Ultima 6: The Speed Run
Akalaupdate: So…I decided to take another stab (heh) at this. Convinced that some of the waiting time could be compressed or done away with, I quickly re-thought the order in which I would attempt to pass the game, and had a second go at it. New best time: 1:28:55. Not even ninety minutes, Dragons and Dragonettes!
Naturally, I recorded video, which I will transcode from DOSBox’s native ZBMV format into something a little more YouTube friendly tomorrow evening, for posting on (probably) Wednesday.
Original Post: So…after I lost1 much of my Ultima 6 playthrough footage, I felt a bit put out, and decided that the best way to make myself feel better about it was to do another playthrough. Only this time, rather than trying to complete the vast majority of the plot points, I would try and pass the game as quickly as I could, skipping as much of its content as possible/necessary. Like the map/pirate treasure quest, which is entirely superfluous and not required at all in order to pass the game.
Plus, I blew past the goal I had set for Extra Life, and I wanted to say thank you to all the Ultima fans who chipped in to support that worthy charity.
Anyhow…as it happens, there’s only a handful of things you have to do to pass Ultima 6:
- Free all eight Shrines of Virtue
- Obtain the balloon plans from Sutek’s castle
- Obtain the balloon components
- Obtain the Vortex Cube
- Obtain the Codex Lenses
- …and obtain the sacred quest from the gargoyle Temple of Singularity
I was able to pull all of this off in 2 hours, 12 minutes, and 20 seconds. I would probably have finished it even sooner, except for an amusing mistake (and game-breaking bug) that I will discuss presently.
But first, let’s see some footage! Here, in 48 minutes and 14 seconds, I liberate all eight Shrines of Virtue:
It was really just the Shrines of Honesty and Sacrifice that slowed me down.
And here, in around the same amount of time, I obtain the balloon plans and surrender to the gargoyles:
Using my patented Hythloth-skipping method.
The next 26 minutes and 19 seconds should have been the last minutes and seconds spent in the game…except for one problem: when I went to obtain the Vortex Cube from Stonegate, I forgot to actually pick it up! This, of course, necessitated a return trip to the castle. Of course, I only realized that I had forgotten the Cube when I was seconds — literal seconds — away from finishing the game. I had already placed the Codex Lenses; I just needed to place, fill, and use the Vortex Cube.
So, off I went to Stonegate. I grabbed the Cube, returned to the Codex temple…and promptly ran afoul of a quirk of the Ultima 6 engine. Because, you see, in the Ultima 6 engine, there are two different item types: let’s call them “static” and “temporary”. Static items are like the gold nuggets you find on the ground in the dungeon Shame, or the weapons decorating the counters of every blacksmith shop. You can pick them up and put them down, and they will always be there. Temporary items are things like loot you find on enemies, items bought from stores, or certain crafted items that appear in the game…like the concave (blue) Codex Lens. As long as these items are in your inventory, they will remain there; if you set them down and walk away, they will be deallocated from memory and disappear from the game shortly after you lose sight of them.
Now, this in and of itself wouldn’t have been a big issue, except for one other thing: the lens-maker in the Lycaeum that makes the concave Codex Lens for you will only make one; if you ask him to make another, he’ll just tell you how much he hopes the first one is working out for you.
Crap!
MAKE ME ANOTHER LENS...I BEG YOU!!!!
So, I reloaded my game, which fortunately had been saved just prior to my first visit to Stonegate. I grabbed the Cube, obtained both Lenses, and finished the game in just over 10 minutes:
One more time, with feeling.
So there it is…Ultima 6, finished in just over two hours (or seven days, in game time). That’s not bad, although I could probably tighten that time to under two hours if I did things a little more efficiently…and if I didn’t make a stupid mistake like forgetting the Vortex Cube in Stonegate’s basement. Still, let it be said for now that the “time to beat” for passing Ultima 6 is 2:12:20; have a go if you dare, Dragons and Dragonettes.
And also, may I just say that as awesome as the fully scheduled NPCs in the game are, a third of Ultima 6 does in fact seem to involve doing absolutely nothing at all whilst waiting for the critically important NPC of the moment to finish lunch. “Oh, sure, m’lord…ending the war with the gargoyles and bringing a stop to their whole genocidal rampage against the good citizens of Britannia? Sounds important! But…my shop is closed right now, you see. Just let me finish my ale and mutton, and I’ll get on about helping you with whatever little problem it is you need me to solve for you.”
[1] I say “lost”, but it looks like all that’s missing from the video files (when viewed in a hex editor) are the header and footer information. I will try and hack these into position at some point, but not for a few days at least.
What Cycles was DOSbox running at? With all the waiting in the game, did you ever bump up the CPU cycles to make game-time pass faster?
Just trying to establish rules for your inevitable challenger. 🙂
Cycles were kept at 3000 (the default for the GOG version of the game, and also the DOSBox default if memory serves). Time in U6 really only passes if you keep the Avatar moving; simply ramping up the cycles and standing there won’t do much.
The previous attempt was at a cycle count of 5000, for the record.
Realistically, if someone wants to attempt it at an obscenely high cycle count, so the Avatar moves like Buzzy the Wonder Squirrel, that would be…interesting to see. Especially if they can pull it off; I personally find that Ultima 6 becomes far too difficult to control (with the mouse, at least) past a certain point, and I think too much speed might wind up working AGAINST the player.
Are there any rules for this? I’m pretty sure I could do it substantially faster…
Anyway, I know this was for a good cause, but next time I think you need to keep your updates to somewhere private. You probably annoyed quite a few people who had their facebook and twitter accounts flooded with your updates so that they couldn’t see anything else (literally had to scroll through dozens of your updates to find something from someone else, over and over). If it kept up much longer even I was going to have to delete you from my lists so that they would become usable again.
If people want to make attempts (which I would welcome and gleefully report on), I’m sure we could lay down some basic ground rules governing e.g. DOSBox configurations and what has to be done in-game. It would be easy enough to say that the GOG version of the game as installed and configured should be the standard, for example; it’s something which is already established. I was trying to play as little of the game as I needed to; I needed to buy certain spells and other things, needed to talk to certain people to get mantras (which I can never remember), needed to free the shrines, needed the balloon plans and Gargish language scroll…that sort of stuff. I could probably have skipped the three gargoyle shrines, because I can remember the uber-mantra that I need to tell the Shrine of Singularity, but chose not to.
But, by all means: if someone wants to beat 88 minutes and 55 seconds, we can set up some ground rules and they can have at it!
As to the Facebook bit (and probably Google+ as well), I think what I’ll probably do next time is just do it all on Twitter and then collate the tweets into a single Facebook (or Google+) update. Twitter is by far my primary social media service, and I sometimes forget that other services handle and display content a bit differently than Twitter does.