Cambragol reports that beta testing for Ultima IV – Threat of the Trinity — his expansion/mod for the original Ultima 4 — is well underway:

Thanks to everyone who volunteered to Beta Test. I got a handful of testers, and they are getting started.

I appreciate everyone who volunteered’s interest in Threat of the Trinity. I now know there is a base of at least 10 players out there! That’ll make all the effort worth it!

I got a couple of testers, though I could have used a couple of more perhaps. There were some good looking candidates on the Beta Testers Needed post, but many of them forgot to contact me through email! So, I couldn’t contact them.

In addition to this, Cambragol discusses some of the changes that he has opted to make to the base game — Ultima 4 — as work on the mod has proceeded. The original goal of the project had been to avoid making such changes, but actually integrating the content of the mod with the story and gameplay of Ultima 4 necessitated a few adjustments.

However, there are a few places where I have made some tweaks to the balance and gameplay of the game that drift from the original and do not involve integration of content. Mostly these are straight ‘improvements’ inspired from Ultima V. Diagonal attack, Directional search, Multiple Reagent mixing, Active player etc. Others are enhancements of existing gameplay, for example, Virtue based NPC reactions and personalites.

There are a couple, however, that are slightly controversial, that I shall go into here. First up is a small, recent tweak, that I feel improves combat. This tweaks prevents the player using any ranged weapons (except daggers of course) in close combat.

I feel this gives combat a slightly more realistic bent, and gives a reason for using/equiping alternative weapons during combat. It adds some strategy as well. I always thought it was a little cheap to be able to use bows even when the monsters had closed with you. Well, no more!

This seems a sensible-enough change, although I’m sure that at least one person whose play style incorporated the use of ranged weapons at point blank range.

Another change, Cambragol warns, may ruffle some feathers:

I needed to damp down the XP earned, or the speed at which it is earned, to spread out the players advancment within the game over the span of the new content. So I have tweaked XP. Currently it works more realistically, in that the XP you earn from any monster is never completely fixed, and lowers as you advance. So the first time you fight a daemon, at level 2 gets you a certain ammount of XP, and the 35th time you fight one, at level 8 gets you a much lower fraction of that XP. Which is pretty similar to how people learn. The learning value of an experience lowers over time for the most part. Additionally, not every monster is the same difficulty, and there is slight variation between individual monsters difficulty/earned XP.

This may make it rather more of a challenge to grind your way to the topmost experience level…in a game that was already known for being quite grind-heavy. One other change that has been made will also add considerably to the difficulty of the game:

Last, and maybe the biggest change, is how all spawning is handled. The original was very simple, and had three steps, based off the number of moves the player had moved. ‘Mobs’ were also for the most part balanced to the party size.

That is all changed now, with spawning now being determined realistically by the type of terrain, proximity to dungeons, caves, crypts, or conversely, towns. There are further factors or throttles on the spawning, but sufficed to say, it is much MUCH more complex, and realistic.

The result is a MUCH harder start, with a slow reduction over time as the player moves past simple combat, and onto the more important tasks of becoming the Avatar, etc. Further, this also allows the land to have a dynamic change occur to it, as the wild early days slowly evolve into a realm of peace, thanks to the actions and examples of the Avatar.

On the one hand, this sounds like a very fascinating approach to any game world, a wild and unexplored continent that the player slowly tames and pacifies over time. It definitely fits with the theme of Ultima 4. But taken together with the other changes Cambragol has made, it seems that the overall experience of Ultima 4 will be much, much more difficult than a vanilla playthrough of the game. With heightened difficulty on the front end, and diminished experience gain on the back end, one could see this mod adding substantial length to Ultima 4…a game already known for being quite the a grind-filled slog.