Ideal Dragon posted an update on what he is now, seemingly, calling Ultima 8: Exult to the Ultima Dragons Facebook group, in which he announced that he and his co-developer, Stardrop, had implemented a bunch of Ultima 8-like art for use in their remake thereof. We’d seen glimpses of this previously, and then recently, but things have come a long way since then:

Stardrop & I have imported enough of the assets from Pagan into Ultima 7 that we can now pretty easily start building out the actual game world.

We figured now would be a good time to deliver another little sneak preview, so here is the Sorceror’s Enclave! We have about half of the main structures in that town built.

Screenshot from Pagan of the same area, attached. Yes, the roof on the top building will become blue in a future update.

The two images he uploaded to that post show, respectively, how the Sorcerer’s Enclave looked in the original game (perspective-corrected to match Ultima 7), and how the same area looks in Ultima 8: Exult.

However, the even more impressive image — which Ideal didn’t showcase on Facebook, but did show off on the project’s channel on the Ultima Dragons Discord server — is this one of the beach that Ultima 8 begins on:

This, I think, shows the truly impressive work that Ideal and Stardrop have done, re-implementing not only the Ultima 8 textures, but also their sheer vibrance, in the Ultima 7 engine. Say what you will about The Black Gate and Serpent Isle, but the colour palettes in both games had a bit of a “washed out” feel to them. Not so, here!