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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

One of the sadder things I read today:

"What I was blindly ignoring back in my teen years was games like Elite, Ultima IV, Zork, MUD - games that fit just fine on the tiny possibility space my original PC enabled."

I had a (slap back of hand) cracked copy of Ultima IV. No User Manual. No Map. No Potions Guide. I had to create my own maps of the world, and permute ingredients to figure out all the potions. I spent three of the most glorious weeks of my life completing that game, and, to this day (close to 30 years later) I recall the level, (you couldn't restore health in the midst of a dungeon) in which I ran into the mirror image of my party and had to battle myself. And riding the balloon over pirate bay. Oh my, ...

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What I remember most about Ultima IV was the blind shop keep who determined if you paid her the correct amount by hearing the clink of coins. So you could buy anything for 2 coins so they clinked against each other. I thought I was so smart, but my 9 year old self didn't realize that the game was about building virtue...

What's particularly fun if you read some of the modern guides, now that the game is thoroughly understood, is how to game the system. Buy stacks of reagents from the blind women, crashing your honesty to the bottom, then boost it back up in the most expedient way possible later. Steal everything not nailed down in the early part of your run-through (if you play honestly the whole way through, resources are actually sorta hard to come by), then use the stolen money to give to the poor for Sacrifice, then later on fix your honesty (or whatever stealing counts against, I forget) in some expedient manner.

I find something quite hilarious about the idea of a MinMaxing Avatar of Virtue. Minmaxing often breaks the mechanics of a game, but it's rare to see it break the morality of a game the way it breaks Ultima IV.

Brilliant game.

Ultima IV was and continues to be the primary reason I do anything with games development.

For anyone who is an Ultima fan, you might want to check out Mortal Online by Starvault (based in Malmo Sweden). It's the closest 3d mmo in the same vein I have found so far (Full loot ffa pvp, guild wars, taxes, generally hardcore) I was very active in the alpha and first years of the game as part of one of the main guilds, which were quite rough due to bugs (and still so), but they have fixed many of their pipeline issues and have fixed tons of bugs and just released an expansion last week. There were no maps so I helped make the main map that everyone uses today for it: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Twm2yJ-ndrg/TymPaFeZbEI/AAAAAAAABh...

Ultima and Ultima Online are very different games, and the fans of each are different. I don't think an MMO can do what Ultima did, by its very nature.

Just so you know, not every fan of UO is an anti-social PK asshat.

No, but the game lends itself to it. =) But it's different from that, anyway. Ultima, I feel, is a game about you-the-player, whereas UO (and all MMOs, really) are games about you-the-collection-of-numbers.

Oh wow! Thank you for the large sized shit of nostalgia. What a wonderful game that is. Like you, I had to draw my own map. I never did finish it, because it was fun just wandering around.

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