[HN Gopher] Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating sy...
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Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems
Author : nateb2022
Score : 26 points
Date : 2025-02-22 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (exult.sourceforge.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (exult.sourceforge.io)
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Ultima 7 was for many, many years my fav game ever. Blew my mind
| as a kid!
| philsnow wrote:
| Ultima VII (and its expansions) and Star Control 2 form a core
| part of my childhood computer experience.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| I think I'd pay like 250 Eur for a massive Ultima game by
| Larian, in which they lean hard on the U8 style pentagram
| spells, you can at any point just become a baker or
| something, etc :D
| snickerer wrote:
| Exult/Ultima VII is an RPG with a real story. I enjoyed it. If
| you people out there like RPGs, try it, if you can live with the
| 'retro' graphics.
| robenkleene wrote:
| This is probably just nostalgia, as I was the right age to sink
| hours into the golden age of Ultima IV-VII when I was younger,
| but I still think these are the best roleplaying games ever made,
| and by an absolutely gigantic mile. Every time I try a new RPG, I
| initially have this feeling like, will this be like Ultima, will
| this be like Ultima, but I always end up disappointed.
|
| The best way of describing what makes them so great is that they
| avoid everything feeling like one of those fake-cardboard-cutout
| Western movie sets. Every other RPG I've played feels like this,
| the infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate (I've only played 1,
| not 2) being the canonical example. Everytime I run into an NPC
| or situation in Baldur's Gate it just feels like the characters
| start talking through a script that was written just for me, the
| player, to setup some problem for I, the player, to solve. This
| is of course the very definition of immersion breaking, because
| this artificial setup draws attention to the fact that you're
| playing a game, you're not actually in a real believable world.
| Baldur's Gate has fantastic combat (an area Ultima VII is
| terrible), but I think the way that the story is setup and told
| is boring and uninspired. And that goes similar for literally
| every other RPGs I've played: Mass Effect ("Hi I'm an alien from
| a new race you've never met, would you like me to tell you
| everything about how my race fits into the universe?"), Skyrim
| (Besthesda, masters of the anonymous, faceless NPC), the
| Witcher/Cyberpunk (the CD Projekt Red games are actually masters
| of this style of game design, because they use it as scaffolding
| for easily the best writing ever in video games, but they're
| still hampered by inherent weakness of the format: That the world
| feels like a prop to setup quests for the player to knock down).
|
| In contrast, the Ultima games feel like they create the world
| first, so that feels alive and believable. And I don't mean by
| writing a bunch of lore (writing has it's format already, _books_
| , use _game mechanics_ to tell your story), but I mean by
| creating a world piece by piece, character by character, city
| block by city block, room by room, each piece of furniture,
| _individual dresser by individual dresser_. Environmental story
| telling, game mechanic story telling, _storytelling native to the
| format of of games._ The tavern goes here, the barber lives here,
| these three friends meet at this pub, at this time every day, and
| discuss this. Ultima does this for every town and every character
| in the game, for even the most trivial NPC. There 's no
| anonymous, faceless, story-less NPCs acting as walking props like
| in every other RPG. And once that world feels like a real
| believable place, one that you could just sit and watch at have
| it be interesting, like people watching through cafe window--
| existing through an intersection of mechanics (how NPCs move,
| day-night-cycles, how they interact with the environment, e.g.,
| the classic "using flour to bake bread"). _Only then_ are the
| player-driven interactions _then built on top of this world_ ,
| e.g., if you hear a rumor that the shopkeeper seems to disappear
| for a couple of hours after their shop closes each night, well
| you can wait till 5 PM and follow them and see what they're up
| to. Since _everything_ is scripted to this degree, it doesn 't
| feel like you've entered into a pre-programmed scenario for
| following just this one NPC, you can follow anyone in the game
| this way, it just so happens that some NPCs might do something
| interesting after you follow them, like maybe you see them hide a
| key under a plant and you can go investigate.
|
| This way of having the player-driven gameplay come directly from
| mechanics _that existed first to make a believable world_ , just
| makes for more interesting games in my opinion than anything that
| has come after. A game that's just a series of scripted
| encounters for the player to knock down is just less interesting.
| robenkleene wrote:
| While I'm on a Ultima VII nostalgia kick, I love this YouTuber
| Noah Antwiler's videos on the Ultima series. This clip (at
| about 16m22s, the link should jump directly there) is a funny
| telling of how wild some of the quest design in Ultima VII is
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mRb36-uMrc&t=16m22s
| chasil wrote:
| I remember playing the original Ultima on an Apple ][ in high
| school.
|
| Something about Mondain?
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