a bit of nuance there.
Agreed.
>One of the most poignant things pic related ever said was that people don't want convenience in games
They do though. To the extent that they don't, the devil is in the details. What are the incentives to tolerate the inconvenience? To what extent is the apparent inconvenience actually involve some kind of fun or engaging gameplay? Or is it just tedium?
The rise of instancing in MMORPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft are really the perfect example of this and the sometimes unavoidable tradeoffs and decisions you have to make as a game designer. Instancing harms the integrity of the world and the sense that it's a real place, an alternate virtual reality. No instancing means players have to negotiate with each other, guilds must engage in diplomacy with other guilds, and so on. But lack of instancing leads to content-starvation. It leads to extremely boring gameplay like sitting in one room for 6+ hours grinding trash because that's the most sensible way to optimize XP and loot drops.
Players want pleasure to be delayed and earned rather than given immediately. It only becomes frustrating when the pleasurable part doesn't live up to the amount of inconvenience it took to get there. That's the whole thing.
>To what extent is the apparent inconvenience actually involve some kind of fun or engaging gameplay?
Yeah, I 100% agree. Most of the hearkening back to the days of "inconvenient" mechanics I see out there is actually a yearning for enjoyable but niche mechanics that aren't part of the modern game design vocabulary (like, say, having to find your own way based on textual clues and map-reading rather than being handed an objective marker). No one actually wants to masochistically go back to shitty, unreadable UIs or what have you.
People who don't actually like games do want convenience, and they have buying power, unfortunately. I've met these people. They'll literally just turn a game off if they can't sleepwalk through it while stoned.
I think you have two basic types of "gamers": those who want systems and challenges to interact with, and those who look at a box art and want to be the cool guy with the sword, and will resent anything that stands in the way of that fantasy.
FOMO is another big reason. Consoomers want to tell themselves that they have experienced every classic, but that's impossible. So what do they do? They pretend games that are not easily accessible to them are not true classics.
(OP)
Take a look at Divinity, The Elder Scrolls, and Gothic if you want to understand the appeal. All three series were heavily influenced by Ultima, particularly The Black Gate.
there is none lol
spoken like a true pleb
They're important, ambitious, and highly influential but good luck enjoying them so far removed from their time. Newer RPGs did it better. I tried 6 not long ago. I wanted to enjoy it real bad. Just couldn't take it anymore at about the halfway point. Maybe 7's this stuff but I dunno. Kinda just think Fallout is my CRPG crust cutoff.
I played 4 for the first time like 4 years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit despite it being so old.
Ultima VII is very different than Ultima VI. Its graphic user interface, for one thing, is entirely overhauled. (The graphic user interface and inventory management were among the weaker aspects of Ultima VI.)
Try it out with Exult, (which makes it run at any resolution on modern Windows OS/hardware, unless it has scaling options I'm unaware of I'd recommend a resolution below 1920x1080 though so things aren't too skewed.) you can find it in a matter of minutes for free and Exult itself is obviously completely free to download and boot the game with. Before you do you can read more about the game here:
hardcoregaming101.net/ultima-vii-the-black-gate
>Newer RPGs did it better
just watch a movie, zoomer
They should remake these, the horrid perspective and spastic movement is enough to drive any sane person away
This is called oblique or cabinet projection. Totally legit you low IQ mongoloid.
Don't like it? Frick far off.
They're not wrong about the spastic movement and the perspective. ASCII Ultimas looked better than this for sure.
Who gives a frick if it's "legit". It looks like shit and the two frame jerking they call animation isn't helping either. This isn't like tank controls, which require a higher IQ. Everyone can play Ultima, but that doesn't change the fact it plays and looks like ass.
You're right and they're wrong, but why the frick do you equate Ultima with VI and VII? Ultima objectively peaked at 4 or 5, depending on opinion. The sprite-based ones are garbage by anyone's standard. They're very weird and were the death of the series.
Filtered
>enough to drive any moronic pleb away
Good.
Ultima perspective is the most surreal shit I've found in retro games.
Sorry to hear about that
It's the "I want to do isometric but without the extra coding and processing that isometric would require".
I completely agree, it's horrible. Worse than the original visual style of the series by far.
I don't know how the frick anyone ever managed to play Tibia.
You have not the slightest idea against what limitations people coded in those days, dumbass kid. Go play with something shiny.
The problem with isometric is that you end up with a tilted grid which makes layout and movement confusing.
The oblique projection in Ultima 6 made sense since it preserved the normal grid of the tile based games and added some depth.
Keeping it for 7 where they got rid of grid movement was a bad decision.
They coulda just drawn things like Zelda III does. Surely that would have been fine. You can draw a somewhat 3D-looking world, and keep your simple, intuitive controls, and put a dude's head directly above his feet where they seem to belong, all at the same time. It is in fact possible.
Personally I'd rather get used to a weirdo scheme in which pushing right makes my character go up-right while pushing up makes him go up-left than get used to a weirdo scheme in which my character's head is NOT above his feet.
Which one is Zelda 3, Kamigami no Triforce or Yumemiru Shima?
I meant Link to the Past but actually Link's Awakening kinda works as an example too.
Ultima Underworlds have their own appeal as simulated 3D worlds with multiple options to solve problems within the game world, some of which were never planned for by the developers.
>ITT plebs
Are Ultima I II and III worthwhile beyond "I stubbornly want to play the whole series in order to see how its evolution"?
Play IV or V. And you must read the manual.
One is easy to get into because of how simple it is but you are still required to read the manual and write stuff down like the later Ultima games. Two is obtuse and hard at the beginning. Three is fun and sort of a glimpse into what the series would become but it also can be a bit tedious due to how encounters work.
Back then, for me, it was the VGA graphics and SoundBlaster 2.0 music/sound. Someone lent 7 to me and I got addicted to it and Final Fantasy 2(4 easy) at the same time. I liked exploring with full freedom and finding things. There were interesting characters and side stories around.
lonely moron
>Being a ruler of Britannia
>Literally cost half of the problem since Exodus
What's his fricking problem?
He's British
Literally cost half of what now?
i think that was supposed to say "caused" instead of "cost"
I only like the Ultima Underworld games but the appeal is that they (and System Shock 1, if you could even consider it an RPG) are the only good real-time DRPGs to this day.
>and System Shock 1, if you could even consider it an RPG
SS1 was made specifically because they were burnt out on making RPGs after crunching for a year to make UUW2.
How would one play Ultima on a modern PC? Is there an image guide out there like there are for other long series?