[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 : 143 points
Date : 2025-02-22 16:56 UTC (1 days 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
| ghfhghg wrote:
| Theres a modern port of starcon2 called masters of urquan
| pridkett wrote:
| Here's something that still blows my mind. When I bought Ultima
| VII, I think I paid $69.99 for it. Depending on how you do the
| math, that's like $150 today. And today I don't buy most games
| unless they're half off and under $15 on steam.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| The even more shocking thing is that it was worth every cent;
| it was the first real experience many of us had in some
| medium to large scale world with day / night cycles, long
| term social interactions (I think I even got married at some
| point?!), ye olde English, ...
|
| Young me figured out the rune writing after a few minutes of
| scribbling on paper, and after that did it purely visually (I
| didn't have the cloth and manual etc, got it with Creative
| Sound Blaster 16 CD and sadly never looked at the
| documentation). There were many puzzles I figured out alone
| and was super proud of. Those were super formative times, and
| Ultima 8, while cool in its own way, didn't have the same
| realtime speed and party control etc.
| ekianjo wrote:
| It had a real package with a map in it. That would be like
| buying a collector edition today at 200 USD
| somenameforme wrote:
| And devs make a _lot_ more money for it. Modern day devs
| justifiably complain about having to give ~30% of their
| revenue to Steam or app stores, but back in the day you 'd be
| lucky to get some sort of deal like a 20% "royalty" on sales
| after 100% of your publisher's costs were covered. So for
| each $60 spent (which as I recall was a more common price
| tag) something like $5-$10 would make its way to the studio.
|
| And physical media meant that as soon as your game or
| software was off store shelves your revenue went to $0. And
| even when it was on store shelves, if it was popular it'd
| rapidly end up in the million 2nd hand resale shops where
| it'd cycle through potentially multiple players and you'd
| again get $0.
|
| Given how studios were dropping like flies back in the day, I
| don't think they were gouging at $60 - it was just a very
| different environment.
| 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
| snickerer wrote:
| That is mind-blowing. I remember I stopped to play Ultima VII
| at the beginning of this quest because I lost the track.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Spoony's Ultima retrospective was great, it's a shame how the
| internet just completely broke him.
| Ieghaehia9 wrote:
| A video I watched not too long ago expressed something similar
| as "in some RPGs, society exists for you" (e.g. you, a random
| escaped prisoner, can just waltz up to the local lord in Skyrim
| and be taken at face value). "In others, you exist in a
| society" (and the guards will keep you from even entering the
| nobles' district unless you're in good standing, which takes a
| considerable amount of the game to get).
|
| It's not quite the same thing, because that example is about
| how other people treat you, not whether they've got lives of
| their own; but in a broader perspective, it's still about how
| much the game seems to be a prop for the player's enjoyment vs.
| being a proper world that doesn't fall apart five days after
| the player wins.
| kaycey2022 wrote:
| This immediately echoes the points laid out in this video
| comparing Oblivion and Avowed. Avowed is a new 70 dollar game
| that just came out, in 2025. The interesting part is the
| design of the towns people in the new game.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhL1NZugsBk
| marticode wrote:
| As a kid who wasted countless hours in Ultima V and VI, thank
| you: you explain very well what made those games so great and
| how disappointed I am every time I have been since then (though
| I gotta say Morrowind was fairly good at mimicking that recipe)
| Keyframe wrote:
| Dose of nostalgia here as well, but trying to objectively
| consider few points made and from what I remember (I did a ton
| of game reviews for game mags back in the day) is that games
| used to basically not have much venues outside of gameplay
| mechanics and storytelling to get to you, so the good outliers
| were really good; Especially considering today's games where
| it's easy to fall into a trap of spending resources on eye
| candy instead of the hard parts. In this genre, games like
| Ultima (most) and Wizardry were really that good. What people,
| for some reason (probably graphics) don't understand is that
| games, just like movies, don't have a date on them and
| shouldn't. Yes, there are advancements in graphics and yes
| there are trends which developed over audience taste (or vice
| versa), but just like any good movie from no matter the age, a
| game from no matter the vintage could and should be enjoyed
| today as equally as any other modern one. For those that can't
| enjoy old games like some people can't enjoy BW movies, there
| are modding communities and even Nvidia RTX Remix (for those
| games that support it) that are bringing new groove to the
| beautiful core.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Yeah, i agree that these are areas that make Ultima 7
| outstanding even compared to many modern RPGs:
|
| 1. NPCs are unique
|
| 2. NPCs have plenty of interesting dialogues compared even to
| current games. I wonder why current games lag behind. If that
| is due to expectation of voiced characters or just an
| expectation that players are not interested in that.
|
| 3. NPCs have defined schedule. Seems like a basic thing (the
| schedule is static, not a real simulation) but still keeps the
| illusion of alive world and is absent in many current games,
| where NPCs are fixed, or just disappear outside business hours.
| coryrc wrote:
| I'm not sure how yet, but I feel LLMs should somehow make this
| easier to do. If you write or generate backstories, then it
| should be possible to generate plausible conversations among
| NPCs. The backstory thing is done well by Dwarf Fortress (I
| think) and surely there's an opportunity for LLMs to add
| interactivity on top of it?
| chasil wrote:
| I remember playing the original Ultima on an Apple ][ in high
| school.
|
| Something about Mondain?
| xipho wrote:
| And you drop a coin in the pool in one of the towns and you get
| a random weapon. Blasters for all on first level!
| tmtvl wrote:
| Becoming a Space Ace because the series was rather silly before
| QotA turned it into something truly outstanding.
| canadiantim wrote:
| I miss ultima online - the good ol' days. Yes you can still play
| it, but alas' not the same. No game has come close.
| xurbax wrote:
| It was amazing in it's heyday. Has any other multiplayer game
| since then persisted items in the game-world (i.e. dropped
| items and such)? I miss that. And the housing was a lot of fun.
| axus wrote:
| UO was the first "massive" online game I'd ever played.
| Getting murdered and running around as a ghost was fun the
| first few times. http://www.havenandhearth.com/ has a similar
| feel with less players. Plenty of housing and PKing though.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Playing that game was one of the highlights of my life.
| erupt7893 wrote:
| There is the UO:1998 project https://www.uo1998.com
| aleyan wrote:
| There is also Ultima VII: Revisited [1] project that reached
| 0.1.0 last month. It attempts to fix the weird U7 perspective by
| giving it a 3d engine.
|
| Between this and recent substantial progress in VCMI and HotA for
| HOMM3, it is an exciting time for retro PC fantasy gaming.
|
| [1] https://www.u7revisited.com/
| uzidil wrote:
| My attempt at creating something similar:
| https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Wow, this looks amazing! :O
| whitehexagon wrote:
| Looks great! and seems like you have spent a lot of time on the
| detail, not just the graphics, but also the storyline (I
| started by having a read of the walk-through). Have you written
| your own game engine for this? anyway, well done, and I wish
| you success.
| uzidil wrote:
| Yes, the engine is written in go and uses opengl (the
| isometric layout uses the opengl z buffer). The game is
| written in bscript (https://github.com/uzudil/bscript). I've
| always been a huge Ultima fan and this was a lot of fun to
| work on.
| relistan wrote:
| This looks awesome
| danso wrote:
| Looking back, U7 is a deeply flawed game (the combat basically
| provides zero challenge, the inventory system is horrendous) yet
| its game world is so deeply immersive that it's not at all
| surprising to see this kind of open source labor of love to
| restore it.
| ekianjo wrote:
| It's a deeply flawed game but thats much less flawed than other
| RPGs. Most of them don't even do a quarter of what Ultima VII
| achieved on what are now ancient CPUs.
| nottorp wrote:
| > the combat basically provides zero challenge
|
| Is that a problem? Do all games have to involve some kind of
| fighting?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Of course not every game needs combat. If there is combat
| though, it should be included thoughtfully and serve the
| game's intended goals (usually by being some mix of
| challenging and satisfying, though not always).
| jerf wrote:
| Ultima traditionally had relatively deep tactical combat, at
| least for the time.
|
| Ultima VII's problem is that it sort of exhibits a desire
| from a design perspective to have that sort of combat, but in
| practice it's even less engaging than those mobile games
| where you select four of your characters from some gacha-
| based roster and fling them at four other characters, and the
| fight proceeds without you. At least in those fights you can
| understand what is going on. Ultima VII's combat is just the
| characters randomly walking around each other, playing some
| sword swinging animations, and then some things are dead and
| some things are not. Not only do you not have much useful
| input, you don't even have comprehension of what happened.
| Did you win handily? Did you scrape through? Is there
| something you could have done to change the outcome? None of
| these questions are answerable from the game. You can't even
| call this "realism", you have vastly less comprehension of
| what happened then people in real life have in real melee
| combat scenarios, as confusing as real life can be.
|
| It would be better off by just removing it except combat is
| still sort of baked into the conflict in the genre and the
| basic design of exploring the world.
|
| Since the ability to "read" the battles and react in any
| intelligent way is about nil, the game made up for it by
| making everything almost trivially easy, as long as you're
| halfway decently geared. It works against the design of the
| world.
|
| This is the problem. They should either be good and
| meaningful, or somehow removed, but Ultima VII has just about
| the worst possible combination of attributes for combat to be
| meaningful in any way, yet it is still there. At least it's
| over quickly.
|
| (The series kind of flamed out on the combat here. Ultima
| VIII's combat is also exceedingly bad, albeit in a completely
| different way. IX's was one of the earliest 3D "open world"
| games and while it may exceed its predecessors in being at
| least "semi-credible for the time", that's about as far as it
| makes it.)
| nottorp wrote:
| I get your point.
|
| I did play most Ultimas though. I don't remember the combat
| annoying me. Perhaps because I just wanted to get it done
| and move on with the story.
| zajio1am wrote:
| For me, the combat was confusing, but the inventory system
| (which considers both weight and bulk) was much better than in
| most other games (even today), which use fixed number of slots
| with perhaps stacking of same items. That us horrendous.
| pavlov wrote:
| I wonder if AI could soon recreate old computer games into a
| modern programming language.
|
| Those MS-DOS era game engine binaries are small enough to fit in
| LLM context. There's ample gameplay footage available that could
| be used to teach the model what the output should be.
| musha68k wrote:
| Long live Lord British and the enthusiasts of Brittania. Neat;
| that said: What's the general hold up with installing Ultima VII
| through dosbox/-x?
| freeqaz wrote:
| Easy for you, not easy for my Uncle or Nephew.
|
| Companies like GoG (Grand old Games) have done a lot to
| "polish" the DosBox experience but it's still ... rough. Small
| things like mouse movement just feeling jank make a big
| difference.
|
| A game can be _functional_ but if the UX is so poor/dated that
| it doesn't hold up, then I think projects like this make a lot
| of sense. Having high quality buttons, config menus that match
| modern UI expectations, and HiDPI font rendering goes a _long_
| way towards getting my non-technical family members to stick
| around.
|
| It just makes it more accessible. But maybe my take is spicy.
| Anybody agree/disagree?
| generic92034 wrote:
| I had great fun playing many old games in DosBox. Most of the
| time these were games I have played in DOS times before,
| decades ago. But I cannot say I generally had a worse
| experience in DosBox. YMMV.
| jszymborski wrote:
| *Good Old Games
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I've long been curious about the Ultima series.
|
| Would this be approachable for someone in 2025? I've played stuff
| like Chrono Trigger and dig 2D graphics. But 90s games always
| tend to have a lot of weird inconvenient stuff that makes them
| hard to play.
| snickerer wrote:
| That's why there are modern projects like Exult. Exult makes
| the playing experience more convenient for players without gray
| beards.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| In the same spirit, for Heroes of might and magic 3:
|
| https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi
|
| Using it on Ubuntu to play with my brother who is on a Mac in
| another country and it already works quite well. We hit only one
| bug so far.
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