Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar | 21 - The Yellow Stone
Вставка
- Опубліковано 28 бер 2024
- It's time to complete our explorations of the Dungeon of Despise and return with the wealth we've accumulated.
Let's play Ultima: Avatar, is a fan-created adaptation of original game Ultima IV, created by me (SimGamer) using RPG Maker MZ.
Original game of Ultima IV by Richard Garriott, otherwise known as Lord British.
Available for RPG Maker MZ on the Steam Workshop:
steamcommunity.com/sharedfile...
Copyright Disclaimer:
Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.
It is believed that the use of copyrighted resources may qualify as fair use under United States copyright law for the following reasons:
"Ultima: Avatar" is for SimGamer's personal research and educational purposes only; The purpose of using these assets is not for commercial use, resale, or distribution.
SimGamer.TV does not claim copyright of any asset used in the production of nor the title of "Ultima: Avatar"
Any unauthorized distribution or sale of this personal adaptation is prohibited by applicable copyright law. - Ігри
OH NO! I just found out that there WAS a spiritual successor to the Ultima Series. A commercial game called Shroud off the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. Richard Garriot made it, so it isn't 'fan fiction'. Now I have to check that out and find out where the story went.
Officially started a game in the module today (I was trying to find a way to re-customize my lady avatar but couldn't find where to go to do it, so I gave up)
Man your mod is brutal, okay I mean I reduced starting level to 2, and rolled a druid... then got Mariah... bad choice, should've gone for Dupré first. On the good side, Mariah is almost level 2 and I'm 75xp from 3 myself. No money for reagents early game hurts so much for Mariah. Things should improve soon. Loving it.
Good dungeon run, I would use that money to get a wand for Mariah and spend the rest in armor for the 3 melee.
Let's see what you do with it next episode !
Glad your enjoying it, modifying it, and riffing on it! I thought about a Mage start, and what its particular challenges would be. Primarily having to rely on consumables due to Maria's low weapon damage.
@@SimGamerTV Well I got her a sling almost immediately, but it's still low ;-)
Apologies for the scheduling confusion in previous releases, we should now be on track again. We're getting into the last half of the series, and this represents our first dungeon run! I also wanted to refer you all to a video released by @judegreer about a week ago, where he faithfully recreated Ultima 4 using Scratch! Check it out here: ua-cam.com/video/aNpJb1KvPt4/v-deo.html
At least 90% of the time in the dungeon was watching various battles. A few fights is cool and exciting... almost entirely fights is much less so.
That was one of the unfortunate parts of U4 as well, the number of battles required to get to level eight. It was required to do a lot of fighting, using the tactical screen, which with a full party becomes quite cumbersome and time-consuming. When the game was first made, combat was a way to add "content" to the game without using a lot of memory, which was very very limited at the time. Remember that this game had to run in less than 32KB of working memory! This version reduces the number of battles required (believe it or not) by sharing exp to all party members automatically.
@@SimGamerTV Oh, I'm right there with you on reducing the amount of tedious battles. I know that the XP sharing was a thing you added. In U4, only the one who got the killing blow got XP. But the epic quality of the game was also part of the charm. The battles were 'many' but you didn't play though the game in 8 hours. You would be travelling all over the world, taling, fighting, etc. and it never seemed rushed. On the overland map, you only ran into monsters when you 'ran' into the monsters. They were on the map. I didn't do any U4 dungeons. I did all of the U3 dungeons and their random encounters didn't seem all that random. The most monster packed random encounter table in U3 was Exodus' Castle. Your recent dungeon crawl had random fights coming in faster than Exodus' castle. :)
Also, In U3 you had 'ultimate' spells. The Cleric got a spell, Don't recall the name, but it was Hotkey 'O'. That spell hit every enemy hard and often cleared the board in one spell. The Wizard got a spell for Hotkey 'P'. It had no name, not even in the book. It was the name of the 'dark one' and when uttered, hit all of the enemies and usually wiped the board. Even dragons would 'maybe' have 1 or 2 left on screen but they would be wiped out with 1 or 2 hits. And, since a U3 party was only 4 characters, that wasn't too tedious. I don't think I'd like playing out hundreds of battles with 8 characters moving one step at a time... yawn...
If I were making this 'dungeon' I would have put in a bias number for each level, say 12 for instance. Every time a Random encounter was triggered, I would make a comparison against the bias and if the encounter happens, I'd subtract 1 from the bias. So, the more times you encounter monsters, the less likely it is that the next encounter would happen. Eventually, you would clear out the level. I'd also regenerate the bias over time, so that if the party lingered a really long time, the monsters would move back in. That's just me though. :) (Way too many random encounters.)
That's pretty close to how it works in this adaptation actually. Another good idea for a bonus video. There's an encounter chance that slowly increases over time, and is checked every so often. Once a battle is won, the encounter chance reduces. If I wanted to speed run these dungeons more, I would just make sure Mariah has all the Mandrake needed to cast Tremor over and over again. Dungeon random encounters are supposed to be 50% as frequent as overland encounters, but there might be a bug where that isn't true?
@@SimGamerTV Do you mean 50% 'As frequent' or 50% 'More Frequent' because you were getting them a lot more often it seemed.
But a %chance isn't the same as the bias i was talking about. If the bias hits 0, the chance should drop to 0% until it regenerates. (I know that monsters are spawned in video games, but it has always irked me that they just pop in out of nothing. I like to imagine that there are a certain number of them present, and you just keep bumping into them as you wander.) Likke in a good tabletop adventure, you can 'clear the dungeon. In U9, nothing 'respawned'. if you cleared a room, it was clear.
When you had the actual monsters wandering around on the map, that was actually the most like the Original Ultima series that you had in this adaptation. of course, you did that in a dungeon and not on the overland map. Is there a limitation with RPH Maker that causes lag or crashes if you put too many mobs on the map?
AFAIK RPG Maker MZ only animates sprites that are on the screen, so no real lag for having lots of them, for instance if I made a more accurate U4 representation of monsters on the map. Using the built in encounter table, but with a script instead of the step counter, was a design choice to rely on more built in systems from RPG Maker rather than rewriting everything.
The dungeons should have 50% as many random encounters as overland, because the encounter timer is every 600 frames instead of every 300 like in the overworld.
@@SimGamerTV I really liked teh Step Counter model. it let you have a break, merely by not moving. I personally favor the more 'casual' game style than the action one.
Funny story about that step counter. One of the reason i bought U3 when I did was because I had just gotten a 'copy' of it given to me in school. I had never played it before but it looked like fun. I made up a party and jumped into the world. It was a hacked copy, that had been altered with a program called Disc Zap. Someone had tweaked the map so that every open space had a chest of gold in it. Monsters didn't spawn on chestts of gold, so no monsters spawned outdoors... until you started collecting all those chests. Monsters also didn't walk through chests, so you could leave fences up. All that sounds great except for one thing... the game 'Step count' wasl already over a million steps. That meant that every group of mobs that I did fight was always a group of eight and the 2nd or 3rd 'toughness' level. I never got a group of 1 goblin' I always got 8 Trolls. (or 8 giants, or 8 dragons) So, I decided that i really wanted to play this game enough that I went and bought it.
When I got ready to play the game, I copied my game save disc before using it. By default, you used the back side of the game disc as your game disc. It had the step counter set to 0 to start. I copied it so that if I ever wanted to play the game over from scratch, it began at 0 again. U3 didn't distinguish between characters or parties of them. Every step was recorded on your save disc. All characters were saved on the same disc. So if I made up a second party and went into the game, I had to start at the step count of hte last party to be run on that disc. Not what I wanted.
When I played the fresh game, I got to start off with '1 goblin' and no treasure chests laying about the countryside. It was much more fun and I was able to build up a great party and defeat the evil Punch Card Computer (Exodus)