[HN Gopher] Ultima VII: Revisited
___________________________________________________________________
Ultima VII: Revisited
Author : ibobev
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-02-23 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.u7revisited.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.u7revisited.com)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Reminds me a little of the Ultima V - Lazarus[1] project, where
| volunteers re-implemented the entire game in the Dungeon Siege 3D
| engine. They also added tons of new characters and dialog, side
| quests, a richer plot, and new artwork and music. They did all
| this and managed to keep the major plot and game elements the
| same. They actually managed to greatly improve on what is
| unarguably :) the best Ultima of the series.
|
| 1: https://www.u5lazarus.com
| frost_knight wrote:
| I think Lazarus is one of the greatest game mods ever made.
| They even added the option to become an evil Avatar and side
| with Blackthorn.
| conception wrote:
| How do they handle hidden dialogue options? One of the most
| amazing things about the series before 3d was you just talked
| to people about things and often they had something to say
| about the topic. Like you can ask just about anyone about the
| avatar or blackthorn. There's a donkey that figures out he's
| inside a video game, etc.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Would any code from the Exult project be useful to help implement
| the gameplay?
| chrisco23 wrote:
| Looks cool. I loved Ultima II and III as a kid. Even wrote some
| text walk-throughs back then. Played them on Apple //e and //c,
| the last Apple products I ever owned (or ever will). I also
| ditched all Windows about 25 years ago.
|
| I suppose to play on Linux though, I would need to run some Wine
| setup huh?
| kej wrote:
| DOSBox if you want to run them locally, or a web browser if you
| want to play them immediately:
| https://archive.org/details/msdos_Ultima_III_-_Exodus_1983
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140645
| steanne wrote:
| this is just a recreation, not an expansion, but xu4 is playable
| on linux without wine.
|
| https://xu4.sourceforge.net/
| layer8 wrote:
| It's still isometric, luckily. I always wanted to have Ultima VII
| with Ultima VIII perspective, and this is kind of a superset of
| that.
| hinkley wrote:
| I gave up on Ultima VII when some wolves attacked my party in
| the forest and I couldn't find my downed party member.
|
| That was the day and age when you only had the manual to help
| you figure out UI problems instead of asking people on The
| Internet. By the time I had access to somewhere to ask I was
| too busy playing Starflight. Which for the kids is the second
| version of No Man's Sky, or No Man's Sky is the third version
| of Starflight.
| seasluggy wrote:
| Ultima online was my one and only Ultima and it's weird to get
| pangs of nostalgia from Ultimas that I've never played.
| jghn wrote:
| IIRC the UO alpha looked even more like U7
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I never played the Ultima games but I did have a crippling Ultima
| Online addiction in high school for two years.
|
| This video definitely brought back some memories.
| holografix wrote:
| "Eat that kal vas flam and have a side of in nox you PK sob!"
| chongli wrote:
| Being a PK (as well as a thief/PK hybrid) in UO is some of
| the most fun I've ever had in a video game. There's nothing
| quite like the adrenaline rush of being a fugitive and
| surviving, picking people off and scavenging what you can
| before the fuzz arrive.
|
| PKing had a deleterious effect on the community -- I'll admit
| -- but I had fun as both a PK and as a victim trying to
| escape or exact revenge. UO (pre-Renaissance) remains the
| multiplayer game with the richest social dynamics I've ever
| played. When they finally got rid of non-consensual PKing
| they totally destroyed this richness. Instead of behaving
| like real people in a community who work together to solve
| their own problems they had the benefit of inviolable game
| mechanics to protect them.
|
| So people's reliance on one another disintegrated and they
| stopped engaging with each other. Without the threat of
| violence to settle things, people became anti-social and had
| no problem being very rude to one another. It was tragic!
| chongli wrote:
| Same! I played a ton of UO and met many friends on it. Never
| played any of the single-player series for more than a few
| minutes. Played some Ultima Underworld which appeals to me but
| it didn't stick.
|
| I have played a lot of Ultima-inspired games though. The Exile
| and Avernum series by Spiderweb Software [1] are childhood
| favourites. I also really loved Arx Fatalis [2], a love letter
| to Ultima Underworld.
|
| [1] http://www.spidweb.com
|
| [2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/arx_fatalis
| gfkclzhzo wrote:
| This is remarkable. I tried to replay U7 over the pandemic and it
| was just too clunky, even with Exult. This looks like it
| addresses my issues while perserving the original aesthetic.
|
| AI voice acting on-the-fly from in-game text would be slick.
|
| Tangent - Do any games let you set a speed multiplier for in-game
| speech? I'd love to run dialog at 1.5x like I do for podcasts.
| hinkley wrote:
| Ultima VII ran in real mode and it wanted every single kilobyte
| of memory that it could steal away from DOS.
|
| They had some fancy optimized version of HIMEM that worked a
| little bit better than the stock DOS one and people started using
| it on all of their boot disks not just the one for Ultima VII.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Ultima VII doesn't run in Real Mode, it runs in Unreal Mode.
|
| https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager
| hinkley wrote:
| Did anyone else ever get the glitch where the game switched from
| color to red and black? That was truly sinister.
| hinkley wrote:
| Dear Larian Studios,
|
| I have been a very good boy this year, and for Christmas I would
| like...
| kibwen wrote:
| And if anybody's looking for a new game with the Ultima vibe, I
| highly recommend Moonring, a free indie game from one of the
| creators of Fable:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2373630/Moonring/
| fnordlord wrote:
| Wow. Thanks. It's amazing that games like these exist for years
| on Steam and never surface when I search for new games with
| those tags.
| gokaygurcan wrote:
| Just uninstalled Akalabeth, Ultima 1, 2 and 3 last week. I was
| planning to play again but couldn't find any time because of many
| reasons. Plan was to continue with the rest of the series
| afterwards. If you're looking for them, GOG is your friend.
|
| On a totally irrelevant note, I know at this point it doesn't
| mean much to Broadsword to invest more into UO, but I really
| can't justify the lack of macOS client.
| UberFly wrote:
| Akalabeth was my first experience as a kid seeing a dungeon
| crawler game and I still feel the excitement and wonder of it.
| metadat wrote:
| See also related discussion from yesterday:
|
| _Exult: Recreating Ultima VII for modern operating systems_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140645 (48 comments)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-02-23 23:00 UTC)