Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems
exult.sourceforge.io
exult.sourceforge.io
Between this and recent substantial progress in VCMI and HotA for HOMM3, it is an exciting time for retro PC fantasy gaming.
Is that a problem? Do all games have to involve some kind of fighting?
Ultima VII's problem is that it sort of exhibits a desire from a design perspective to have that sort of combat, but in practice it's even less engaging than those mobile games where you select four of your characters from some gacha-based roster and fling them at four other characters, and the fight proceeds without you. At least in those fights you can understand what is going on. Ultima VII's combat is just the characters randomly walking around each other, playing some sword swinging animations, and then some things are dead and some things are not. Not only do you not have much useful input, you don't even have comprehension of what happened. Did you win handily? Did you scrape through? Is there something you could have done to change the outcome? None of these questions are answerable from the game. You can't even call this "realism", you have vastly less comprehension of what happened then people in real life have in real melee combat scenarios, as confusing as real life can be.
It would be better off by just removing it except combat is still sort of baked into the conflict in the genre and the basic design of exploring the world.
Since the ability to "read" the battles and react in any intelligent way is about nil, the game made up for it by making everything almost trivially easy, as long as you're halfway decently geared. It works against the design of the world.
This is the problem. They should either be good and meaningful, or somehow removed, but Ultima VII has just about the worst possible combination of attributes for combat to be meaningful in any way, yet it is still there. At least it's over quickly.
(The series kind of flamed out on the combat here. Ultima VIII's combat is also exceedingly bad, albeit in a completely different way. IX's was one of the earliest 3D "open world" games and while it may exceed its predecessors in being at least "semi-credible for the time", that's about as far as it makes it.)
I did play most Ultimas though. I don't remember the combat annoying me. Perhaps because I just wanted to get it done and move on with the story.
Young me figured out the rune writing after a few minutes of scribbling on paper, and after that did it purely visually (I didn't have the cloth and manual etc, got it with Creative Sound Blaster 16 CD and sadly never looked at the documentation). There were many puzzles I figured out alone and was super proud of. Those were super formative times, and Ultima 8, while cool in its own way, didn't have the same realtime speed and party control etc.
And physical media meant that as soon as your game or software was off store shelves your revenue went to $0. And even when it was on store shelves, if it was popular it'd rapidly end up in the million 2nd hand resale shops where it'd cycle through potentially multiple players and you'd again get $0.
Given how studios were dropping like flies back in the day, I don't think they were gouging at $60 - it was just a very different environment.
The best way of describing what makes them so great is that they avoid everything feeling like one of those fake-cardboard-cutout Western movie sets. Every other RPG I've played feels like this, the infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate (I've only played 1, not 2) being the canonical example. Everytime I run into an NPC or situation in Baldur's Gate it just feels like the characters start talking through a script that was written just for me, the player, to setup some problem for I, the player, to solve. This is of course the very definition of immersion breaking, because this artificial setup draws attention to the fact that you're playing a game, you're not actually in a real believable world. Baldur's Gate has fantastic combat (an area Ultima VII is terrible), but I think the way that the story is setup and told is boring and uninspired. And that goes similar for literally every other RPGs I've played: Mass Effect ("Hi I'm an alien from a new race you've never met, would you like me to tell you everything about how my race fits into the universe?"), Skyrim (Besthesda, masters of the anonymous, faceless NPC), the Witcher/Cyberpunk (the CD Projekt Red games are actually masters of this style of game design, because they use it as scaffolding for easily the best writing ever in video games, but they're still hampered by inherent weakness of the format: That the world feels like a prop to setup quests for the player to knock down).
In contrast, the Ultima games feel like they create the world first, so that feels alive and believable. And I don't mean by writing a bunch of lore (writing has it's format already, books, use game mechanics to tell your story), but I mean by creating a world piece by piece, character by character, city block by city block, room by room, each piece of furniture, individual dresser by individual dresser. Environmental story telling, game mechanic story telling, storytelling native to the format of of games. The tavern goes here, the barber lives here, these three friends meet at this pub, at this time every day, and discuss this. Ultima does this for every town and every character in the game, for even the most trivial NPC. There's no anonymous, faceless, story-less NPCs acting as walking props like in every other RPG. And once that world feels like a real believable place, one that you could just sit and watch at have it be interesting, like people watching through cafe window--existing through an intersection of mechanics (how NPCs move, day-night-cycles, how they interact with the environment, e.g., the classic "using flour to bake bread"). Only then are the player-driven interactions then built on top of this world, e.g., if you hear a rumor that the shopkeeper seems to disappear for a couple of hours after their shop closes each night, well you can wait till 5 PM and follow them and see what they're up to. Since everything is scripted to this degree, it doesn't feel like you've entered into a pre-programmed scenario for following just this one NPC, you can follow anyone in the game this way, it just so happens that some NPCs might do something interesting after you follow them, like maybe you see them hide a key under a plant and you can go investigate.
This way of having the player-driven gameplay come directly from mechanics that existed first to make a believable world, just makes for more interesting games in my opinion than anything that has come after. A game that's just a series of scripted encounters for the player to knock down is just less interesting.
It's not quite the same thing, because that example is about how other people treat you, not whether they've got lives of their own; but in a broader perspective, it's still about how much the game seems to be a prop for the player's enjoyment vs. being a proper world that doesn't fall apart five days after the player wins.
1. NPCs are unique
2. NPCs have plenty of interesting dialogues compared even to current games. I wonder why current games lag behind. If that is due to expectation of voiced characters or just an expectation that players are not interested in that.
3. NPCs have defined schedule. Seems like a basic thing (the schedule is static, not a real simulation) but still keeps the illusion of alive world and is absent in many current games, where NPCs are fixed, or just disappear outside business hours.
Companies like GoG (Grand old Games) have done a lot to "polish" the DosBox experience but it's still ... rough. Small things like mouse movement just feeling jank make a big difference.
A game can be _functional_ but if the UX is so poor/dated that it doesn't hold up, then I think projects like this make a lot of sense. Having high quality buttons, config menus that match modern UI expectations, and HiDPI font rendering goes a long way towards getting my non-technical family members to stick around.
It just makes it more accessible. But maybe my take is spicy. Anybody agree/disagree?
Something about Mondain?
Using it on Ubuntu to play with my brother who is on a Mac in another country and it already works quite well. We hit only one bug so far.
Would this be approachable for someone in 2025? I've played stuff like Chrono Trigger and dig 2D graphics. But 90s games always tend to have a lot of weird inconvenient stuff that makes them hard to play.
Those MS-DOS era game engine binaries are small enough to fit in LLM context. There’s ample gameplay footage available that could be used to teach the model what the output should be.