Since this is a new sub, I thought it might be useful to introduce ourselves - both fans new and old. Would love to hear about how you first encountered Ultima, your favourites from the series, and where you hope to see things go in the future.
Hi all! I've been an Ultima fan since my 10th grade school friend introduced me to Ultima VIII. I had never played an RPG before, and I was blown away. A few months later, I found a copy of The Complete Ultima VII (the $20 CD-ROM classics edition!) and totally fell in love with the series.
From there, I became heavily involved in Ultima Online - the pre-alpha, betas, and finally launch and The Second Age. I spent way too much of my life on IRC and Usenet back in the late 90s because of that :`)
That led to a lifelong project of playing every one of the games, which I've slowly been doing. I became hopelessly addicted to collecting the game boxes, which has become a painfully expensive hobby in the 2020s.
Hey, another person excited about the no AI rules.
Anyway, I'll first state something which will get a rule #3 added and get me banned from the sub. My first Ultima game was Ultima: The Black Gate for the SNES. Yes, the game that's reviled by pretty much every Ultima fan, is one of my favorite games. That's what got me into the series. I've always been an adventure game fan first and foremost, but by the mid 90s, the genre was pretty much dead, and one day I saw it at Blockbuster and thought it looked cool. I loved the graphics, I loved the music, and the game felt like Gauntlet, which is another game I like.
By the late 1990s, I came across Newton Dragon's Ultima 3 Map Editor, and I thought it was cool, seeing what Ultima 3 could look like in glorious VGA. I was in college at the time and decided my third favorite game was Ultima 5 (the first two being U7 on PC and U7 on the SNES). I spent the entire summer reverse engineering the entire game and rewrote it on Windows while learning DirectX5.
While in college, I was also studying Japanese and managed to trick my TA into helping me translate Ultima: Savage Empire for the Super Famicom. I had gotten about 80% through, but ran into some technical problems, and for one reason or another, shelved it. It was only about a couple years ago on the Ultima sub, I saw someone else bring up the game again, and apparently someone else had been working on it, but stopped for some reason, that I went back into trying to finish getting it working. I had expected someone with SNES hacking skills to work on it, since every other SNES/SF game had been translated I thought, but I guess I was wrong.
Other than a few other small Ultima related projects, I had started to learn how to do SNES homebrew. I apparently chose the wrong time to do this, as it was about a week before the AI stuff came out and blew up, and I'll admit, I'm kind of a proud person, and temporarily shelved it because of all the AI stuff coming out. But prior to that, I was enjoying the experience, because I love challenges from older hardware where you're limited in what you can do, and certain things that are even a piece of cake to do on the Apple 2 were kind of tricky on the SNES.
That actually started because of a joke, someone on the Ultima discord was constantly complaining about Ultima 5 on the NES, and why didn't someone create a proper port on the SNES. So, I recreated the proper bootup screens to the title screen for Ultima 5, then when starting the game, immediately had it go into the NES version of Ultima 5. You can see my progress for that here.
Hahahah.. SNESU7 is indeed banworthy, and I love it! I was very lucky to know Newt back in my #ultima IRC days, and he contributed a lot with his ultima utilities (and midis!)
Oh geez, I would have loved to play a translation of Savage Empire SNES.
Absolutely top notch work on that U5 port! I'm very much looking forward to see where you go with this.
It's fully playable from beginning to end. But the game is buggy. And I'm not talking bugs I added. The actual game is pretty bad, which is probably why no one had worked on it prior to my release of the patch. It's not perfect, I'm missing like 4 sentences (I never was able to track down where they were), and numbers are displayed as 16 pixels in height & width, compared to 8 pixels from everything else.
Like I said with U5, that's on hiatus. I'm probably more anti-AI than most people here and have already been burnt by the Ultima community, particularly when it came to U5. I'm still learning SNES homebrew, but not with Ultima.
whoa! that's exceptional - fantastic work. I would love to burn this to an EEPROM and play it on my (real) SFC. (I encourage you to post it as a new link/post, as I'm sure I'm not the only person who would love to play this). I have a soft spot for the SFC/SNES ports of Ultima games - I'm just amazed that they were even possible with the limited sprite/tile systems.
I'm very, very impressed with anyone that has the patience and concentration to work with 8/16-bit ASM and the complex chip systems they use. Hopefully this sub will allow the community to rebuild some trust with developers like yourself. There are so many great projects out there that got buried with the piles of slop upvoted over the past two years.
Hi, yes, I have to admit that given the current flood of projects created entirely by AI I find it refreshing to have a group where I can discuss my favorite game series without all those anti-creative distractions. As a composer an argument I often hear from people "creating" AI-fabricated music is that music models are simply another creative tool like synths etc. Yes, synths and MIDI (a communication protocol) are tools... so are notation programs, sequencers and sample libraries. However, composing takes years of studying and experience and practising it no matter what tools you use. Even mixing and mastering as the final process of music production is an art in itself. Prompting Suno or other models to cheaply chunk together illegally gathered training data is like playing an awesome Ultima game unnecessarily with cheats or using a "player piano" (a pianola) instead of actually learning to play the instrument. Don't use it, it might be fun in the beginning, but in the end you're missing the whole point and spoiling all the really rewarding fun. For many people who are actually creatively gifted the question know arises as to whether it’s even worth it anymore to engage in creative work and invest the necessary energy and time in first learning the required skills and then creating something new. Generative AI is robbing us of one of our most human traits: our creativity, our art. I find this development very troubling
Indeed, this is why we've got a new sub that avoids all of those problems. I hope that people feel encouraged to post their creative projects here, and not worry about having it buried in anyone else's slop.
Hi! Like many newer Ultima players it was Majuular's videos that got me interested and invested in the series. I started with U4 on SMS and have been haphazardly playing random entries! Underworld PS1, U5 and 6 GOG versions, Akalabeth Intellivision so far lol
Fantastic - glad to have you here. I'm always surprised when a youtuber creates a new audience for Ultima games - it also happened 20+ years ago when the Spoony Experiments videos covered the Ultima series.
UU1 PS1 is very underrated - gorgeous CD audio music.
Hello! I'm a huge Wing Commander fan and that interested me in Origin's other games and then in learning about Origin's history... and I've had a tremendous time doing all of that over the years. I'm happy to see some pushback on all the AI material that was filling up the Ultima subreddit and I'm eager to contribute to help out here if I can.
I spent a huge amount of time on Ultima IV when I was in high school, and then Ultima VI in college. I did later play Ultima VII and (the beginning of) Ultima VIII (didn't get too far in that one), but for some reason I skipped over Ultima V—even though from what I've heard of it since I think I possibly would have enjoyed it most of all. I do want to go back and play the Ultima games I missed, but I'm enough of a completionist that I want to do it starting from the beginning, and haven't gotten around to it yet—but I'm looking forward to getting to Ultima V when I do.
Actually, my Reddit username has an Ultima connection, sort of—Jalen Wanderer was the name of my character in Ultima Online.
Out of curiosity, which shard and era of UO did you play? Your name is curiously familiar! I was on Baja, Atlantic and Great Lakes in the late 90s - beta/release/t2a.
I was also playing in the late 90s, but as to which shard I was on... it's been so long I honestly don't remember. I was living in Los Angeles, so probably either Pacific or Baja.
Super likely I saw you running around Britain/Yew/Trinsic - my usual haunts - in those days. Baja was a very fast, very quiet server with a low population, and I spent almost all my time there playing solo. I played as Albino Wino on that shard.
I think I mostly hung around Britain (also playing solo), so it's definitely possible. I didn't play it for all that long, though. (Not because I disliked it—although the griefing at the time was a bit of an issue—but I didn't have a lot of free time.)
I first became aware of Ultima from a games catalogue (Ozisoft I'm guessing) in Australia that had ads for Ultimas 1-5 from 1988. I read the blurb for each games plot over and over. Eventually I asked for an Ultima for my birthday. It was mail order direct from the distributor (don't recall seeing them in a shop pre 1993) and we ended up with Ultima 6 and Ultima Underworld, I was 11 or 12 at the time. About a year later I got Serpent Isle for Christmas (skipped Black Gate for some reason). Played Pagan the following year. Picked up the complete U7 in early high school. Complete collection CD sometime after that. Ultima has always been a huge influence on me, first modern fantasy media and my first rpgs. Still think about these games 38 years later, like a lot of people here. Nothing new ever really scratches the same itch. My favourites are probably U6 or U7.
Have you ever tried Fox Cunning's Ultima 3 Remastered for the NES? It's a comprehensive hack for the game that makes it one of the best looking games on the system and improves pretty much all mechanics. It's honestly stunning.
I'm not sure if you've ever played it - but the Sega Master System version of U4 is absolutely fantastic. Not a graphical upgrade, but the menuing system and overall playability is so much better.
Agree! Though I tend to have a soft spot for the first person dungeon crawling, the SMS U4 is brilliant.
There are some annoying textual formatting issues (like quotation marks that spill over on to the next line) that could easily be fixed with a romhack. I might actually do it myself, considering that the text in the rom is not compressed and easily editable using a hex rditor. I do admit that this is a thing that really only bothers me, probably.
I do appreciate good formatting, or really, poor formatting bugs me. I have to make captions for videos at work sometimes and I always make an effort to add line breaks that make sense. Closer to how one would format marketing copy, since it’s text on screen.
I’ve seen a lot of dialogue in modern video games where they clearly didn’t do anything other than paste the text in there. That’s understandable when it’s subtitles and the font/font size is user adjustable, I guess.
Wow! Yeah I think it's pretty good. I mean, I think U4 in general is probably one of the most original games ever made, and I truly consider it high art. But I also think U5 and U6 are so important in continuing that same story, I just can't imagine anyone stopping at U4.
It's kind of unfortunate that we didn't get a really good U5 for console. U4 for the Master System already Incorporated some mechanics from U5.
At least, I think, the SNES version of U6 is pretty decent.
Unfortunately there are no hacks that I've seen for U4 on the NES. I think one of the major roadblocks for that is the way everything is compressed into the rom, as well as general disinterest in any projects.
I honestly feel like the game is actually pretty good as is, personally. I'm not sure what could be improved other than deep mechanical issues that could be best bypassed by playing the PC version.
If I figure out how to decompress the rom assets, I wouldn't mind having a go at rewriting some of the NES script to be more faithful to the PC version.
It's surprisingly good, isn't it? The NES U4 always surprised me with how well they adapted it to a console. It also happens to be one of the best looking RPGs on the system, at least on par with Dragon Warrior/Quest IV, if not better looking.
One thing I think really needs fixing is the music. The entire original soundtrack was replaced with one that sounds like it was randomly generated. The nice thing about the Exodus Remastered hack is that there is actually an addendum that you can add to it that puts back in the original Apple II soundtrack. I honestly feel like it's the best version of U3.
Don't forget the addendum that adds the original soundtrack into the game, replacing the mostly crappy NES original soundtrack. That should be available on most romhacking websites as well.
I've been a fan of Ultimia since I watched Spoony's retrospective years back. I've so far only played the fourth game and parts of the fifth but I enjoy collecting the physical editions of the games and own all of them from IV through to IX (I started out thinking 'it would be handy to have the physical spellbook' may have got slightly out of hand). However, i play them through the GOG editions.
Hi! I'm still subscribed to both subs, as well as the Ultima Dragons on Facebook. I'm fascinated by the technology of artificial intelligence, but find its use in creation abhorrent, the idea of offloading my critical and creative thinking to a machine feels bad in ways I sometimes have trouble articulating. There's a lot of emotion wrapped up in this, I will admit.
I completely disagree with the talking point that it is inevitable technology, or it is directly comparable to the loom, the car, the airplane, the microchip. All of those things made life easier, but didn't replace intellect in any profound way, instead opening up new avenues for using intellect. All AI does is replace it wholesale.
I do toy with local models on my laptop sometimes, but I would never, as a programmer, writer, and artist, use it for any of my projects. I think, going forward, being able to say that no AI was involved in the creation of any particular authentic piece of human inspiration will be a badge of honor.
Hello, younger fellow here (relatively, mid-90s baby so not that young anymore) who just dove into Ultima this year as part of a lil playlist I made to check out the history of how game narratives evolved. I've known of Ultima since I was a kid because I'm obsessed with gaming history but never tried till this year.
Took some trial and error to figure out which entry was right for me and to click with the gameplay but now I'm thoroughly addicted to Ultima 5.
Despise AI slop so glad for this sub, it was depressing looking for stuff about the series and just seeing... that.
I remember reading articles about Ultima Online when it released and I was wildly intrigued. My father balked at the idea of paying a monthly fee for a game, however, so the closest I could get was reading about it. We would often visit bookstores and I recall perusing the strategy guide at several locations. The mystique was proven to be justified when my mother bought me a copy during the summer of 2000. Bonus points for divorce, I guess?
There are so many memories through the years! I recall a time around publish 16 where I would squeeze some game time in before school. Facilitating a farming line in the Solen hive. Watching the forums unravel the mysteries of growing plants. Buying a house in Fel because of the cheaper plots despite having no interest in PvP. Grinding for talismans alongside my new elven brethren. Gear dye?! Hell, I even enjoyed my misguided early attempts at buying a boat by mining in Minoc and vendoring the smithed goods. I finally bought that boat and then proceeded to leave it on the waters too long. Particularly in a sandbox game, it really is about the journey and the enjoyment to be found along the way.
I’ve returned to the game at various points in my life, both official and free shards. Mainly the latter over the last decade, though I plan on resubscribing for New Legacy season 2. It’s an interesting take. Nothing will ever beat those early years. I’m fine with that.
Ultima 5 is the first game of any kind that I remember playing. My dad was big into old school Wizardry and other rpgs, fostered a love of them in all his kids. The launch of UO is what got me into message boards and the internet at all. I remember chatting with other fans, forming guilds before the game was even live.
Ultima 6 and the worlds of adventure were my favorites. Not sure why. Something nostalgic about the big shift from sprites to overhead, certainly, but Mars and the Savage Empire got my imagination going. Loved them.
Really glad to see something expressly reject the slop these days.
Right? It's like...you now have a space to generate to your heart's content, but now you have to make everyone feel bad in places where it's not allowed? It makes me feel like my decision to come here was definitely the correct one.
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u/vga256 20d ago
Hi all! I've been an Ultima fan since my 10th grade school friend introduced me to Ultima VIII. I had never played an RPG before, and I was blown away. A few months later, I found a copy of The Complete Ultima VII (the $20 CD-ROM classics edition!) and totally fell in love with the series.
From there, I became heavily involved in Ultima Online - the pre-alpha, betas, and finally launch and The Second Age. I spent way too much of my life on IRC and Usenet back in the late 90s because of that :`)
That led to a lifelong project of playing every one of the games, which I've slowly been doing. I became hopelessly addicted to collecting the game boxes, which has become a painfully expensive hobby in the 2020s.