Ultima IV: the girl next door that broke my CRPG cherry.
I’ll never forget you. Veramacor, indeed.
I wore my Ultima IV ankh on a clip on the epaulet of my biker jacket back then. Twice I was stopped by born-agains who asked me if it was Satanic.
The questions at the beginning made me a bard. I would have been horrified by the suggestion that I not play through with that result.
I bet it was this one (though mine has a different cover - blue with the ankh on it.
I can’t not note that for the last week, I’ve been reading this hilarious Let’s Play through Ultima’s IV through VI. It’s a nice walk down memory lane, with snarking.
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Ultima%204-6/Update%201/index.html
Speaking more directly to the subject, I’ve always been very curious as to Garriot’s procedure on inventing his complex moral system, where there’s a hierarchy of things which interplay with each other. There’s a little in WikiPedia about this
That’s it. Good find!
The Official Book of Ultima, by Shay Addams.
Awesome book, mine had a blue cover though.
I agree that Ultima IV and V were the peak. Honestly Ultima V is the better game for many reasons (day/night, schedules, larger game, more terrain variety – I LOVED the lighthouses and their beam of light sweeping over the world map, revamped conversations, more involved quest, etc.) however playing Ultima V without the very solid foundation of Ultima IV would be strange. Ultima IV, V, and VI are a very tight trilogy (jarring visual “upgrade” in VI aside) and really should be played together.
Ultima VI for me began the trend that continued through VII and beyond of increased world realism that didn’t bring nearly as much fun gameplay to the table as Ultima V’s day / night cycle, schedules, etc. I mean, do I really need to pick up every object in the world? Be able to bake bread? Know how many stones an anvil weighs? I know some people really enjoyed doing things like baking bread and building stairwells out of it but… what did it add to the game world? Still, I know people like it so I try not to harp on it much but Ultima VI was the beginning of the end (though in many ways VII was brilliant, as was UUW, so don’t get me wrong…).
We’ve had superb remakes of Ultima V and VI in Dungeon Seige. I’m hoping we see an Ultima IV one someday to unify the trilogy. As it is we’ve got a tile-based 1985 version of Ultima IV paired with Ultima V and VI remakes or the tile-based 80s versions of Ultima IV and V paired with a mismatched 1990 isometric jarringly different Ultima VI. So either a remake of Ultima IV in DS or a remake of Ultima VI with original Ultima V tech would be great.
I’ll try and get some pics uploaded of some of my Ultima stuff tonight. I’m particularly fond of my original boxes, of course, but also I have the Famicom versions of Ultima III and IV. While the ports weren’t great at all (avoid!!!) I picked them up cheap to enjoy the box art and documentation giving a Japanese twist to a series I’ve always loved.
BigWeather, no doubt.
One fun thing about the Shay Addams book is how it details that Garriot “lost” the playthrough race for the first time ever on Ultima V. He and whoever beat him both started the same: they be-lined for the magic axe outside Jelhom and where ever the nearest invisibility ring was (I forget). But then Garriot collected a party and began to do his thing. Whoever beat him did a solo-playthrough, and got through it more quickly because his rings lasted much longer, and he could do things like the “only 1 invisible character left so all monsters flee” more often (I loved using that to farm the reaper room on level 4 or 5 of I think it was Dastard. You had to take virtue hits as you left a monster in a hidden location before exiting, thus “resetting” the room, but by the time you staggered out of the dungeon you had more than enough gold to make up for it). Also, he leveled to 8 quickly.
That’s funny, the “trick” to Ultima 4 was to play solo for most of the game. The enemy encounters scaled to your party so playing solo made you traverse through the world super fast. IIRC the enemies scaled but the gold didn’t. Could be wrong about that though.
I had that one, too. A great read overall.
I popped my Ultima cherry on Ultima 5 and I still regard that as the high point of the series (as well as one of the best CRPGs I’ve ever played). The only CRPG I had played before Ultima 5 was Bard’s Tale 3, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t remotely prepare me for all the CRPG potential that Ultima 5 delivered. I went back to 4, enjoyed it, but had already been a little spoiled by the improvements in 5. I fully appreciate that 5 wouldn’t have been half the game it was if Garriot had never gone through the process of making 4.
No, that’s pretty much right on as I remember it. Encounters could only leave 1 chest, so the # of enemies in an encounter was irrelevant on that front as far as I know. You could fight 1 orc or 9 dragons; the only difference is that dragon chests were more lucrative (but that just meant more gold up to 99, and possibly 1 item). But it was only going to be one chest in both cases.
That’s one reason V was a big improvement; individual enemies could drop chests. And chests could contain any number of items. Dragon chests and chests in the lower dungeon levels were incredibly lucrative (reapers were good too though, heh). I remember my buddy and I breaking the bank (I think we used 2 time stop scrolls and 2 summon daemon scrolls) to kill our first dragon (found wandering near britannia), and being amazed at the results.
Ultima had a huge influence on CPRGs, of course. There was a flurry of Ultima clones at the time, such as Magic Candle, but it went well beyond that. Bioware and Baldurs Gate was clearly inspired by the series in dozens of ways, ranging from the overhead view to the party makeup. The same is true of Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls games, though they took different things. And today’s MMO makers learned a lot about how to build a game world from Ultima’s setup of city quest hubs and wilderness adventure areas.
But that’s just the start. A lot of JPRG fans have never heard of Ultima, but early JPRGs like Zelda and Final Fantasy borrowed a lot of their classic tropes from the series. If you’ve every played a JPRG and wandered through a village full of townsfolk who spout one-liners, or traveled overland with a single figure representing the entire party only to “zoom in” for combat, or been limited where you can go in the world until you get the airship, then you’ve seen the influence of Ultima.
And it goes beyond RPGs. At a time when most video games focused on limitations - small areas with linear gameplay - Garriot modeled an entire world and let the player go wherever they wanted. The GTA games may not have much in common with Ultima in terms of morality, but Rockstar lifted their open world design philosophy straight from the Ultima series.
So happy birthday Ultima IV, one of the most influential games in one of the most influential series in game history!
Ultima III was probably the first RPG I played, stealing bits of time to goof around with it in the computer lab at school, but IV was the first one I bought myself and played the hell out of it at home, and it definitely had a profound effect on my future tastes in gaming. I’ve still got the floppies and manuals around here somewhere, and might still have the ankh (could be in one of my collections of miscellaneous little bits), but I think I lost the map and box while moving, alas.
And dammit, I still remember answering one of the questions wrong, getting kicked out of the Abyss, and having to do it over again.
I actually loved it when friends would rave to me about the GTA 3+ and then ask why we had not seen more open world games. I laughed and said on the PC side we had been doing it since the early 80s.
I played Ultima IV on the NES, so for me it’s only 20 years old. I played a ton of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior but gave up on each before the end. Ultima was the first big RPG I ever finished, I played that game like crazy. I’d love to see a remake on the DS like those other RPGs have had.
25 years?!?! That can’t be right.
My Apple IIe got a lot of Ultima action. As many have said, those games were there at the right time and those were the games everyone had in their library if they said “I play computer games” (which is funny in itself, since no one much says “computer” any longer they say "PC). The Garriot name, unfortunately, does not mean quite what it used to.
I just don’t understand min/maxing.
Normally I’m not into min/maxing at all either and if you’re playing U4 for the first time I’d be sad if you played that way. Having said that when I replayed the game a while back it helped me go through the game quicker, enabling me to enjoy the whole thing - if that makes any sense. The 8v8 battles can be very time consuming.
THOU HAST LOST AN EIGHTH!
Yeah. I guess I just associate Ultima IV with being 16 or whatever I was and getting submerged in the then-huge world.
I dabbled in Ultima I on a friend’s Apple II when I was 10 or so, and played it on my PC maybe five years ago now — I was amazed at how small and simple it seemed, compared with my memories. I was much more goal-directed and less fanciful playing it.
Ah, youth and innocence are fled. Out, out, brief candle!