Ultima VII: Revisited | Hacker News Reader

Ultima VII: Revisited

u7revisited.com

229 pointsibobev54 comments

Reminds me a little of the Ultima V - Lazarus[1] project, where volunteers re-implemented the entire game in the Dungeon Siege 3D engine. They also added tons of new characters and dialog, side quests, a richer plot, and new artwork and music. They did all this and managed to keep the major plot and game elements the same. They actually managed to greatly improve on what is unarguably :) the best Ultima of the series.

1: https://www.u5lazarus.com

I think Lazarus is one of the greatest game mods ever made. They even added the option to become an evil Avatar and side with Blackthorn.

How do they handle hidden dialogue options? One of the most amazing things about the series before 3d was you just talked to people about things and often they had something to say about the topic. Like you can ask just about anyone about the avatar or blackthorn. There’s a donkey that figures out he’s inside a video game, etc.

the download links are all broken. try

https://ultima5.ultimacodex.com/ultima-5-lazarus/

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/

Wow. Thanks. It’s amazing that games like these exist for years on Steam and never surface when I search for new games with those tags.

Moonring is indeed absolutely top-notch! There’s a Mac version as well, and it runs on the Steam Deck. It’s definitely a plausible spiritual successor to Ultima IV. I’m shocked that the existence of an absolutely free game in this genre hasn’t made more of a splash.

Ultima IV is already an absolutely free game in the Ultima IV genre. How much of a splash does it make?

How could it be free? Is there a story behind that?

As far as I can tell it's just one person's labor of love.

"Hi folks. I've loved RPGs since the early 1980s, and grew up playing games like Lord British's 'Ultima' series and early Roguelikes. This is my love-letter to a style of gaming that has largely fallen out of fashion: with its vivid, bright sprites overlaid on stark black backgrounds, true open-world gameplay, and lack of handholding. The days I spent playing these games were spent in joyful exploration and discovery, venturing into the dark unknown, a co-author of the experience, filling in the gaps left by the primitive art with my imagination. For those of you who did the same, I hope Moonring recaptures some of the spirit of those days for you. For those who did not, I hope that the more modern conveniences you find in this game allow you to catch a glimpse of what we did 40 years ago."

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode

Still real mode, just a variant.

Thank you for this rabbit hole. I don't remember why, specifically, but I do remember there being a rather annoying sequence I needed to go through in order to "boot" to U7. Just to hopefully be greeted by that weirdo in red.

Yeah that first day trying to play it after Christmas was a lot of fun ”wait, what?”

As a 10 year old at the time whose first exposure to memory management in general was the boot disc for Ultima VII, that game was the epitome of things that led me to love hacking things together.

This and Strike Commander are why I used a really weird serial port mouse driver I found on a BBS but used like 1/10th as much memory as the default mouse driver that came with the mouse.

But it got over the last hurdle of not having enough space.

Formatting config.sys and autoexec.bat was an artform.

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!”

Being a PK (as well as a thief/PK hybrid) in UO is some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. There's nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of being a fugitive and surviving, picking people off and scavenging what you can before the fuzz arrive.

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!

There isn’t an mmorpg game to date that has recreated the PK experience of UO.

I say this as someone who was very heavy into PvP in UO. There's a reason for this. Most PKs wanted to be wolves. Very few players want to play a game where they're sheep.

I spent most of my time tracking down the wolves and fighting them. So so so many of them would run away the second anything approaching a fair fight presented itself to them. On my shard, over time there was a group of us representing the spectrum of "good guys" and "bad guys" but who weren't just trying to be assholes who bonded & became friends. When playing in character we'd fight each other. And then when some band of asshat PKs would go around being jerks, we'd out of character join forces and go stomp their ass.

Same! I played a ton of UO and met many friends on it. Never played any of the single-player series for more than a few minutes. Played some Ultima Underworld which appeals to me but it didn't stick.

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.

[1] http://www.spidweb.com

[2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/arx_fatalis

To this day my ringtone is 'stones' played just how it did from the midi setup in my family PC. It still gives me a sense of magic and possibility, all these years later. To everyone else it's just a weird old man with beeps and boops for a ringtone.

This is awesome, keep up the good work! Have liked and subscribed =)

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!

Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140645

Whenever i see a Dungeon Keeper pic i am immediately inclined to go play again. If you havn't seen, there's a wonderful fan expansion fixing basically everything: https://keeperfx.net

> 2024-09-24 5 months ago

> xtremeqg shared his PR that allows KeeperFX to be natively compiled on Linux. It still needs a lot of work, but a Linux release is getting very close!

Exciting!

[0] https://keeperfx.net/history

It’s still isometric, luckily. I always wanted to have Ultima VII with Ultima VIII perspective, and this is kind of a superset of that.

I gave up on Ultima VII when some wolves attacked my party in the forest and I couldn't find my downed party member.

That was the day and age when you only had the manual to help you figure out UI problems instead of asking people on The Internet. By the time I had access to somewhere to ask I was too busy playing Starflight. Which for the kids is the second version of No Man's Sky, or No Man's Sky is the third version of Starflight.

Yeah changing perspectives would be really helpful. I vaguely recall that in Serpent Isle behind the wall forming the final room (where you're supposed to stick the three McGuffins into the slots) they're just… sitting there on the floor. Probably some way to test the end game sequence that didn't get removed because you needed to turn on cheats and move the wall to find it.

There's a pond surrounded by fallen leaves. Somewhere in the leaves is a key. The key opens a shed, the shed contains an enchanted garden hoe that apparently hits like a truck. I never did find that key.

Surrounding that particular river and pond system between Britain and Cove is a very polluted lake. "Lock Lake," they call it. Miranda in Castle Britain is attempting to sign a document to clean it up.

On the outskirts of the lake are dead green trout. There are two variations of them. One is food, and the other acts as a container. The two are upside-down from each other. You can eat the food ones without any problem. One of the storage-trout (What a fun sentence.) has the key to the shed.

Note that it's hard to find that one. It's mostly underneath a plant, so check for odd green pixels beneath plants. I believe it's closer to the western edge of the lake, just before it curves around near the northwest corner of the lake. It's located on 2 North 48 East, if you have a sextant. The upsidedown trout with the key is physically located next to a green piece of garbage that looks like a diagonal broadsword blade. It's beneath "Cattails."

By the way, there's a body on the muck in the lake if you can build a bridge to it. It has nice stuff. 5 North 54 East.

Well shit, I'm pretty sure I wasn't even looking in the right spot.

Did you even meet the unicorn?

It's quite the creature. Did you ever visit the dungeons near Minoc? They're never really explained in-world, as far as I can tell. It's probably one of the biggest mysteries of the game, despite how inconsequential and boring they are. They're probably a callback to some other game's dungeon that had more content.

this is just a recreation, not an expansion, but xu4 is playable on linux without wine.

https://xu4.sourceforge.net/

Dear Larian Studios,

I have been a very good boy this year, and for Christmas I would like...

This is remarkable. I tried to replay U7 over the pandemic and it was just too clunky, even with Exult. This looks like it addresses my issues while perserving the original aesthetic.

AI voice acting on-the-fly from in-game text would be slick.

Tangent - Do any games let you set a speed multiplier for in-game speech? I'd love to run dialog at 1.5x like I do for podcasts.

Dungeon Keeper I had really good graphics for those PC requirements.

recommended system: 133mhz cpu with 16MB of ram

I even played it after II came out because it felt so snappy and fast

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.

Akalabeth was my first experience as a kid seeing a dungeon crawler game and I still feel the excitement and wonder of it.

Ultima VII was an absolute joy of childhood. It will always stand apart as a landmark in immersive game writing and design with soul. And the Ultima V Lazarus remake was a stunning community achievement.

I'd be interested in seeing a living, breathing game world simulated by AI under game writers' guidance.

Irrelevant, but just in case it rings any nostalgic bells, when I see graphics like that I remember Dink Smallwood!!! What a nice game that was!!

I've always found U6/U7 perspective especially vertiginous. Maybe the new engine will finally allow me to play them.

Does anyone know a game where 2d sprites sit on 3d chairs? This is something this engine will have to tackle.

Ultima online was my one and only Ultima and it’s weird to get pangs of nostalgia from Ultimas that I’ve never played.

IIRC the UO alpha looked even more like U7

Did anyone else ever get the glitch where the game switched from color to red and black? That was truly sinister.

I spent many summers playing Ultima Underworld 1&2. Only got to try U7 one weekend.

Would any code from the Exult project be useful to help implement the gameplay?

Looks cool. I loved Ultima II and III as a kid. Even wrote some text walk-throughs back then. Played them on Apple //e and //c, the last Apple products I ever owned (or ever will). I also ditched all Windows about 25 years ago.

I suppose to play on Linux though, I would need to run some Wine setup huh?

DOSBox if you want to run them locally, or a web browser if you want to play them immediately: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Ultima_III_-_Exodus_1983

See also related discussion from yesterday:

Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140645 (48 comments)

uhm.. I might be a part of your guy's hist...

In 1997~ish, I was on the Intel team to test celeron procs on games (the team was 2 ppl, me and my best friend...

We had a bank of ~6 machines and accounts on a T3, and we rand circles around y'all PVPing the heck out of everything...

Dread Lord Phlux, Dread Lord Mym, HellFire Club)

It was my golden days of gaming, but it was because we were testing the new SIMD instruction sets in procs on celeron...

However, we had a T3 to desktop whilst everyone else had 56K modems... hahha fools...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier

(we were the reason you claimed "died due to lag")

*mym went on to be an EVP at BLIZZARD btw)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com