Why Do YOU Love Ultima?
Kevin Fishburne has an excellent suggestion:
I think a thread should be started where we can all tell stories about why we love Ultima. Testimonials, basically, so we can gain greater insight into each other’s understanding and perception of the series, and perhaps in some way begin to understand what we as a collective define Ultima to be.
Good idea or nay? It’s been touched on here and there, myself included, but I’d love to see everyone’s experiences in one place. It’d be hella inspirational and maybe bring us together a bit more. This is a very fractured community at times.
To which I say: not a thread. I have a category already which is labeled “What Makes an Ultima?”, which I set up as part of a project I have not yet had time to pursue. I would love nothing more than to fill it up with guest posts of people explaining what Ultima was to them and what, in their opinion, constitutes a proper Ultima game.
So, here’s the deal. If you’re already registered at Aiera and would like to contribute, let me know and I will enable your user account with post-drafting rights. (I’ll still have to approve all the articles, thanks to the WordPress security model, but don’t worry…I’ll publish almost anything!)
If you’re not registered (how come?) and would like to contribute, send me your thoughts via the contact form and I will figure out how to post them under your name.
Interesting… would be a bit like Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s “Gaming Made Me” series, but based on Ultima.
Oh wow.. that’s.. well that’s not something I would want to undertake without setting aside the proper amount of time to make a decent presentation. (In other words, I wouldn’t take it lightly)
Ultima to me, is like the Lord of the Rings, or the Wheel of Time series to fantasy. It’s the pinnacle.
Then take the time; the site’s not going anywhere.
I’d love to hear from everyone about this.
That’s a tough one to answer. I think that the reason I love Ultima evolved with time.
I first bought the game at Radio Shack because of the superb Ultima V box cover but then I was drawn into Britannia with all the goodies (Thick & well written manuals, cloth map, codex coin) I found in the box.
At that time I didn’t have a PC at all, and only played for a few hours on a DOS emulator for Atari ST before I stopped. The emulated graphics were just to bad (White and green instead of VGA). Still I kept the game on my shelf and kept reading the manual.
I can say that this was certainly one of my first experience of playing a game in English as my native language is French.
The first Ultima game I’d play was Savage Empire as when my father finally bought a PC Ultima VI was no longer available in my local computer stores. I would have to wait for a couple of years to get the Second Ultima Trilogy and finally play the AoE. And the Ultima VI music blasted my ears. Even now when I listen the BOOTUP music I get chills down my spine.
Beside that I really got hooked to the Virtues philosophy. I discovered them during a time of questioning and found them to my liking, so I tried to live up to them.
All in all I think that Ultima was really a complete and immersive experience well beyond the simple scope of a computer game. I have an emotional attachment to the characters and universe that is unparalleled in my gaming experience, even in pnp rpg.
Hehe, I’m the heretic of the bunch, my favourite Ultima was U8, followed by U7. Many people don’t even consider U8 an ultima so I’m not qualified to give an answer!
I accept!
As Sir Klaus I thing that my first years with ultima are the ones that make my reasons to love Ultima
My first experience with Ultima was watching my brothers play Ultima Underworld I. They were at the first level in a chasm they could not jump. I was a young and didn’t know how games worked so I just said “Why don’t you throw the backpack first and then jump?”. It worked (not sure if it was plain luck or it really was because of the game physics).
A year later my brother bought Ultima VII and I played for a while. I never got outside of Trinsic but all the interactivity in the town was just enough for me at the time. Sadly for some reason my brother didn’t have any documentation or maps (I think he lend them to someone) so I coudln’t get outside of Trinisc.
Years later in 1998 or so, I got my brother’s 486 and installed Ultima VII again. I used the cheats to get out of Trinsic and started playing again. Around that time I found a compilation of all the spanish Ultimas called Ultima Pack (it had U7, SI and u8) but this package only had a CD with the games and the manuals. No map again… (at least this time I could answer Batlin’s questions)
It wasn’t until I got my hands on a copy of Ultima Collection that I could finally answer the anticopy of Trinsic.
Then I started to play Ultimas in english. I still have a notebook where I put my translations of Ultima VI conversations. Ultima VI was the one who really taught me english.
Funny thing, is that learning english with an Ultima has one little problem… I did my first high school english exam in old english 🙂
Anyway, later I played all the Ultima games in order (during my last year at High School), and Ultima V became my favourite. A lot of freedom, interactivity and character schedules, and also a good story. It really felt as a big adventure instead of just a game.
For me an Ultima needs to have a lot of freedom and interactivity, a good story, and the most important thing, it needs to draw you into the game. The manuals, maps and all the things that came with the games help a lot for just that.
I’m not much of a writer but I will say this – the Ultima series, at its height, provided a good balance of RPG and story elements that today’s companies seem unable to replicate. They either go too far in one direction or too far in another.
I’ve said this before but I’ll repeat myself. Nowadays, it seems you either get a hollow sandbox world full of cardboard characters, where the entire point is wandering around and powergaming your way through, MMORPG-style. Or you get a static, barely interactive narrative full of overdone, overwritten characters straight out of a Hollywood B-movie. What happened to all the “normal” RPGs, I ask?
I’m exaggerating, of course, and there were good RPGs made after Ultima, but that’s the gist of it.
Okay, I see I have some text to move into articles.
But that’s okay, I don’t mind doing so. At least for those of you who have accounts at the site. If I move your comment into an article, I’ll remove it from this thread.
as I said by e-mail, I will write an article as soon as I get the time, I have a lot to say. Really, my challenge will be cutting it as short as possible: unfiltered, I could write a small book, easily!
I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I had the top ten pack sitting around for years. I had no way to get new games and I tried to get each game to run.
One of the games was ultima 7 the miracle as it was. I read in the pdf manual there was magic, and when I walked through the red moongate into Trinsic. It was something I instantly took to.
I had never played an rpg before, and the charm of the graphics was something I instantly took to.
The story was engaging, I had never had to read that much in a game before! But, when I was younger, I had a much better imagination for that kind of stuff.
The interactivity was amazing! Every object had it’s purpose, you could kill npcs with dire consequences. And as a low level, I tried killing a lot of npcs. I remember getting all excited when I could finish off a guard while I was still trapped in trinsic.
I printed out the manual! Deciphered the runic on tomb stones for the fun of it.
It’s such a cohesive game, each npc is important, and worth talking to. It seems like one another know each other in game. It’s something you don’t see very often in games anymore. Now we get “ask about name1,2,3, or 4” as dialogue options. It feels so tacked on for good measure and just about always unneeded. Each option could uncover something important in ultima 7. Even if the barkeepers were pretty useless ;).
The fact it was my first rpg, all quests felt fresh and new. The game got me hooked. It’s a tough game to live up to in 2011, and even if a game did. It will not be fresh and new to me.
Another thing about those old top down rpgs. Everything was much closer together. By design or limitation. It was easier to move around quicker, (my u7 ran very quick in the day, it was 98-99 before I played it) and the ability to get from one house to another quicker was invaluable. It means you can do more in a shorter amount of time and get more real gameplay in, in shorter amounts of time. And it still felt like it was a big world.
These games today are realistically massive, but it’s not fun to play. I don’t want the world map to span 1-2 hours to cross.
Micro Magic thats pretty much exactly what happened to me! Except I think i was 7 or 8 years old. That top ten pack was gold!
@Sir Klaus Dragon
“Beside that I really got hooked to the Virtues philosophy. I discovered them during a time of questioning and found them to my liking, so I tried to live up to them.”
Same here, interestingly. I needed something a bit less dramatic and dogmatic and the simple ethics of the Virtues were very satisfying. The mathematical balance felt right as well. While nothing is simple, it gave me food for thought when trying to find my way through life’s disturbances.
@Natreg Dragon
“Funny thing, is that learning english with an Ultima has one little problem… I did my first high school english exam in old english”
That is awesome.
@Infinitron
Agreed. However, I think if a sandbox game is deep enough, as far as what you can do and what the effects of those actions are, the game will slowly develop its own culture, history and ultimately story. Sandbox games should be designed to enable these things. When actions leave no real mark then they fail at anything other than deathmatch, thievery or hoarding.
@Micro Magic
Great story. The rush of freedom and adventure, intelligently replying to your every move, was addictive.
In a word, freedom. Other than confusion, the first feeling I had when playing my first Ultima was freedom. It allowed me to do things no other game had in any meaningful way, if at all.
The rules were easy and made sense. You move around, you fight, you talk to people and you interact with objects. Each successive game improved on these basic tenets. Story was always secondary to me; I just wanted to explore and see how deep the physics went. Ultima VI was a dream in that respect and to some degree VII.
The story affected me deeply in IV of course, though mostly because it was the first philosophy I’d heard that made any real sense to me. While yes it’s arbitrary and has many peers, the mathematical balance of its elements created a tiered system of basic values which if prudently considered are much like a wise and wizened guide through life’s perils.
The simulation aspect of Ultima, as an extension to the initial attempts at sandbox style gameplay, always fascinated me the most. The idea of creating a world that behaved and reacted realistically and uniformly to your actions spoke of higher aspirations than any game I’d dreampt of at the time.
In the end I think the basic spirit of the game is one of exploration, camaraderie and achievement.
I love Ultima for the fact that it’s a medieval setting, that most of the world are really fun to explore, and there almost always a certain level of depth involved (even in Ultima8 if you take time to find it), and it’s seldon linear as you can go anywhere you want at anytime. It’s freedom unparalleled today in almost any game that gets out, bar maybe MMORPGs, but even them can’t reproduce the amount of depth of say ultima4 or 5.
My favorite by far was ultima5, and I still play it every now and then. The original even more than Lazarus, but both are excellent. I gre up with Britannia, and I’d love to see a well done, immersive world re-made, based at the time of Ultima5.
Everything about U4/U5 I am very fond of.
I keep my finger crossed for another ultima-like experience in the future.
— Francois424