Help An Ultima Fan Finish Ultima V: Lazarus

u5lazarus

I received this request for assistance from Gunther, via e-mail late last week:

Good Evening,

I’m having a problem with the Lazarus remake from “Warriors Of Destiny”:

http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Gerrin

I don’t know how to turn off the script in Dungeon Siege, nor do I actually want to mess around with the game.

Also from the walkthrough:
“Attack on Bordermarch

The Oppression agent Gerrin leads a team of the Black Company to Bordermarch, claiming to have followed the Avatar. He asks if this place is a Resistance stronghold. There are two choices:

Yes. No Karma penalty for being honest. Everyone in Bordermarch feels doomed and neither Sir Simon nor Lady Tessa will speak with the Avatar anymore. (+15 XP)
No. –1 Karma for lying. Gerrin orders an attack, BUT ATTACKING GERRIN WILL MEAN THE BORDERMARCH RESIDENTS WILL BECOME HOSTILE TO THE PARTY.”

This is a bug btw, and this hasn’t been fixed after 1.2’s release in 2008 (I believe it was 2008, when the 1.2 version was released, due to bugs with the Blink Spell…)

“Killing Gerrin or any Bordermarch residents is –5 karma each. One way to handle this encounter is to set the party on hold fire so they will not accidentally react to Gerrin. Kill all the Oppression soldiers, then let the Bordermarch residents kill Gerrin. Unless the party helps, it is possible that a Bordermarch resident may be killed, although between them and the guards, the Oppression force will generally be cleared.”

Another problem lies in the fact that if I ordered them not to attack, they’ll probably get killed. The solution could be that I only select myself and go into combat with the guards, but even if I put it on “Engage”, The Avatar will still attack Gerrin, because he’s being attacked by Gerrin (not attacking someone in “Engage” mode only works when being attacked by an archer or a mage).

I have already finished about 70% from this game, so the only things I can do know (before the bordermarch) are:

1. some sidequests that are left
2. visit the Shrine Of Humility (haven’t done that one either)

Normally, I could ask this on the board of Project Britannia, but they’re hardly active and unless it’s an U6P Question, most people won’t respond (don’t know why…)

Perfect examples are two questions of me on that board:

http://www.projectbritannia.com/forum/index.php?topic=2405.0

52 views, 0 responses (after reloading the previous savefile, this problem was solved)

http://www.projectbritannia.com/forum/index.php?topic=2467.0

7 views, 0 responses. My characters are all at lv.7 now, but I can’t find anything about how many exp. is needed to level up your character (except for U6P)

This message was copied from the Exult forums a few hours ago. At this moment I am at the bordermarch (I think that makes it 80%, since I already killed 2 Shadowlords), I asked if I could ask this question over there. Dominus told me that I should contact someone called Kenneth, so that he could relay my message somewhere.

Well, let’s hope that this is indeed the right place for Gunther to have come. I must confess, however, that while I greatly enjoyed Ultima V: Lazarus, I am at a loss as to how to troubleshoot bugs therewith.

But some of you are rather more clever than I; perhaps someone here can offer Gunther some suggestions?

5 Responses

  1. Kindbud_Dragon says:

    What I remember from my playthrough a few years back was to move my party members outside Bordermarch on the opposite side of the drawbridge(?) before the cutscene while keeping the Avatar within Bordermarch. After the cutscene played I ran the Avatar back to the party and then engaged the enemy who chased the Avatar. In that manner it became easier to have the residents not turn on the Avatar and dialog would proceed as normal (at least that is how I recall it happening). Hope it helps!

  2. De-equip all ranged weapons your party have as they may be hitting friendlies when they miss the oppression guards. This was the problem in my playthrough.

  3. Egads, we shipped with that bug? It’s been so long that I don’t really trust my memory, but I’m amazed (and sad) that that bug lives on even after the 1.20 patch. 🙁

    As for a workaround, the two suggestions above both sound promising to me.

    Regarding your XP-to-level question, that one I may be able to help with. I just dug up my old Laz design docs, and according to them, here are the numbers:

    LVL / XP Needed / Max. HP
    1 0 30
    2 100 60
    3 200 90
    4 400 120
    5 800 150
    6 1600 180
    7 3200 210
    8 6400+ 240

    I can’t vouch for these numbers with 100% certainty since I may have tuned the tables late in development without going back and updating the design doc, but I don’t THINK I did that. Back in those days my concept of “game balancing” generally boiled down to “try something and pray it doesn’t suck.” ;-D

    Good luck!