When this game came out there was NOTHING like it. This was Bethesda before Bethesda was a thing. Huge open world, everything interactable, no loading screens... This game was a decade ahead of its time, Morrowind didn't come out until 2002. All the NPC's have houses, the shop keepers have houses, THAT THEY GO TO, and beds that they sleep in at night, they eat dinner after work, bake bread in their kitchens. NO ONE WAS EVEN ATTEMPTING THAT IN 1992. This was the most immersive game that existed when it was made, and its world is a lot more real than many games made today.
@@Jkend199 it's unreal just how amazing it is... Seems like everything Origin touched back then was a solid few years ahead of the competition. Amazing developer.
@@aquawalrus Richard Garriot is considered an eccentric nut now, and maybe he is, he was also a game development genius in his day. Ultima 7 is a masterpiece that a lot of dev's today could learn more than a few things from.
I laughed out loud when you said that we should be sure to attack you on a deeply personal level. That's hilarious. Just found this channel and I loved this video! Subbed!
@@aquawalrusonce people start transferring their own shortcomings or lack of insight onto you for no reason other than some imagined trigger in their minds, resulting in them making passive aggressive comments trying to put words in your mouth that at no point did you say or even remotely imply, THEN you know you're a real gamer channel
Great username. And i have only been here a few weeks or maybe a month myself. Love it when you find a channel that is almost exactly the style of video you like, about games your interested in or in a style you find appealing, it's a great thing
Pretty sad that Ultima 7 is still more rich in gameplay, world building, characterization and plot than all of Starfield. Yet it was considered a streamlined entry in the series at the time. I remember when Gamespot gave Parasite Eve 1 a lower score for being short for an RPG, because the game was only 20 to 30 hours long.
@@Se7enBeatleofDoom if you would have told me 20 years ago that RPGs from the 90s were the peak I wouldn't have believed you, but it seems to be sadly true. The good news is with this being my first Ultima game I've got at least 8 more to experience!
@@aquawalrus As someone who is a hardcore fan of Elder Scrolls 3 morrowind. I am still waiting for someone to make a spiritual successor to Morrowind. Icewind dale & baldur's gate 1 and 2 fans finally got Baldur's gate 3. At least GTA San Andreas fans almost have a spiritual successor in Saints row 2. GTA San Andreas is a better RPG than Starfield and fallout 4/76. I still stand behind my opinion.
@@Se7enBeatleofDoom I actually didn't even play Starfield, just watching a few hours of gameplay and I know it wouldn't be the game for me. I hate to make the judgement without even playing it myself but it's so clear Bethesda has fallen far from where they used to be. I absolutely agree on Morrowind, my top Bethesda game of all time, probably a contender for best RPG ever as far as I'm concerned.
@@noneofyourbusiness4616 I do play them, and you're right there are good ones out there but a huge majority of the AAA games that come out these days just don't do it for me. Call it nostalgia or just a difference of opinion but legit that's how I feel. The most modern RPG I played that I really enjoyed was PoE 1 and 2. I've heard Pathfinder is pretty good, and Octopath you just mentioned looks very Chrono trigger, which I like. I didn't care much for BG3 (or any of Larians stuff TBH), and Bethesda has been going downhill since Skyrim. There's good stuff out there, but it feels like a gamble these days to dump 80$ plus dollars into something new, when I could spend 3$ to get something just as memorable in the retro market.
Nothing stuck to my mind about Ultima VII as much as trying to get it working. It had it's own memory manager that was incompatible with EMM386 AND it required a lot of conventional memory, which was usually rendered available WITH EMM or QEMM. Despite giving me enough trauma to still have vivid nightmares, I did get it working and played through the game, but the experience of getting it working poisoned me against finishing the second part, Serpent Isle. When I later heard about fanmade ways to get the game working on more modern systems without having to bother with the memory manager, I said several bad words.
The one blessing I have from waiting so long to play the game is that I luckily get the super stable Exult engine to play it on. I've heard horror stories on trying to get this to run back in the day.
It was crazy, how much I loved this in spite of all the wonkiness going on. The fights were a clusterfuck. Using weapons or spells with area effects was near impossible without anihilating your own party members. Searching the inventory gave me headaches, even after Serpent Isle thankfully added a key ring and having to feed your whole party by hand every five minutes was an absolute chore. But the world and the storytelling made up for all of this.
A game like no other, I was pretty young at 1992 but I played a little after and Ultima's were always up in my list of favorite games. Your work is awesome and I am always looking forward for your videos!
@@daeds.paints I'm so glad I finally gave the series a chance, I was worried it might feel too dated but it holds up so well even to a new player. I'm stoked I have all the rest of the games to play now. Appreciate the support!
@@aquawalrus I remember asking my dad for more RAM to play UO, then, the 56kbps monthly payment letter came, and oh boy.... He was mad at me. By the way, do you play on a modern PC or on old hardware? I'm rebuilding my rig from 2000 with a p4 and a 6600GT (that were mine), just missing a proper IDE HDD by now but am actually playing in a old 2001 laptop plugged to a LG CRT :), it's so good.
@@daeds.paints I'm playing on a modernish computer, I built it in 2015 I think. Still runs well enough for me. One of my goals is to build a windows 98 era computer with original hardware at some point. The hard part will be getting all the bits and making sure they still operate, but that's half the fun.
@@aquawalrus Yep, it's really fun to tinker with that older stuff, I had a blast with my old computer, can't wait until I get my hands on the IDE HDD so I can install 98SE and have a blast. The laptop I'm using has a Celeron with 1gb RAM and a x1100, the main PC I use for modern gaming is quite good but most of these games don't work that well and it was a pain to connect my RX6600 XT to the CRT monitor :D. Can't wait for more of your videos!
Good job! I played U7 since the early 90s and it and Serpent Isle (especially Serpent Isle, even with shit that was cut at the last minute to hit deadlines) are two of my all time favorites. The combat icons are pretty intelligible. Things like “Attack nearest”, “Attack biggest”, “Flee”, “Defend/Put distance” (ie ranged), “Draw aggro” (the one in the crowd… the character will literally jump into the middle of the fray). They art crucially important since equipping the party with good gear and jumping in can get the job done, but if you do have a strategy, I found that it helps. Especially since I often have Iolo with a triple crossbow hanging back, Dupre with the beefiest gear jumping straight in and Shamino usually set to protect weakest which means he either puts himself between Iolo and the enemies or jumping in the fray. The others, if I even add them, it depends. The bread thing made me laugh. They don’t tell you but just go to Britain and watch the NPCs at the bakery. Same with the weaver near the Lyceum. I think the idea was to figure it out. And it’s not a necessary skill, since buying food or hunting usually gets you by, but early in the game bread is useful.
My biggest hangup with the bread was figuring out how to "use" water on the flour. Once I got that part I was set. I could also never figure out how to get the well to work, so I had to rely on water buckets that were already full lol.
Bro... First off let me say, another excellent video. I never played any Ultima games but damn this one looks like a lot of fun. I can't believe how ahead of its time it is! I never knew or would even think that these games had a day nite cycle let alone shopkeepers have schedules and the moveable objects. The magic carpet put it over the top for me! Sidenote: I've had the same starter for going on 4 years now and make sourdough at least once a month if not more. It's so fun! Nothing better than pulling out a perfect sourdough loaf out of a steaming hot Dutch oven. I have a little signature scour that I do as I'm sure you probably do as well. Bread making is a lot of fun
@@not_jon_vendi I've been doing my starter for about 6 months now. My first few loaves were a bit wonky but that are doing good now. I cook in a cast iron pot, makes them perfectly round loaves. Startlingly similar to the bread from Ultima lol.
Ultima 7 was also my intro to the series. My parents gifted it to me for Christmas when I was about 12 back in the early 90s. I remember absolutely being so engaged in the world that it didn't matter if I jumped in cold to the 7th entry. Even to this day I love U7 and still replay it every few years. I don't think I've ever used those combat options on the paperdolls. I just press "c" and let everyone swing their weapons around in a chaotic mess -- but this is a testament to U7's richness, that we can tolerate the game's clunky combat system and enjoy it for the characters, the world, the story. Then came Serpent Isle (U7 part 2) which is much more linear than U7 but this also allowed for a very complex and rich story. There are some issues with Serpent Isle's 3rd act due to rushed production, but it's still a gem. U7 and SI are both fantastic, though I think I like SI a bit more. Ultima 8: at the time poorly received and I remember feeling disappointed as a kid. It was obviously rushed with a lot of corners cut. U8's criticisms were more mechanical than story and with time, especially in recent years, I think it's earned more respect and appreciation from the Ultima fans, largely thanks to its dark and atmospheric world. While not as good as U7, i still think it's worth visiting. Ultima 9: Sadly, the series ended with a complete stinker. I think in an effort to be more accessible to a wider audience, especially those who didn't know the Ultima lore, they really simplified things and did what they could to create a self-contained game. In doing this, unfortunately, it contradicts much of what has already been established from previous Ultima entries. In fact, it outright ignores the major cliffhanger event from the end of Ultima 8. It feels more like a generic early 2000s RPG than an Ultima entry. Unlike U8, U9 has not aged well at all. Dumb will always be dumb. It was wonderful to hear the perspective of someone new to U7 in the year 2024! I hope you also check out Serpent Isle and U8 if you haven't already. And, perhaps, if you wish to one day share the pain of many Ultima fans, you can dare to try U9.
I'll absolutely be giving the rest of the series a go after loving this one. I think the biggest thing that kept me from trying the series for so long was that I was so worried about starting at the 7th entry, but they do such a great job to integrate new players. I've heard SI is great, and heard 8 isn't quite up to that level, but the reviews I've seen of it make it seem really interesting so I'm really excited for that one. Excited for 9 as well but I've heard such bad things about it so it's more out of morbid curiosity.
Great walk through. Just enough to help but doesn't ruin all the puzzles. I was mid game, and hadn't played for several months when i found this video and it not only inspired me to get back in there, but also reminded me what had happened up to the point where I left off and where I was supposed to go next. I just paused when I got up to where I was.
I grew up with the Ultima series. Mowed lawns after school and on weekends until I had enough to buy my first computer in the 5th grade, an Apple II+. The first 2 games I bought for it were Aztec and Ultima I. Played Ultima I-V on the Apple II series, then VI-IX on Intel PCs. VII was probably the peak of the series and is still quite playable today. The first trilogy has not aged very well, but the 2nd trilogy is still pretty good. Of the third trilogy, only VII is worth playing imho.
@@caseytwill I've heard Black Gate and Serpent Isle are the peaks of the series. I've seen some mixed reviews on 8 but have to admit I sort of like the aesthetic of it. Adding jumping was probably a mistake.
@@aquawalrus I don't think VIII is a *bad* game (post jumping patch), but having grown up on the series, I thought it was a real letdown as an Ultima game. I felt like VIII and IX sorta ignore everything you accomplished in VII. For example, in VII you selflessly sacrifice your ability to return home in order to close the black moongate and prevent the Guardian from entering Britannia. In VIII, you summon demons, participate in human sacrifice, and abandon the other 6 virtues just to return back to Britannia. It's the exact opposite of your journey to becoming and acting as the avatar, and it feels like a complete betrayal to the previous 4 Ultimas.
Based on your interests I've observed in other games, you'd really love Ultima Underworld especially the slightly updated full screen versions with updated controls. I'd honestly check those out. There's some really cool ideas in those 2 games. The themes in it are also interesting. The Ps1 version is fully 3D and the original DOS version is 3D with high quality 2D sprites. A LOT of the games you've covered were inspired by UU.
I actually bought the Underworld games before this one, and keep meaning to get to starting them but keep getting distracted by other titles. I am excited for them when I finally make it there.
If I remember the halo is combat mode on and off - and the shape option below is tactics for your followers - attack random enemies, defend other followers etc.
The original retail release of Ultima 7 included two manuals; one with the in-game lore, the other a technical manual with installation instructions and information on the controls and interface along with a brief tutorial. The latter isn't included with the digital rereleases for some inexplicable reason.
I must admit that the Ultima series never caught my interest. The only game in the series that I've played, was false prophet. The story seems really interesting, and the visuals are cool, but the mechanics were a drawback for me at the time. Looking back at it, i don't even know why that was the case 😅. But after seeing your video, i will give these another chance. Great video man.
I have wanted to play it for so long, but always found it an intimidating series to jump into. Glad I finally took the plunge. Maybe one day I'll get brave and play the even older ones.
About the manual: The game (and GOG version) come with a PDF called "Player Reference Card". This is the actual non-lore manual that guides you through the UI and how to play. I know this comment is 2 months late, but the same is true for all the other Ultima games you might play later.
Regarding your troubles with the geography of Britannia, the Ultima games always came with various physical "goodies" in the box one of which was almost always a cloth map which could be used to navigate to major cities and various points of interest.
@@davel231 I actually kept thinking the whole time I was playing "man I wish I had a physical map!" I figured the original likely came with one, no such luck with a digital purchase though 😔
The way to tell what the controls mean is to read the manuals that come with the game. Not the lore manual but the quick reference. It is on GOG if that’s where you got the game.
It's funny, I tried googling the answers and even looked up the manual I did read but didn't go in depth into my gog files. More reason i miss physical releases so I don't miss things!
@@aquawalrus Also much easier to decipher the rune alphabet with the physical lorebook at your hands, or finding places like Vesper on the cloth map that came with the game. The game comes from a time, when every game was still accompanied by physical documentation and in case of big RPGs often maps and goodies like coins or amulets. Can't remember anything like that being handled through turtorials until much later.
The only ultima game I really played was part 3. And that was the NES port. Though I had a lot of fun with it. I tried the later ones and hated the interface so never got into them. I do really enjoy the history and lore behind the games though, so being able to watch retrospectives on them is great 👍
Also, I finally took the time to figure out the mysterious black and white dots with arrows on the bottom left of the character inventory because my companions kept dropping important weapons when they ran away during battle! If you set each of them to bersek (white dot with 3 arrows pointing to 3 back dots), they will never flee battle (thus never drop a weapon).
Looking forward to the rest of the review! My very biased opinion is that if you continue on the Ultima journey, you should play 4 / 5 / 6 - I think (with nostalgia goggles on and not having revisited for many years now) that's the best era - and maybe give the original Underworld a try. Thanks for sharing with us!
@@asimplenameichose151 I was soo close to starting with those 3. The main thing that pushed me over the edge to do 7 first was that a couple of people had asked for it specifically. I really want to play through the rest now! Especially now that I have a touch more insight into the lore.
@@aquawalrus Sounds great! To be fair to your audience, 7 is also a really good choice (though I never had the time to make it through that one back when I had game-playing time).
Go for the Sega Master System version of U4, and then PC for U5 and U6. Ultima 7 part 2 and Ultima Underworld 1 are "kind of" a series alongside U7, with U8 and U9 being something completely different.
a fair review. if you liked it enough to follow up with a serpent isle playthrough/review, i'll be sure to watch that one, too. it may be a hot take in a niche crowd, but i think it's even better.
9:00 I was sure the game manual explained the party combat strategies (attack nearest, strongest, weakest, flank, flee etc)... I was playing it on my friend's 486 with some kind of Origin collection including Shadowcaster. We also had Serpent Isle which just refused to run because it needed a crazy amount of free conventional memory, and his PC had Doublespace installed which ate a chunk of it.
@@aquawalrus ouch, that's unlucky. I can definitely see how the interface would be a lot more confusing without that. To be honest I always tended to stick to the default combat mode, or sometimes berserk mode because Iolo and Spark kept fleeing and dropping crucial quest items and backpacks behind walls. Dropping stuff behind a wall and losing it forever was one of the most annoying things in the game...
@@Ricky-jl1wf I would have never guessed that, but it does make sense. What does the one with a bunch of question marks mean? That was by far the most confusing for me (I'm just trying to sound smart they were all confusing for me)
This. Also: Attack nearest, attack at random, flee, defend self, protect (set the circle to select which to protect); the one with the two question marks is reserved for the Avatar, and allows you to manually attack. They seemed logical to me. I figured it out when I first played this game as a kid. No offense. 😛 In all fairness though, the one that I am not sure about is the white dot surrounded by black dots (enemies); I'm guessing the character will try to make enemies attack him (tank).
I think there were two manuals, one for lore and one for game mechanics. I read the lore one and didn't realize there was another. I miss physical media!
I've been meaning to play Ultima 7 for ages and can't wait to see your review of part 2: Serpent Isles. The only game in the series I've played and the one I'd recommend you try is Ultima: Underworld 1. Its basically the granddad of first person dungeon crawlers and still holds up. Just don't do what I did and decide that the Avatar is an axe specialized. Old school RPG's aren't fond of people who disagree with the Church of later day sword wielders though unlike with the Fellowship I wasn't part of a murder mystery for this.
@@deathnotehell1 I expected to like it, but still can't believe just how good U7 actually was. Underworld is definitely on my to play very soon list. I love first person dungeon crawlers, and even more so want to play it now that I'm invested in the lore. I fall into the hammer lover religion, much to my detriment in most RPG games.
@@aquawalrus U:Underworld was a game I played for the first time about 3 years ago and it kinda caused me to go through a first person dungeon crawler binge which if nothing else is a good thing to say about the game.
@@deathnotehell1 Weirdly enough, the game that got me going hard on the dungeon crawlers again after so long away from them was Menzoberanzan. Objectively a middling game but absolutely got me hungry for the genre. I don't really think there's one I've played that I don't at least enjoy a bit.
Ultima Runes of Virtue 2 on the Game Boy is my favorite open world action RPG of all time. Often unfairly maligned and misunderstood, yet I highly recommend it.
I'm going to have to take a look at that one, somehow in all my looking into the series I didn't even realize there were Gameboy games! Just looked it up and if nothing else I like how it looks visually.
I figured there was some way to interact with it! I played with the bellows a lot but that's about as far as I got. I'll have to make sure to use it to the fullest when I do Serpent Isle.
I always preferred Ultima Underworld (the first one is the better game IMO though 2 is an improvement on a technical level) to the mainline Ultima series even though Ultima 6 and 7 were masterpieces of design. UU's smaller scope leads to a tighter experience with some really great puzzles and quests while still feeling very much like an Ultima game (for example, there's an entire sequence where a mute person is trying to teach you the lizardman language so you can negotiate his release from captivity). When it comes to huge RPG worlds, my favourite early example is Darklands, which I very much recommend you look into if it's not on your radar yet; it's a really unique experience, perhaps closest in feel to the earlier D&D games where most of the game is interacted with via text with a separate combat system, but the whole look and feel of the game and how it actually plays is entirely different
I really need to get to the Ultima Underworld games. Darklands is for sure on my radar, even have it installed ready to go just need to get to the playthrough!
I started with this one as well. Picked it up on a whim for a few bucks at Half Price Books in like 1996. Then I tried Ultima Online, got PKed within 30 seconds of stepping out of the starter town about 5 times and never went back. UO players were serious dicks.
@@EdmundKempersDartboard honestly I feel like that is my greatest memory of multiplayer or MMO type games back in the day. Don't know if they've gotten better now but I was always driven off by the players who just want to endlessly kill you. Let me harvest my flowers and kill rats in peace!
It's still one of my favorite games ever. I'm not a purist so I'll run it in exult every once in a while and just mess around in the world. It is truly impressive what they were able to achieve in 1992. It really shows that simple scheduling can do a lot to make a world seem real, you don't need fancy AI. Unfortunately combat sticks out like a sore thumb, it's a legitimate clusterfeck of panic swinging. I like the real time aspect of it but I think they were a few years too early for that sort of gameplay. The FPS is quite low and I think Diablo was the first game that managed to pull it off. I still wouldn't go back to something like the Ultima 6 interface, 7 managed to usher a new era in mouse interactivity, it's hard to even image a computer world without mice but much like the WASD control scheme for FPS games the industry just wasn't mature enough at the time.
It's funny how the control schemes we use today seem so obvious, but back then it was the wild west trying to find something that worked, even weird peripherals like joysticks, those weird ball on top mice and even "vr' gloves were all experimented with just to try and control things.
48:27 "Very difficult to recommend to everyone. It has a lot to make it inaccessible to modern gamers." And this is why its an amazing game/serious. Its NOT designed for just anyone. Its designed for a certain players in a certain genre and THAT'S what makes it so good and so special. It sticks to what it was designed for, and takes no short cuts to appeal to everyone. The players this game was designed for will find this game so amazing because its made for them to elevated heights that common big name companies wouldn't dare to try and be bold and would rather make the same usual boring slop that always sells because the brainless casual gamers outweigh the invested true gamers.
I have to agree, something is lost with the broad appeal they try to give to every single game these days. Like we don't see the true vision of what the developers want to make because it's so watered down to make it accessible to everyone. I'm all for more people in the gaming space, but I miss the sense of accomplishment in learning a difficult game. Seems the only ones doing good work in the gaming space these days are small indie developers.
@@aquawalrus Its funny you mention Indie developers because for the past 10ish years, I've only been playing/buying/or having any interest in indie games. Well, except Fromsoft and their souls games/elden ring but those games are also niche games for a certain crowd.
46:30 i actually think the graphics are terrific especially for the time period. The game is very colourful and you can tell effort went into making a cohesive visual style
@@ThommyofThenn I really liked how the whole game looked, and that cohesive world with all the maps combined was just amazing. I can really see this game had some passionate creators.
@@aquawalrus to this end, i am glad to see you do a vid on one of these games. I've really only seen 1 other channel do retrospectives on the series and although i haven't played them yet, i do have the 4th one on GOG (free I think). I'm interested enough to watch more content on them, but they also seem to be remarkably content -dense games especially for the player who enjoys aorlx building and lore! So they must take a long time to play and do research on, but we appreciate it! I bet this will become one of your most watched vids
@@ThommyofThenn I'm always glad to explore a new RPG series. If you want to see some good videos on it Voidbrand Gallery has videos on most of them, he sadly doesn't post anymore but the videos he does have are great, helped me understand some of what was going on.
@@aquawalrus Did You? Or was it a pun by Garriott all along? The mundane being the ultimate evil? OoooOOOhhhhh... ;P its spawn being MinMax, excuse me, Minax?
This was one year after Super Mario World was released, which was groundbreaking at the time. Try to let that sink in. Its so sad what Richard Garriot sank to after blowing us all away in '92 with this release. PS: I found the dot icons completely intuitive at the time and didnt need a manual entry, although, like you, I found the combat so easy you dont really need to do anything, which would have been disapponting except there was so much to do and explore, I didnt even care.
@@bluedistortions I never thought of it in those timelines honestly, and yeah that really makes you realize just how wildly ahead of its time this game was. You aren't the first to tell me the dots made perfect sense with no explanation, I might just be dumb but they literally meant nothing to me. Someone explained them a bit in one of the other comments and now I sort of get it, but damn I would have never got it on my own lol.
That intro.... i dont get the guardian's motivation to tell the only one that could possibly foil his plans about his plans - usually the villains only tell the hero of their plans, once they think they have already won. But here it's like the inciting incident for our hero - which is.... weird?
@@mrscruffy8045 being completely new to the series I was actually confused who the guardian even was for the first couple hours. I was like, is this guy a good dude? He's telling me what's up and said he's a guardian. I guess the evil laugh at the end gives it away.
@@aquawalrus Same feeling when i first played it, having played V and VI, before, back in the day - got the copy lying next to me.... i dont know what you want - vesper is clearly marked on the map (in runic ;D). On review, i found the manual to be lacking, too, though. Try Ultima V - it's my favorite. It's the last of the 8 bit era and thus kinda has its kinks worked out, being entirely played on keyboard on a well made interface (makes you not miss tooltips, mouse wheel support, drag&drop or any other modern conventions - it's like cheap anime of user interfaces, as in facial expression dont neccessarily need noses). Feelies are the best, too. Nice big open map - in fact been playing it all day, today. All it takes can be found legally for free online with little effort.
@@aquawalrus Yeah ultima at that point traditionally was very much about connecting the dots - and those "feelies", like the lore book and map used to be very much part of it. Which made it such a memorable experience - in general, i'd say, anything, that might have once gave you a eureka moment while reading on the toilet, is memorable. Those games acompanied the player beyond the screen. It was magic - on a couple of discs, but with a more of a board game-ish material line-up, where a map was as mandatory as a board would be for a board game. PS: I remember Ultima IV costing a whopping 160 Deutsche Mark back at local release in spring 86. That was like quadrouple price. Like same in Euro, today.
To be honest, I probably would have been a lot more into the rune system if I had a physical manual for the game, then I could feel like I'm deciphering a riddle. It's just not the same on a laptop. Maybe I'll print the manuals out for my next Ultima game.
@@orcwarchiefreviews I've never played it, but at face value it looks great. It's also just led me down a rabbit hole to Breach, and that's another game series I also now want to play!
@@orcwarchiefreviews I'm no stranger to fighting with the wildness of retro games. Though I still need to go back and figure out Ravenloft, that game is the only one that's outsmarted me so far.
For me, I couldn't get into the isometric view of Ultima. Something about it is disorienting and confusing to me. 🤷 And that's a bummer because I know it's a damn good series
@@JelloFluoride I totally get that, I grew up more on Baldur's Gate than Ultima, and the angle is just slightly weird here. I got used to it pretty quick, but my first few hours were a touch disorienting.
I feel like you got inspiration from Grimbeard in terms of formatting. Which would be weird if correct because that would make you the second UA-camr I've seen take inspiration from him.
@@stevenguitink5947 I've definitely taken some inspiration from him, he's one of my favorite UA-camrs to watch and one of a couple that inspired me to make a channel at all. I also have a great love of rats, so there's that in common.
@@deathstinger13 turnip and cabbage are great insults as well. If it sounds like it would be a staple in a medieval peasants diet, it's probably insulting.
Remember in Ultimas the little game play instructions as they are usually reside in a Command Summary Card. Sometimes multiple ones. However Ultima 7 is probably a terrible RPG but it's an amazing technical achievement for its day.
I thought it was a good RPG, but it's sort of like the witcher in that while you are indeed playing a role, it's not a role you choose. You're the avatar and that's it, not much nuance in terms of playing a different type of hero. It does let you bake bread and that's what's most important. 🍞
@aquawalrus for me Rpg is more about combat and character advancement. Which barely exists in this game. Story is low on my list of RPG needs. (Basically don't be stupid or vile is all I ask.). Though if you go back all the way to Ultima 1-3 I'd say most of the original unpatched versions are only really worth it for history contexts. Though the iigs version of 1, Mac 68000 booting off disk for 2, and the Fox Cunning Nes patch with original soundtrack patch Nes for U3. (Osx version is far lesser in making it good nowadays but it's got a few QoL add ins if you want mostly og.) And 4 is best on the Sega Master System with FM audio on.
sure the map is huge, but is' a lot smaller than ultima 6. that was my disppointment with it, you could explore for far longer in ultima 6 than in 7, if you weren't even trying to finish it. edit: you're meant to play with the physical actual map you decode the runes from on what is what city. you're blasted on the face with the map of britannia when you opened the game box.
Everytime I get a comment like this it makes me sad we don't have physical games anymore. I have my laptop with a digital map when I play these sorts of games usually, but it's just not the same!
I'm an old fan of Ultima. Here is a long comment containing some of the history... The first one I played was Ultima III, not long after it came out. I got to Ultima I and II soon after, and I was excited when Ultima IV came out. Ultima IV is a major turning point in the series. The first three are typical of early CRPGs, though they offer more exploration than most. They are murderhobo simulators with a lot of grind and very little story. Ultima II is especially strange, and I defy anyone to get through it without finding external hints for some of its most obfuscated mysteries. This sort of thing isn't unusual for games from the early 1980s, but today's gamers will likely find these games maddening. Ultima IV subverted the murderhobo nature of the previous games. I believe this was the first time in a CRPG in which the player character actually had to be good. Ultima IV is also the first one with an interactive dialogue system. Ultima V improves upon the engine of the earlier games, and a rudimentary day/night cycle and NPC schedules are introduced. With Ultima VI, there is a huge change in the engine, and I believe this game and its two spin-offs (Savage Empire and Martian Dreams) are the earliest that will be even remotely accessible to modern gamers. Ultima VI is the first one to have the towns integrated onto the overworld map, as opposed to being single tiles that the player enters. People who start with Ultima VII will find these games to be somewhat primitive by comparison; they are a lot more keyboard dependent, and the optional mouse controls are crude. However, they have a similar look and overall atmosphere, and the learning curve shouldn't be too difficult. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams are unusual and interesting concepts for RPGs. I recommend them to anyone who is looking for something a little different. For long time fans like me, Ultima VIII is where the series started to fall apart. This was after Electronic Arts, the infamous destroyer of franchises, had taken full control of Origin Systems. (By the way, the cube, the sphere, and the tetrahedron of Ultima VII Part 1 bear a striking resemblance to EA's logo of the time. It seems that some of Origin's employees viewed EA as trouble, and there are a few items in Ultima VI and VII that can be connected to EA.) Ultima VIII was rushed out incomplete, and there were elements to it that long time fans didn't like, including some maddening platforming sequences (real Ultima nerds don't have reflexes) and the lack of a party, which had been with the series since Ultima III. I can excuse the lack of a party, as there are narrative reasons for it, but platforming doesn't belong in an Ultima game. Despite its flaws, there is a lot of good to be found in Ultima VIII, and the negative attitudes toward it have softened over time. Ultima IX went 3-D, which was all the rage in the late 1990s. Like Ultima VIII, it was rushed out, and it had a lot of bugs, but the situation was even worse. Long time fans wanted it to stay with the isometric formula (which was apparently the original intention), and lore inconsistencies were rather jarring. It seems that Ultima IX was designed to bring in new audiences with the new fangled technology. It didn't bring in a big audience, and the existing audience largely abandoned it. To this day, it doesn't get a lot of love, but its technical achievements in 3-D were influential. After that, only Ultima Online kept the franchise alive. It was successful, but not all Ultima fans took it up. Some of us (myself included) had no desire to play multiplayer games. There are fan remakes that might make some of the games more accessible to modern audiences. Ultima V Lazarus and Ultima VI Project are total conversion mods for Dungeon Siege. They greatly expand on the stories of these games by adding NPCs and quests and by making the gargoyle problem a lot more serious in the early game of Ultima VI. Dungeon Siege is an engine that modern gamers should be able to figure out without too much trouble, though it is clunky in its own special way. I find these remakes to be the best way to experience these stories, but they are significantly longer and more involved than the original games, and the monsters will kick your butt if you visit certain places before you are ready. There is also an Ultima VI total conversion mod for the Exult engine, which is used to play Ultima VII on modern computers. It has a few bugs and rough edges, but it seems very faithful to the original. At one point, someone was working on Savage Empire for Exult, but I don't think it got very far.
This is an awesome comment and I really appreciate you taking the time to share it. I'm definitely the type to go back and play the early games, despite the issues with them you've pointed out I think its worth it for the history alone, even if the lore is lacking in those early titles. I think with what you've said moving on to 4-6 after 7-2 might not be a bad idea, then eventually work myself up to playing the first trilogy. I've heard at least the first 2 are relatively short if you know where you're going. To be honest as much as I generally avoid walkthroughs for an initial play I would probably make an exception in their case to mitigate some of the learning curve. I've actually been looking more into the series even since I played this one and 8, though it seems to have gotten some bad feedback, actually looks really interesting. Another UA-camr called Voidbrand did a video on it and has a lot of the same views on it you shared here, but that slightly darker atmosphere looks really interesting to me. 9 I think looks really neat as well, I understand it was a bit of a flop lore-wise but I always love seeing a long running genre try to make those first steps to 3D. I remember Castlevania making that leap with the N64 and the result was super memorable for me.
@@aquawalrus Ultima I and II are relatively short because they aren't party-based, but much of the time spent involves mindless grind. Ultima I is reasonably intuitive and should be possible to complete without a guide, but II is a different story. That game is a nonsensical mess, but it is a fun mess. I had a lot of fun with it back in the day, but some parts of it make about as much sense as the obfuscated puzzles in Zork. The first two games are clearly experimental, and it wasn't until the third that the style of the games began to settle into something coherent. Ultima III might give you fits if you don't happen to talk to the right NPCs, so talk to everyone and take notes of anything that could possibly be important. This goes for IV and V too, where the NPC dialogue is a lot more detailed. (Warning - in Ultima V, sometimes, an NPC will ask who sent you.) Combat in III through V is extremely tedious, extremely repetitive turn-based combat with a maximum party size of 4 to 8. It takes forever. In Ultima IV, I finally got so sick of overworld combat with random boring monsters that I sector edited the floppy disk to connect a lot of places with walled paths that kept most of the monsters trapped outside. I was overjoyed when the engine was revamped for Ultima VI and combat began to get streamlined. Combat has never been the highlight of Ultima; there were other RPGs that put combat front and center and gave it a lot more complexity. In Ultima, the story, lore, and exploration were always the attraction, and combat was just something to fill out the time. I think the earlier Ultima games can be rewarding, and they are historically important, but you have to be prepared to meet them where they are (or, in the case of Ultima V, play the fan remake instead).
The worst part of the platforming in 8, is that being an isometric 2.5d kinda game, there is absolutely no way to accurately measure the distance between you and the tiny rock pillars you're supposed to jump onto.
@@SergioLeRoux You just brought back a bad memory. I don't know what possessed them to put this game mechanic into Ultima VIII. There is no justification for it. Ultima VIII has the bones of a game that could have been an all time classic, but sadly, it is unfinished and poorly executed in many ways. I wish someone would do a loose remake, taking the best of the concepts from this game and expanding upon them.
I've been looking for a game like this my entire life. A whole planet you can circumnavigate, sandbox, NPCs with schedules... Ultima VII, but way more types of enemies and mechanics, larger, and with additionally proredecurally generated quests and dungeons would be the ideal game.
@@MithranArkanere you've probably already played it, but BG2 checks a lot of those boxes. I'm playing it right now for the first time in a few years and I'm always shocked at the absolutely massive amount of content.
@@MithranArkanere that's fair, I have to admit out of everything with Ultima that was the most interesting part, literally the whole game world is one huge map. You're totally right though, I can't think of another game that's done that. I'm stoked to play U7-2 and see if it compares. I've seen mixed opinions on which is better between that one and this one.
""The map is huge, over a dozen cities..." I see you're starting the video with the lies and overexaggerations. Thanks for that, now i don't have to waste my time watching the rest of it.
There is these things we used to get with these games, called instruction manuals and reference cards that show you and teach you about the game mechanics. Shocking, I know... In the case of the Ultima games, the manuals and maps were meta and part of the game itself.
@@williamfranklin860 true enough, though the Ultima manual is a bit more focused on the lore and not so focused on the actual playing of the game. Apparently there is a second manual with more info on the gameplay, but I haven't seen that one yet. Something lost with the advent of digital storefronts. I miss having physical manuals and maps.
When this game came out there was NOTHING like it. This was Bethesda before Bethesda was a thing. Huge open world, everything interactable, no loading screens... This game was a decade ahead of its time, Morrowind didn't come out until 2002. All the NPC's have houses, the shop keepers have houses, THAT THEY GO TO, and beds that they sleep in at night, they eat dinner after work, bake bread in their kitchens. NO ONE WAS EVEN ATTEMPTING THAT IN 1992. This was the most immersive game that existed when it was made, and its world is a lot more real than many games made today.
@@Jkend199 it's unreal just how amazing it is... Seems like everything Origin touched back then was a solid few years ahead of the competition. Amazing developer.
@@aquawalrus Richard Garriot is considered an eccentric nut now, and maybe he is, he was also a game development genius in his day. Ultima 7 is a masterpiece that a lot of dev's today could learn more than a few things from.
@@Jkend199 is it possible to truly be a genius without a touch of madness?
@@Jkend199the last game that Richard Garriot wrote was Ultima IV. He didn't wrote a line of code of Ultima VII.
That's because he was preoccupied leading his people as Lord British. 😉
I laughed out loud when you said that we should be sure to attack you on a deeply personal level. That's hilarious. Just found this channel and I loved this video! Subbed!
@@UglyDogProductionsCo I just wouldn't feel like a real UA-cam channel without some unsolicited hate.
Glad you found the channel!
@@aquawalrusonce people start transferring their own shortcomings or lack of insight onto you for no reason other than some imagined trigger in their minds, resulting in them making passive aggressive comments trying to put words in your mouth that at no point did you say or even remotely imply, THEN you know you're a real gamer channel
Great username. And i have only been here a few weeks or maybe a month myself. Love it when you find a channel that is almost exactly the style of video you like, about games your interested in or in a style you find appealing, it's a great thing
Pretty sad that Ultima 7 is still more rich in gameplay, world building, characterization and plot than all of Starfield. Yet it was considered a streamlined entry in the series at the time. I remember when Gamespot gave Parasite Eve 1 a lower score for being short for an RPG, because the game was only 20 to 30 hours long.
@@Se7enBeatleofDoom if you would have told me 20 years ago that RPGs from the 90s were the peak I wouldn't have believed you, but it seems to be sadly true.
The good news is with this being my first Ultima game I've got at least 8 more to experience!
@@aquawalrus As someone who is a hardcore fan of Elder Scrolls 3 morrowind. I am still waiting for someone to make a spiritual successor to Morrowind. Icewind dale & baldur's gate 1 and 2 fans finally got Baldur's gate 3. At least GTA San Andreas fans almost have a spiritual successor in Saints row 2. GTA San Andreas is a better RPG than Starfield and fallout 4/76. I still stand behind my opinion.
@@Se7enBeatleofDoom I actually didn't even play Starfield, just watching a few hours of gameplay and I know it wouldn't be the game for me. I hate to make the judgement without even playing it myself but it's so clear Bethesda has fallen far from where they used to be.
I absolutely agree on Morrowind, my top Bethesda game of all time, probably a contender for best RPG ever as far as I'm concerned.
@@aquawalrusAre you actually playing enough of today's good RPGs to make this judgment? Octopath Traveller 2 is as good as any '90s RPG.
@@noneofyourbusiness4616 I do play them, and you're right there are good ones out there but a huge majority of the AAA games that come out these days just don't do it for me.
Call it nostalgia or just a difference of opinion but legit that's how I feel.
The most modern RPG I played that I really enjoyed was PoE 1 and 2. I've heard Pathfinder is pretty good, and Octopath you just mentioned looks very Chrono trigger, which I like. I didn't care much for BG3 (or any of Larians stuff TBH), and Bethesda has been going downhill since Skyrim.
There's good stuff out there, but it feels like a gamble these days to dump 80$ plus dollars into something new, when I could spend 3$ to get something just as memorable in the retro market.
Nothing stuck to my mind about Ultima VII as much as trying to get it working.
It had it's own memory manager that was incompatible with EMM386 AND it required a lot of conventional memory, which was usually rendered available WITH EMM or QEMM.
Despite giving me enough trauma to still have vivid nightmares, I did get it working and played through the game, but the experience of getting it working poisoned me against finishing the second part, Serpent Isle.
When I later heard about fanmade ways to get the game working on more modern systems without having to bother with the memory manager, I said several bad words.
The one blessing I have from waiting so long to play the game is that I luckily get the super stable Exult engine to play it on.
I've heard horror stories on trying to get this to run back in the day.
It was crazy, how much I loved this in spite of all the wonkiness going on. The fights were a clusterfuck. Using weapons or spells with area effects was near impossible without anihilating your own party members. Searching the inventory gave me headaches, even after Serpent Isle thankfully added a key ring and having to feed your whole party by hand every five minutes was an absolute chore. But the world and the storytelling made up for all of this.
A game like no other, I was pretty young at 1992 but I played a little after and Ultima's were always up in my list of favorite games.
Your work is awesome and I am always looking forward for your videos!
@@daeds.paints I'm so glad I finally gave the series a chance, I was worried it might feel too dated but it holds up so well even to a new player. I'm stoked I have all the rest of the games to play now.
Appreciate the support!
@@aquawalrus I remember asking my dad for more RAM to play UO, then, the 56kbps monthly payment letter came, and oh boy.... He was mad at me. By the way, do you play on a modern PC or on old hardware? I'm rebuilding my rig from 2000 with a p4 and a 6600GT (that were mine), just missing a proper IDE HDD by now but am actually playing in a old 2001 laptop plugged to a LG CRT :), it's so good.
@@daeds.paints I'm playing on a modernish computer, I built it in 2015 I think. Still runs well enough for me.
One of my goals is to build a windows 98 era computer with original hardware at some point. The hard part will be getting all the bits and making sure they still operate, but that's half the fun.
@@aquawalrus Yep, it's really fun to tinker with that older stuff, I had a blast with my old computer, can't wait until I get my hands on the IDE HDD so I can install 98SE and have a blast. The laptop I'm using has a Celeron with 1gb RAM and a x1100, the main PC I use for modern gaming is quite good but most of these games don't work that well and it was a pain to connect my RX6600 XT to the CRT monitor :D. Can't wait for more of your videos!
Good job!
I played U7 since the early 90s and it and Serpent Isle (especially Serpent Isle, even with shit that was cut at the last minute to hit deadlines) are two of my all time favorites.
The combat icons are pretty intelligible. Things like “Attack nearest”, “Attack biggest”, “Flee”, “Defend/Put distance” (ie ranged), “Draw aggro” (the one in the crowd… the character will literally jump into the middle of the fray). They art crucially important since equipping the party with good gear and jumping in can get the job done, but if you do have a strategy, I found that it helps. Especially since I often have Iolo with a triple crossbow hanging back, Dupre with the beefiest gear jumping straight in and Shamino usually set to protect weakest which means he either puts himself between Iolo and the enemies or jumping in the fray. The others, if I even add them, it depends.
The bread thing made me laugh. They don’t tell you but just go to Britain and watch the NPCs at the bakery. Same with the weaver near the Lyceum. I think the idea was to figure it out. And it’s not a necessary skill, since buying food or hunting usually gets you by, but early in the game bread is useful.
My biggest hangup with the bread was figuring out how to "use" water on the flour. Once I got that part I was set.
I could also never figure out how to get the well to work, so I had to rely on water buckets that were already full lol.
I remember playing Ultima quest of the avatar as a kid on my Amiga computer. Good times.
Bro... First off let me say, another excellent video. I never played any Ultima games but damn this one looks like a lot of fun. I can't believe how ahead of its time it is! I never knew or would even think that these games had a day nite cycle let alone shopkeepers have schedules and the moveable objects. The magic carpet put it over the top for me! Sidenote: I've had the same starter for going on 4 years now and make sourdough at least once a month if not more. It's so fun! Nothing better than pulling out a perfect sourdough loaf out of a steaming hot Dutch oven. I have a little signature scour that I do as I'm sure you probably do as well. Bread making is a lot of fun
@@not_jon_vendi I've been doing my starter for about 6 months now. My first few loaves were a bit wonky but that are doing good now. I cook in a cast iron pot, makes them perfectly round loaves.
Startlingly similar to the bread from Ultima lol.
Ultima 7 was also my intro to the series. My parents gifted it to me for Christmas when I was about 12 back in the early 90s. I remember absolutely being so engaged in the world that it didn't matter if I jumped in cold to the 7th entry. Even to this day I love U7 and still replay it every few years. I don't think I've ever used those combat options on the paperdolls. I just press "c" and let everyone swing their weapons around in a chaotic mess -- but this is a testament to U7's richness, that we can tolerate the game's clunky combat system and enjoy it for the characters, the world, the story.
Then came Serpent Isle (U7 part 2) which is much more linear than U7 but this also allowed for a very complex and rich story. There are some issues with Serpent Isle's 3rd act due to rushed production, but it's still a gem. U7 and SI are both fantastic, though I think I like SI a bit more.
Ultima 8: at the time poorly received and I remember feeling disappointed as a kid. It was obviously rushed with a lot of corners cut. U8's criticisms were more mechanical than story and with time, especially in recent years, I think it's earned more respect and appreciation from the Ultima fans, largely thanks to its dark and atmospheric world. While not as good as U7, i still think it's worth visiting.
Ultima 9: Sadly, the series ended with a complete stinker. I think in an effort to be more accessible to a wider audience, especially those who didn't know the Ultima lore, they really simplified things and did what they could to create a self-contained game. In doing this, unfortunately, it contradicts much of what has already been established from previous Ultima entries. In fact, it outright ignores the major cliffhanger event from the end of Ultima 8. It feels more like a generic early 2000s RPG than an Ultima entry. Unlike U8, U9 has not aged well at all. Dumb will always be dumb.
It was wonderful to hear the perspective of someone new to U7 in the year 2024! I hope you also check out Serpent Isle and U8 if you haven't already. And, perhaps, if you wish to one day share the pain of many Ultima fans, you can dare to try U9.
I'll absolutely be giving the rest of the series a go after loving this one.
I think the biggest thing that kept me from trying the series for so long was that I was so worried about starting at the 7th entry, but they do such a great job to integrate new players.
I've heard SI is great, and heard 8 isn't quite up to that level, but the reviews I've seen of it make it seem really interesting so I'm really excited for that one. Excited for 9 as well but I've heard such bad things about it so it's more out of morbid curiosity.
@@aquawalrus One good thing I can say about U9 with full sincerity: wonderful soundtrack! I look forward to seeing your future videos.
Great walk through. Just enough to help but doesn't ruin all the puzzles. I was mid game, and hadn't played for several months when i found this video and it not only inspired me to get back in there, but also reminded me what had happened up to the point where I left off and where I was supposed to go next. I just paused when I got up to where I was.
Glad it was able to help!
I grew up with the Ultima series. Mowed lawns after school and on weekends until I had enough to buy my first computer in the 5th grade, an Apple II+. The first 2 games I bought for it were Aztec and Ultima I. Played Ultima I-V on the Apple II series, then VI-IX on Intel PCs. VII was probably the peak of the series and is still quite playable today. The first trilogy has not aged very well, but the 2nd trilogy is still pretty good. Of the third trilogy, only VII is worth playing imho.
@@caseytwill I've heard Black Gate and Serpent Isle are the peaks of the series. I've seen some mixed reviews on 8 but have to admit I sort of like the aesthetic of it. Adding jumping was probably a mistake.
@@aquawalrus I don't think VIII is a *bad* game (post jumping patch), but having grown up on the series, I thought it was a real letdown as an Ultima game. I felt like VIII and IX sorta ignore everything you accomplished in VII.
For example, in VII you selflessly sacrifice your ability to return home in order to close the black moongate and prevent the Guardian from entering Britannia. In VIII, you summon demons, participate in human sacrifice, and abandon the other 6 virtues just to return back to Britannia. It's the exact opposite of your journey to becoming and acting as the avatar, and it feels like a complete betrayal to the previous 4 Ultimas.
Based on your interests I've observed in other games, you'd really love Ultima Underworld especially the slightly updated full screen versions with updated controls. I'd honestly check those out. There's some really cool ideas in those 2 games. The themes in it are also interesting. The Ps1 version is fully 3D and the original DOS version is 3D with high quality 2D sprites.
A LOT of the games you've covered were inspired by UU.
I actually bought the Underworld games before this one, and keep meaning to get to starting them but keep getting distracted by other titles. I am excited for them when I finally make it there.
@@aquawalrus man you put in work. None of the games you cover are short or intuitive lol. Respect to you
Thank you for covering games like this that I absolutely never will even after living through the era that I should have been into them.
@@aaronmarko happy to do it! It's a great excuse to play all these titles I should have played back in the day.
If I remember the halo is combat mode on and off - and the shape option below is tactics for your followers - attack random enemies, defend other followers etc.
The original retail release of Ultima 7 included two manuals; one with the in-game lore, the other a technical manual with installation instructions and information on the controls and interface along with a brief tutorial. The latter isn't included with the digital rereleases for some inexplicable reason.
@@muffinboymcgee7411 that explains it. This is the GoG version so that technical manual was sadly absent.
I miss having physical games!
I must admit that the Ultima series never caught my interest. The only game in the series that I've played, was false prophet. The story seems really interesting, and the visuals are cool, but the mechanics were a drawback for me at the time. Looking back at it, i don't even know why that was the case 😅. But after seeing your video, i will give these another chance. Great video man.
I have wanted to play it for so long, but always found it an intimidating series to jump into. Glad I finally took the plunge. Maybe one day I'll get brave and play the even older ones.
About the manual: The game (and GOG version) come with a PDF called "Player Reference Card". This is the actual non-lore manual that guides you through the UI and how to play. I know this comment is 2 months late, but the same is true for all the other Ultima games you might play later.
@@Novack79 it's still a good tip, I haven't played serpent isle yet but I want to be more prepared when I do!
Regarding your troubles with the geography of Britannia, the Ultima games always came with various physical "goodies" in the box one of which was almost always a cloth map which could be used to navigate to major cities and various points of interest.
@@davel231 I actually kept thinking the whole time I was playing "man I wish I had a physical map!"
I figured the original likely came with one, no such luck with a digital purchase though 😔
The way to tell what the controls mean is to read the manuals that come with the game. Not the lore manual but the quick reference. It is on GOG if that’s where you got the game.
It's funny, I tried googling the answers and even looked up the manual I did read but didn't go in depth into my gog files.
More reason i miss physical releases so I don't miss things!
@@aquawalrus I think everyone who lived through 80s/90s software misses printed manuals!
@@RichardToddIsMyName manuals, strategy guides, and those little cloth printed maps that came with RPGs! Better times.
@@aquawalrus Also much easier to decipher the rune alphabet with the physical lorebook at your hands, or finding places like Vesper on the cloth map that came with the game. The game comes from a time, when every game was still accompanied by physical documentation and in case of big RPGs often maps and goodies like coins or amulets. Can't remember anything like that being handled through turtorials until much later.
The only ultima game I really played was part 3. And that was the NES port. Though I had a lot of fun with it. I tried the later ones and hated the interface so never got into them. I do really enjoy the history and lore behind the games though, so being able to watch retrospectives on them is great 👍
It's been a great excuse to finally play them. I need to get to serpent isle! I've heard it's great.
Also, I finally took the time to figure out the mysterious black and white dots with arrows on the bottom left of the character inventory because my companions kept dropping important weapons when they ran away during battle! If you set each of them to bersek (white dot with 3 arrows pointing to 3 back dots), they will never flee battle (thus never drop a weapon).
I feel like when I finally do a video for serpent isle I'll need to do some in depth research on the mystery dots
Yeey new Aqua Walrus upload
@@Foczo I almost didn't make my Saturday deadline haha.
This is really good channel no??
@@ThommyofThenn I'm the number one walrus based retro video game channel.
Looking forward to the rest of the review! My very biased opinion is that if you continue on the Ultima journey, you should play 4 / 5 / 6 - I think (with nostalgia goggles on and not having revisited for many years now) that's the best era - and maybe give the original Underworld a try. Thanks for sharing with us!
@@asimplenameichose151 I was soo close to starting with those 3. The main thing that pushed me over the edge to do 7 first was that a couple of people had asked for it specifically. I really want to play through the rest now! Especially now that I have a touch more insight into the lore.
@@aquawalrus Sounds great! To be fair to your audience, 7 is also a really good choice (though I never had the time to make it through that one back when I had game-playing time).
@@asimplenameichose151 I definetly feel the need to make up for lost time now, can't believe it's taken me this long to start into the series.
Go for the Sega Master System version of U4, and then PC for U5 and U6. Ultima 7 part 2 and Ultima Underworld 1 are "kind of" a series alongside U7, with U8 and U9 being something completely different.
a fair review. if you liked it enough to follow up with a serpent isle playthrough/review, i'll be sure to watch that one, too. it may be a hot take in a niche crowd, but i think it's even better.
@@Akytalusia I definitely want to play it as well... Now that I've taken the plunge with Ultima I want to play them all eventually!
9:00 I was sure the game manual explained the party combat strategies (attack nearest, strongest, weakest, flank, flee etc)... I was playing it on my friend's 486 with some kind of Origin collection including Shadowcaster. We also had Serpent Isle which just refused to run because it needed a crazy amount of free conventional memory, and his PC had Doublespace installed which ate a chunk of it.
So, another commenter pointed out that apparently this game has not one but two manuals. So I guess I just read the wrong one. Live and learn.
@@aquawalrus ouch, that's unlucky. I can definitely see how the interface would be a lot more confusing without that. To be honest I always tended to stick to the default combat mode, or sometimes berserk mode because Iolo and Spark kept fleeing and dropping crucial quest items and backpacks behind walls. Dropping stuff behind a wall and losing it forever was one of the most annoying things in the game...
The dot symbols are how you want the party to behave: go for the strongest enemy (largest black dot), weakest enemy (small dot), flank enemies, etc.
@@Ricky-jl1wf I would have never guessed that, but it does make sense.
What does the one with a bunch of question marks mean? That was by far the most confusing for me (I'm just trying to sound smart they were all confusing for me)
This. Also: Attack nearest, attack at random, flee, defend self, protect (set the circle to select which to protect); the one with the two question marks is reserved for the Avatar, and allows you to manually attack.
They seemed logical to me. I figured it out when I first played this game as a kid. No offense. 😛
In all fairness though, the one that I am not sure about is the white dot surrounded by black dots (enemies); I'm guessing the character will try to make enemies attack him (tank).
@@Gotcha444 no it tracks, I'm approximately as intelligent as an 8 year old. It explained why my interest in games peaked at that age 😋
To be honest I only knew these cos I had the paperback manual :)
9:05 page 18 of the manual if you're playing the complete U7, explains how I understood these as a kid
I think there were two manuals, one for lore and one for game mechanics. I read the lore one and didn't realize there was another.
I miss physical media!
Red monkey bro in thumbnail got that Halo Infinite Brute energy but also some of that thanos vibe 😂
@@ThommyofThenn he's bizarro evil Donkey Kong.
@@aquawalrus lol
I've been meaning to play Ultima 7 for ages and can't wait to see your review of part 2: Serpent Isles. The only game in the series I've played and the one I'd recommend you try is Ultima: Underworld 1. Its basically the granddad of first person dungeon crawlers and still holds up. Just don't do what I did and decide that the Avatar is an axe specialized. Old school RPG's aren't fond of people who disagree with the Church of later day sword wielders though unlike with the Fellowship I wasn't part of a murder mystery for this.
@@deathnotehell1 I expected to like it, but still can't believe just how good U7 actually was.
Underworld is definitely on my to play very soon list. I love first person dungeon crawlers, and even more so want to play it now that I'm invested in the lore.
I fall into the hammer lover religion, much to my detriment in most RPG games.
@@aquawalrus U:Underworld was a game I played for the first time about 3 years ago and it kinda caused me to go through a first person dungeon crawler binge which if nothing else is a good thing to say about the game.
@@deathnotehell1 Weirdly enough, the game that got me going hard on the dungeon crawlers again after so long away from them was Menzoberanzan. Objectively a middling game but absolutely got me hungry for the genre.
I don't really think there's one I've played that I don't at least enjoy a bit.
17:44 The sign said "north is the way".
I'd love to hear your take on the classic might & magic games, I only started with the 3rd one (Isles of Terra) but loved every single one I played.
I haven't played any of them yet, but I did pick up the entire collection off GoG not too long ago, so just a matter of time!
Ultima Runes of Virtue 2 on the Game Boy is my favorite open world action RPG of all time. Often unfairly maligned and misunderstood, yet I highly recommend it.
I'm going to have to take a look at that one, somehow in all my looking into the series I didn't even realize there were Gameboy games!
Just looked it up and if nothing else I like how it looks visually.
You can actually use the forge by putting iron on it, and forge a sword, similar to how you baked bread.
I figured there was some way to interact with it! I played with the bellows a lot but that's about as far as I got. I'll have to make sure to use it to the fullest when I do Serpent Isle.
i translated enough signs that i memorized the runic alphabet back in the day.
I strive to achieve such heights.
I always preferred Ultima Underworld (the first one is the better game IMO though 2 is an improvement on a technical level) to the mainline Ultima series even though Ultima 6 and 7 were masterpieces of design. UU's smaller scope leads to a tighter experience with some really great puzzles and quests while still feeling very much like an Ultima game (for example, there's an entire sequence where a mute person is trying to teach you the lizardman language so you can negotiate his release from captivity).
When it comes to huge RPG worlds, my favourite early example is Darklands, which I very much recommend you look into if it's not on your radar yet; it's a really unique experience, perhaps closest in feel to the earlier D&D games where most of the game is interacted with via text with a separate combat system, but the whole look and feel of the game and how it actually plays is entirely different
I really need to get to the Ultima Underworld games.
Darklands is for sure on my radar, even have it installed ready to go just need to get to the playthrough!
very nice review, m8
subscribed
I started with this one as well. Picked it up on a whim for a few bucks at Half Price Books in like 1996. Then I tried Ultima Online, got PKed within 30 seconds of stepping out of the starter town about 5 times and never went back. UO players were serious dicks.
@@EdmundKempersDartboard honestly I feel like that is my greatest memory of multiplayer or MMO type games back in the day.
Don't know if they've gotten better now but I was always driven off by the players who just want to endlessly kill you.
Let me harvest my flowers and kill rats in peace!
It's still one of my favorite games ever. I'm not a purist so I'll run it in exult every once in a while and just mess around in the world. It is truly impressive what they were able to achieve in 1992. It really shows that simple scheduling can do a lot to make a world seem real, you don't need fancy AI. Unfortunately combat sticks out like a sore thumb, it's a legitimate clusterfeck of panic swinging. I like the real time aspect of it but I think they were a few years too early for that sort of gameplay. The FPS is quite low and I think Diablo was the first game that managed to pull it off. I still wouldn't go back to something like the Ultima 6 interface, 7 managed to usher a new era in mouse interactivity, it's hard to even image a computer world without mice but much like the WASD control scheme for FPS games the industry just wasn't mature enough at the time.
It's funny how the control schemes we use today seem so obvious, but back then it was the wild west trying to find something that worked, even weird peripherals like joysticks, those weird ball on top mice and even "vr' gloves were all experimented with just to try and control things.
Had to pause and laugh at the "sir, this is a wendys" thing.
My greatest achievement in this life is learning to edit different hats onto my cat.
48:27 "Very difficult to recommend to everyone. It has a lot to make it inaccessible to modern gamers." And this is why its an amazing game/serious. Its NOT designed for just anyone. Its designed for a certain players in a certain genre and THAT'S what makes it so good and so special. It sticks to what it was designed for, and takes no short cuts to appeal to everyone. The players this game was designed for will find this game so amazing because its made for them to elevated heights that common big name companies wouldn't dare to try and be bold and would rather make the same usual boring slop that always sells because the brainless casual gamers outweigh the invested true gamers.
I have to agree, something is lost with the broad appeal they try to give to every single game these days. Like we don't see the true vision of what the developers want to make because it's so watered down to make it accessible to everyone.
I'm all for more people in the gaming space, but I miss the sense of accomplishment in learning a difficult game. Seems the only ones doing good work in the gaming space these days are small indie developers.
@@aquawalrus Its funny you mention Indie developers because for the past 10ish years, I've only been playing/buying/or having any interest in indie games. Well, except Fromsoft and their souls games/elden ring but those games are also niche games for a certain crowd.
@hondragrid pretty much the same. From soft are the only big dev I can think of off the top of my head that I find worthwhile.
Thanks a lot for this!
@@Ceneviva happy to do it! 😸 Amazing game.
He he, you climbed into the blacksmith's roof, but didn't find the secret teleporter to the cheat room.
@@SergioLeRoux I need to go back up there it seems. Time to steal everyone's boxes again.
Yoooo AW ! Here for the algorithm for now. Be back with a full analysis of the video after I watch it!
@@not_jon_vendi you're a legend.
46:30 i actually think the graphics are terrific especially for the time period. The game is very colourful and you can tell effort went into making a cohesive visual style
@@ThommyofThenn I really liked how the whole game looked, and that cohesive world with all the maps combined was just amazing. I can really see this game had some passionate creators.
@@aquawalrus to this end, i am glad to see you do a vid on one of these games. I've really only seen 1 other channel do retrospectives on the series and although i haven't played them yet, i do have the 4th one on GOG (free I think).
I'm interested enough to watch more content on them, but they also seem to be remarkably content -dense games especially for the player who enjoys aorlx building and lore! So they must take a long time to play and do research on, but we appreciate it! I bet this will become one of your most watched vids
@@ThommyofThenn I'm always glad to explore a new RPG series. If you want to see some good videos on it Voidbrand Gallery has videos on most of them, he sadly doesn't post anymore but the videos he does have are great, helped me understand some of what was going on.
6:53 : "...on the more Mondain scale...."
@@mrscruffy8045 I made a pun and didn't even realize it!
Awesome.
@@aquawalrus Did You? Or was it a pun by Garriott all along? The mundane being the ultimate evil? OoooOOOhhhhh... ;P its spawn being MinMax, excuse me, Minax?
Did you see the 3d remake?
I hadn't, but just looked it up, looks really cool!
The two slots you haven't filled are rings
They are pointing to your fingers.
you get 2 ring slots.
I needed more bling I suppose!
This was one year after Super Mario World was released, which was groundbreaking at the time. Try to let that sink in.
Its so sad what Richard Garriot sank to after blowing us all away in '92 with this release.
PS: I found the dot icons completely intuitive at the time and didnt need a manual entry, although, like you, I found the combat so easy you dont really need to do anything, which would have been disapponting except there was so much to do and explore, I didnt even care.
@@bluedistortions I never thought of it in those timelines honestly, and yeah that really makes you realize just how wildly ahead of its time this game was.
You aren't the first to tell me the dots made perfect sense with no explanation, I might just be dumb but they literally meant nothing to me. Someone explained them a bit in one of the other comments and now I sort of get it, but damn I would have never got it on my own lol.
That intro.... i dont get the guardian's motivation to tell the only one that could possibly foil his plans about his plans - usually the villains only tell the hero of their plans, once they think they have already won. But here it's like the inciting incident for our hero - which is.... weird?
@@mrscruffy8045 being completely new to the series I was actually confused who the guardian even was for the first couple hours. I was like, is this guy a good dude? He's telling me what's up and said he's a guardian.
I guess the evil laugh at the end gives it away.
@@aquawalrus Same feeling when i first played it, having played V and VI, before, back in the day - got the copy lying next to me.... i dont know what you want - vesper is clearly marked on the map (in runic ;D). On review, i found the manual to be lacking, too, though. Try Ultima V - it's my favorite. It's the last of the 8 bit era and thus kinda has its kinks worked out, being entirely played on keyboard on a well made interface (makes you not miss tooltips, mouse wheel support, drag&drop or any other modern conventions - it's like cheap anime of user interfaces, as in facial expression dont neccessarily need noses). Feelies are the best, too. Nice big open map - in fact been playing it all day, today. All it takes can be found legally for free online with little effort.
@@mrscruffy8045 those damn runes made a fool of me again! Haha
@@aquawalrus Yeah ultima at that point traditionally was very much about connecting the dots - and those "feelies", like the lore book and map used to be very much part of it. Which made it such a memorable experience - in general, i'd say, anything, that might have once gave you a eureka moment while reading on the toilet, is memorable. Those games acompanied the player beyond the screen. It was magic - on a couple of discs, but with a more of a board game-ish material line-up, where a map was as mandatory as a board would be for a board game.
PS: I remember Ultima IV costing a whopping 160 Deutsche Mark back at local release in spring 86. That was like quadrouple price. Like same in Euro, today.
To be honest, I probably would have been a lot more into the rune system if I had a physical manual for the game, then I could feel like I'm deciphering a riddle. It's just not the same on a laptop.
Maybe I'll print the manuals out for my next Ultima game.
Hey new episode I'm interested if you ever get to the Masters of Orion franchise see your thoughts on that
@@orcwarchiefreviews I've never played it, but at face value it looks great. It's also just led me down a rabbit hole to Breach, and that's another game series I also now want to play!
It's a fascinating game series unfortunately a little bit of a bastard due to some weird glitching on the GOG
@@orcwarchiefreviews I'm no stranger to fighting with the wildness of retro games. Though I still need to go back and figure out Ravenloft, that game is the only one that's outsmarted me so far.
Ohh the ravenloft game is brutal
For me, I couldn't get into the isometric view of Ultima. Something about it is disorienting and confusing to me. 🤷 And that's a bummer because I know it's a damn good series
@@JelloFluoride I totally get that, I grew up more on Baldur's Gate than Ultima, and the angle is just slightly weird here.
I got used to it pretty quick, but my first few hours were a touch disorienting.
I feel like you got inspiration from Grimbeard in terms of formatting.
Which would be weird if correct because that would make you the second UA-camr I've seen take inspiration from him.
@@stevenguitink5947 I've definitely taken some inspiration from him, he's one of my favorite UA-camrs to watch and one of a couple that inspired me to make a channel at all.
I also have a great love of rats, so there's that in common.
What is an emp
new insult obtained: Beet root
@@deathstinger13 turnip and cabbage are great insults as well.
If it sounds like it would be a staple in a medieval peasants diet, it's probably insulting.
pretty cool
Almost as cool as a Dodge with sunglasses.
Remember in Ultimas the little game play instructions as they are usually reside in a Command Summary Card. Sometimes multiple ones. However Ultima 7 is probably a terrible RPG but it's an amazing technical achievement for its day.
I thought it was a good RPG, but it's sort of like the witcher in that while you are indeed playing a role, it's not a role you choose.
You're the avatar and that's it, not much nuance in terms of playing a different type of hero.
It does let you bake bread and that's what's most important. 🍞
@aquawalrus for me Rpg is more about combat and character advancement. Which barely exists in this game. Story is low on my list of RPG needs. (Basically don't be stupid or vile is all I ask.). Though if you go back all the way to Ultima 1-3 I'd say most of the original unpatched versions are only really worth it for history contexts. Though the iigs version of 1, Mac 68000 booting off disk for 2, and the Fox Cunning Nes patch with original soundtrack patch Nes for U3. (Osx version is far lesser in making it good nowadays but it's got a few QoL add ins if you want mostly og.) And 4 is best on the Sega Master System with FM audio on.
sure the map is huge, but is' a lot smaller than ultima 6. that was my disppointment with it, you could explore for far longer in ultima 6 than in 7, if you weren't even trying to finish it.
edit: you're meant to play with the physical actual map you decode the runes from on what is what city. you're blasted on the face with the map of britannia when you opened the game box.
Everytime I get a comment like this it makes me sad we don't have physical games anymore. I have my laptop with a digital map when I play these sorts of games usually, but it's just not the same!
I'm an old fan of Ultima. Here is a long comment containing some of the history...
The first one I played was Ultima III, not long after it came out. I got to Ultima I and II soon after, and I was excited when Ultima IV came out. Ultima IV is a major turning point in the series. The first three are typical of early CRPGs, though they offer more exploration than most. They are murderhobo simulators with a lot of grind and very little story. Ultima II is especially strange, and I defy anyone to get through it without finding external hints for some of its most obfuscated mysteries. This sort of thing isn't unusual for games from the early 1980s, but today's gamers will likely find these games maddening. Ultima IV subverted the murderhobo nature of the previous games. I believe this was the first time in a CRPG in which the player character actually had to be good. Ultima IV is also the first one with an interactive dialogue system. Ultima V improves upon the engine of the earlier games, and a rudimentary day/night cycle and NPC schedules are introduced.
With Ultima VI, there is a huge change in the engine, and I believe this game and its two spin-offs (Savage Empire and Martian Dreams) are the earliest that will be even remotely accessible to modern gamers. Ultima VI is the first one to have the towns integrated onto the overworld map, as opposed to being single tiles that the player enters. People who start with Ultima VII will find these games to be somewhat primitive by comparison; they are a lot more keyboard dependent, and the optional mouse controls are crude. However, they have a similar look and overall atmosphere, and the learning curve shouldn't be too difficult. Savage Empire and Martian Dreams are unusual and interesting concepts for RPGs. I recommend them to anyone who is looking for something a little different.
For long time fans like me, Ultima VIII is where the series started to fall apart. This was after Electronic Arts, the infamous destroyer of franchises, had taken full control of Origin Systems. (By the way, the cube, the sphere, and the tetrahedron of Ultima VII Part 1 bear a striking resemblance to EA's logo of the time. It seems that some of Origin's employees viewed EA as trouble, and there are a few items in Ultima VI and VII that can be connected to EA.) Ultima VIII was rushed out incomplete, and there were elements to it that long time fans didn't like, including some maddening platforming sequences (real Ultima nerds don't have reflexes) and the lack of a party, which had been with the series since Ultima III. I can excuse the lack of a party, as there are narrative reasons for it, but platforming doesn't belong in an Ultima game. Despite its flaws, there is a lot of good to be found in Ultima VIII, and the negative attitudes toward it have softened over time. Ultima IX went 3-D, which was all the rage in the late 1990s. Like Ultima VIII, it was rushed out, and it had a lot of bugs, but the situation was even worse. Long time fans wanted it to stay with the isometric formula (which was apparently the original intention), and lore inconsistencies were rather jarring. It seems that Ultima IX was designed to bring in new audiences with the new fangled technology. It didn't bring in a big audience, and the existing audience largely abandoned it. To this day, it doesn't get a lot of love, but its technical achievements in 3-D were influential. After that, only Ultima Online kept the franchise alive. It was successful, but not all Ultima fans took it up. Some of us (myself included) had no desire to play multiplayer games.
There are fan remakes that might make some of the games more accessible to modern audiences. Ultima V Lazarus and Ultima VI Project are total conversion mods for Dungeon Siege. They greatly expand on the stories of these games by adding NPCs and quests and by making the gargoyle problem a lot more serious in the early game of Ultima VI. Dungeon Siege is an engine that modern gamers should be able to figure out without too much trouble, though it is clunky in its own special way. I find these remakes to be the best way to experience these stories, but they are significantly longer and more involved than the original games, and the monsters will kick your butt if you visit certain places before you are ready. There is also an Ultima VI total conversion mod for the Exult engine, which is used to play Ultima VII on modern computers. It has a few bugs and rough edges, but it seems very faithful to the original. At one point, someone was working on Savage Empire for Exult, but I don't think it got very far.
This is an awesome comment and I really appreciate you taking the time to share it.
I'm definitely the type to go back and play the early games, despite the issues with them you've pointed out I think its worth it for the history alone, even if the lore is lacking in those early titles. I think with what you've said moving on to 4-6 after 7-2 might not be a bad idea, then eventually work myself up to playing the first trilogy. I've heard at least the first 2 are relatively short if you know where you're going. To be honest as much as I generally avoid walkthroughs for an initial play I would probably make an exception in their case to mitigate some of the learning curve.
I've actually been looking more into the series even since I played this one and 8, though it seems to have gotten some bad feedback, actually looks really interesting. Another UA-camr called Voidbrand did a video on it and has a lot of the same views on it you shared here, but that slightly darker atmosphere looks really interesting to me.
9 I think looks really neat as well, I understand it was a bit of a flop lore-wise but I always love seeing a long running genre try to make those first steps to 3D. I remember Castlevania making that leap with the N64 and the result was super memorable for me.
@@aquawalrus Ultima I and II are relatively short because they aren't party-based, but much of the time spent involves mindless grind. Ultima I is reasonably intuitive and should be possible to complete without a guide, but II is a different story. That game is a nonsensical mess, but it is a fun mess. I had a lot of fun with it back in the day, but some parts of it make about as much sense as the obfuscated puzzles in Zork. The first two games are clearly experimental, and it wasn't until the third that the style of the games began to settle into something coherent. Ultima III might give you fits if you don't happen to talk to the right NPCs, so talk to everyone and take notes of anything that could possibly be important. This goes for IV and V too, where the NPC dialogue is a lot more detailed. (Warning - in Ultima V, sometimes, an NPC will ask who sent you.) Combat in III through V is extremely tedious, extremely repetitive turn-based combat with a maximum party size of 4 to 8. It takes forever. In Ultima IV, I finally got so sick of overworld combat with random boring monsters that I sector edited the floppy disk to connect a lot of places with walled paths that kept most of the monsters trapped outside. I was overjoyed when the engine was revamped for Ultima VI and combat began to get streamlined. Combat has never been the highlight of Ultima; there were other RPGs that put combat front and center and gave it a lot more complexity. In Ultima, the story, lore, and exploration were always the attraction, and combat was just something to fill out the time.
I think the earlier Ultima games can be rewarding, and they are historically important, but you have to be prepared to meet them where they are (or, in the case of Ultima V, play the fan remake instead).
The worst part of the platforming in 8, is that being an isometric 2.5d kinda game, there is absolutely no way to accurately measure the distance between you and the tiny rock pillars you're supposed to jump onto.
@@SergioLeRoux You just brought back a bad memory. I don't know what possessed them to put this game mechanic into Ultima VIII. There is no justification for it. Ultima VIII has the bones of a game that could have been an all time classic, but sadly, it is unfinished and poorly executed in many ways. I wish someone would do a loose remake, taking the best of the concepts from this game and expanding upon them.
I've been looking for a game like this my entire life. A whole planet you can circumnavigate, sandbox, NPCs with schedules...
Ultima VII, but way more types of enemies and mechanics, larger, and with additionally proredecurally generated quests and dungeons would be the ideal game.
@@MithranArkanere you've probably already played it, but BG2 checks a lot of those boxes.
I'm playing it right now for the first time in a few years and I'm always shocked at the absolutely massive amount of content.
@aquawalrus not at all, bg is map based. Not a seamless world. I do love bg too, but not nearly as much as u7.
@@MithranArkanere that's fair, I have to admit out of everything with Ultima that was the most interesting part, literally the whole game world is one huge map.
You're totally right though, I can't think of another game that's done that. I'm stoked to play U7-2 and see if it compares. I've seen mixed opinions on which is better between that one and this one.
@aquawalrus elder scrolls games got close but they do mot have whole planets.
@@MithranArkanere Daggerfall is a great one to play that feels endless, just a shame there isn't more dungeon variety.
""The map is huge, over a dozen cities..." I see you're starting the video with the lies and overexaggerations. Thanks for that, now i don't have to waste my time watching the rest of it.
This was epic, loved it so much! ❤🥲
There is these things we used to get with these games, called instruction manuals and reference cards that show you and teach you about the game mechanics. Shocking, I know... In the case of the Ultima games, the manuals and maps were meta and part of the game itself.
@@williamfranklin860 true enough, though the Ultima manual is a bit more focused on the lore and not so focused on the actual playing of the game.
Apparently there is a second manual with more info on the gameplay, but I haven't seen that one yet. Something lost with the advent of digital storefronts. I miss having physical manuals and maps.
@@aquawalrus The reference card is available as a PDF. It is out there.