Comment by ascotan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ascotan | Hacker News Reader

I loved Ultima IV. I think I still have the original cloth map and ankh somewhere. I believe it came with 5 1/4" floppys for the C64.

You have to remember that at the time, that there were really 3 game media back then. A) board games like DnD, B) the 8-bit Nintendo/Gameboy and C) the PC.

The Nintendo was cool and fast paced and was great to play with your friends, but the PC had all the adventure games. Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Bard's Tale II, Zork, etc.

PC Adventure games were all MUCH more involved that today's stuff. All the DnD games had decoder wheels and 500 page journals. You were expected to play it slow, read the journal entries, and immerse youself in the game. The closest thing I can think of today that comes close is Skyrim.

Most PC games today are built for kids with ADHD that aren't going to sit down long enough to use a decoder wheel. Heck, how many people actually read the quest text in world of warcraft?

Ultima IV actually had pretty good graphics for the time. The UI layout was really great. Most of the other games of the time were based on the old "wolfenstein maze" view of a game. Having an top down map was quite innovative.

There was a lot of 'searching' in Ultima IV. You had to find party members, you had to find secret doors. You had to find hidden items.

You had to run around do /say job, /say name, /say health, /say quest.. to every npc in the game to see if they'd tell you something.

Anyway loved the game, but it was built for a different time.

I'm torn as to whether I agree. If there's one thing I appreciate about modern games -- games within the last 10 or so years -- is that they respect my time. There's a lot we could unpack here, so I'll just be brief. Ish.

While it might have been awesome at the time (I loved Ultima IV) I'm not a kid anymore. I don't have summer vacation. I also don't have ADHD. What I do have is an hour a day to play a game before bed, so that game damn well better make it worth my while.

Besides, the consistent popularity of MMOs and particularly MOBAs belies the whole idea of ADHD as driving factor. Both reward a large investment of time & mastery. And both are practically PC-only.

> There was a lot of 'searching' in Ultima IV. You had to find party members, you had to find secret doors. You had to find hidden items.

No kidding. One of the party members, Geoffrey (who was a fighter and represented the virtue of Valor) is behind a locked door in a game where it's not entirely easy to buy keys to said doors.

My father, brother and I had the hardest time of finding the shepherd companion (Katrina). I think in the end we solved the problem by starting the game as a shepherd, which is basically "hard mode" as you have the weakest starting position (level 1 out of 8, whereas other starting characters begin at level 2 or 3), you can never use magic, and you start off on a small island near a ruined city.

Much later on, we found the damn shepherd, south of the starting point in said ruined city, entirely off of any road there.

Using Katrina is definitely "hard mode." Her best weapon long-range weapon is the sling. And you need to get her up to level 8 to complete the game.

My friend and I had noticed we hadn't found her, so I decided to do a four-corner search of the town, and she turned up very quicklu. To be fair, I had been trained by Ultima III that there were often cool -- but not necessarily required for game completion -- things hiding the corners.

> Most PC games today are built for kids with ADHD that aren't going to sit down long enough to use a decoder wheel. Heck, how many people actually read the quest text in world of warcraft?

I find this ironic, as when I was a little kid I had the time and patience to use a decoder wheel. As an adult it doesn't seem as fun or interesting.

The decoder wheels were never fun. They weren't supposed to be fun. They were copy protection.

Some games liked to dress them up with thematically-appropriate text and images, which was nice, but it was still just a tiresome chore you had to deal with before playing the game.

I'm going through all the Ultimas now. (Currently on U5 but I've been busy for a few weeks.) The sense of world-building is the series is fascinating. With a minimal amount of space a wide world was developed and it feels to persist a lot more than in any modern game, where a bunch of spaz happens and then the game is over.

I'm not sure if having to write down notes in a notebook is something beneficial to game play, or just a limitation we had to live with. In a modern game you don't have to remember shit. If Joe tells you to ask Bob, you get a Quest Item reminding you to see Bob, and Bob has an exclamation point over his head to remind you to go to him.

(About the article: it bugs me when people alphabetize the virtues instead of the proper order of HCVJSHSH. ;> )

Where did you get your copies of the games?

Ultima 4+5+6 is on gog.com for $6:

http://www.gog.com/game/ultima_456

Windows and OSX, how about that?

edit: Just 4 by itself is free!

http://www.gog.com/game/ultima_4

GOG periodically has sales for the entire Ultima milieu in one big bunch.

> I'm going through all the Ultimas now.

Same here! I've loved the series since I was younger.

GOG.com is the best place to get them online, and even though I own physical copies I've purchased most of them from there.

One caveat: for the earlier Ultimas, I highly recommend going through the pain of installing fan-made patches that add the Apple II music to many of the DOS versions, upgrade the graphics to VGA, fix bugs, and so on:

http://ultimacodex.com/2012/04/patches-updates-for-the-gog-c...

With the MIDI patches, I'm able to play music for the early Ultimas through my Roland MT-32. :-)

You should also take a look at the xu4 project (open source game engine using the original resources: http://xu4.sourceforge.net) and LairWare's Mac-only version of Ultima III (http://www.lairware.com/ultima3/).

Responding to the article in particular, as much as Ultima VIII is reviled for its gameplay, I do enjoy the idea of turning the idea of virtue on its head: how do you continue as the Avatar (meaning, the literal embodiment of virtue) in a world where you have to do bad things for good reasons?

Yes, not only space, but also limited hardware. U5 was the last Ultima that still ran on 64kb of memory -- of course with several floppy discs to swap (a second floppy drive was a big advantage for that game) -- I think, there where 6 or 8 of them, but you had to swap mainly two (overworld and town disc).

It was the genius of that time, that a game of that size could fit into such limited hardware (64kB RAM, no HDD, only Floppy drives with 180kB size limit, <1MHz clock with unbelievable slow 8bit processor (I guess, today they sell such stuff as a smartcard "SOC" -- but of course with out the Floppy drive -- even the processors on SD-Cards are faster today, I guess) [Specs from the C64 version, but there existed versions at least also for Apple II with similar specs (It could even be, that it ran on Apple II with only 48kB) -- and (later?) of course for IBM PC].

U4 was technically similar to U5 (also several discs to swap and a big world on limited RAM), U5 did just drove the concept to the technical (and swapping-endurance-) limits. I think, they doubled the disc number (and so the content, I think 4->8 discs), improved the combat system (I liked the U5 combat system the most from all Ultimas I know) and made a new story, that showed the other side of "righteous" living.

Even, when I never found the time, to finish U5, for me it is still the best of all time.

To be a bit of a pedant, there was a C64 port of Ultima 6, the only version of the game that ran on 8-bit hardware. [0] But it's essentially unplayable due to the technical limitations, as you've outlined. To quote one Youtube comment: "You would take two steps and data would load from the disk. Talk to someone, more loading. Walk a bit more, more loading. Dragged too much."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcMljmsPkGM

Ok, my information was, that U6 was released on IBM PC and the developers did not support older (8bit) HW any more.

Was this an official port?

I tried to play U6 much later, but I hated the new controls, as much I remember.

There were no (authorized) 8-bit ports of Ultima VI at all, unless EA licensed the name to an outside developer as a platform license of some kind. We got as far as building the U6 world editor on our Apples, but it's not a good sign when your content looks lame and outdated at the start of a long game project. The performance gap between PCs and the 8-bit platforms was just too great. 20 MHz 386 systems with 256-color graphics were shipping by that point, and that meant that no art assets could have been shared between a contemporary PC title and an 8-bit version of the same title. Any attempt at creating an Ultima VI on an Apple or C64 would have resulted in a very different game.

Nobody was happy about leaving the Apple II behind, but we got over it in a hurry.

EDIT: Holy cow, I looked at the YouTube link and somebody actually did greenlight a C64 port, it looks like. Utter insanity, I can't believe that happened!

Yeah, they basically ginned up a half-finished alpha, realized it was impossible to complete, and then fucking shipped it anyway. Not a pleasant birthday present for a twelve-year-old boy who had idolized Richard Garriott up 'til then.

Sorry to hear that, seriously. About all I can guess is that they were so desperate for cash that they were making some really bad judgment calls. This would have been just prior to the EA buyout, I imagine. (I'd left by then.)

The C64 port of Ultima V almost drove the guy who did it into a rubber room, and he was an extremely sharp guy. I just can't believe anybody thought it was a good idea to put U6 on an 8-bit computer in 1990, or to ship the result to paying customers. If it weren't for that video, I would have said chipsy was smoking crack.

It was an official release, but it was a piece of shit. It was ugly, buggy as hell, missing major gameplay features, and had no sound whatsoever. Not only was it constantly grinding the floppy drive, but it came on four double-sided disks, and--just for example--the conversations were on a different disk than the towns, so every time you tried to talk to someone, you had to switch disks, wait 30 seconds, and then reverse the process when done.

Sometimes, you would drop an item and it would turn into a wall square, permanently. Sometimes a stack of items--ammo, potions--would stop decrementing when you removed one but keep incrementing when you added one, which sounds great except that U6 had encumbrance, so you wound up unable to carry anything but 60 pounds of potions. If, say, you fired a bow at an enemy four squares to the northeast, instead of animating an arrow flying at them, it would animate a bow taking four steps north, then four steps east. Ground hazards (bear traps and lava) proced every time you moved the cursor, so you could kill anything in one round by tossing a bear trap under them, wiggling the joystick for a while, and then ending your turn so the game would notice they were dead. Sometimes the game wouldn't actually notice when a PC was supposed to be dead--the whole party could splash around happily in lava as their HP went further and further negative.

I had been a huge Ultima fanboy up 'til then, but that was the last one I ever played. Twelve-year-old me felt seriously betrayed. They should never have shipped the C64 version.

Speaking of memory issues, I could've sworn that the Apple version of U5 required a 128KB //e. I just went and checked the box on my shelf, and you're right, it only required 64KB. It's a memory issue -- with my memory -- because I probably wrote about 50% of the code in question. :-P It's cool to see that people are still enjoying it, though!

I would read a blog post about your experiences.

It would be about as exciting as any other programmer's blog, I'm afraid. This guy's other blog entries on Ultima and the history of 8-bit RPGs in general are outstanding -- see http://www.filfre.net/tag/garriott/ for a lot of fun background details. I'd recommend reading his stuff instead. :)

One correction I'd offer: Richard never received a letter accusing him of being a "Satanic Perverter of America's Youth," at least not in so many words. That particular sobriquet was mine, after he made the mistake of letting his car windows get a bit too dirty. It was hilarious at the time... but I 'fessed up pretty quickly because he was either genuinely mortified, or doing a great job of acting like it.

Have you heard of or tried Ultima V: Lazarus?

It's a fantastic total conversion of Ultima V using the Dungeon Siege engine. It requires that you have Dungeon Siege or Legends of Aranna installed (won't work with Dungeon Siege 2). The (almost) complete Ultima V with extra sidequests and the option of becoming an evil Avatar. It's one of the best game mods I've ever played. I believe Richard Garriott himself gave Team Lazarus a big huzzah.

some things from the original U5 couldn't be implemented in the DS engine. The blink spell had to be cut, for example.

http://u5lazarus.com/

Not yet; I'm not finished tearing Ultima 5 to pieces and decoding every single thing about it. ;) After that, Lazarus, and then U6, which I've never played. It will be interesting to see how a fresh play of an Ultima game goes for me at this stage in my life.

Have you played any of "The Bard's Tale" -- We had EXTENSIVE notebooks and maps from that game, much more than in Ultima.

I think BT4 was the hardest, if I recall -- and the walkthrough books were also hard for us to get back then and both reviled and revered.

If your doing nostalgia marathons, try that series as well.

I played Bard's Tale III Thief of Fate for HOURS and HOURS when I was younger. I didn't understand the concept of grinding back then, so I never made much progress beyond the 3rd world (there were 8 if I remember correctly). Mostly because I kept getting into trouble by not building my characters up enough to be strong enough to tackle the next section.

I had this idea in my mind for the longest time that I would go back and try to replay that game with what I know now and see how much better I could be at it.

So I tried, and you know what?

The game is fucking terrible. It's nearly unplayable. It's tedious, the graphics suck, the sound sucks, the interface sucks, the combat sucks. It does not hold up. I can't believe I spent weeks of my childhood playing this garbage.

On the other hand, Ultima VI and Ultima VII are as good as the day they came out.

HAHA, thanks for that - My memory is completely clouded in 7th grader nostalgia... so I appreciate you having a much mre recent objective look at the game :)

I recall having a blast in bards tale, and memorizing the exact arrow keys to get from town to dungeon entrance without even looking at the screen.

I recall dutifully mapping out all dungeons on graph paper.

I played a ton of Bards Tale 1 on my Apple 2. I don't think I ever passed it, though. For me, after seeing Bard's Tale I could never get into Ultima--the 2d top down graphics were just too poor compared to Bard's Tale's 3d view of the towns and dungeons.

And I definitely remember mapping out all the dungeons and Skara Brae on graph paper. Eventually I borrowed the hint book from a classmate and photocopied the whole thing.

Later, when my friends were playing Ultima V, I was playing Dungeon Master on my Amiga. I just couldn't get over the graphical difference. I never understood Ultima...

I got hooked on TSW [1] recently. Two years old it should count as a modern game where you probably need to take notes quite a bit.

People playing can hand out "play for 72 hours" invitations. If you are interested, let me know.

1: The Secret World, in the MMORPG genre with.. attitude and interesting ideas

But did you start with Akalabeth?

No, it wasn't in the package. :(

They have a version available for iOS. It's just a simple BASIC game that evolved into Ultima I (also written in BASIC, with some Assembly).

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