Francois Poisson has made a number of updates to Ultima: Exodus, his RPG Maker MZ-based remake of Ultima 3, over the last few weeks. In mid-November, he added the Isle of Fire to the list of areas he had rebuilt, although that was far from the only change mentioned in the update he posted a screenshot of the area to:

Thankfully, working on the Castle of Fire was not too hard on my free time. See, there’s little more than monsters, a few prisoners, some invisible floor tiles, lots of lava and lightning field… Not a lot of dialogue. In fact no dialogue at all from NPCs. So I added a bit of them, some for neutral demons that just laugh at you and tell you to go away while you can (such helpful chaps, wouldn’t you agree?), some for the traumatized prisoners in the cells which 99.99% of the players will never read anyways, but I didn’t want to leave “empty dialogues”. Well unless the prisoner is crazy and jumps you, but then it’s just a battle.

Revamped the special enemies for this castle, since they require exotic weapons to defeat and exotic armor to mitigate damage, I made sure you felt that reminder if you did not in fact came prepared. Mobs are slightly more durable than their dungeons/overworld counterparts as well. Unfortunately, they can be dodged if you’re quick on the keyboard/controller, so again, most player will just laugh it up and squeeze their way past them… But just because they can, does not mean I don’t put effort into it.

Tested the Mark of Fire and Mark of Force with success and was not vaporized on the spot. Also noticed the overworld lava CAN be walked on, and only did 10hp/tile… it’s been dramatically increased now and the overworld lava cannot be ignored with the mark of fire by default (which is fine by me, if you want to take a shortcut, you’re gonna have to pay for it).

He did note, in that same update, that he hadn’t started working on the end sequence — inserting cards to deactivate/defeat Exodus — mostly due to being unsure how to best implement it in the RPG Maker MZ engine. Still, the Isle of Fire itself looks amazing:

About a week later, Francois was back again with another update, this time concerning some overhauling he’d been doing to his earlier work in the remake effort:

This week I started overhauling what I have completed so far. Bring everything older up to snuff if you will. If I compare my latest zones and scripts to my new ones, I cringe sometimes. So going over all old zones and completing/upgrading them to my current standards. This also means very few new pictures to show you guys so my updates will not be as … “spectacular” as my past ones. But it’s just the way it’s going to be, at least until I start doing the dungeons. But I’ll see what I can do.

Here’s a quick summary of all the fixes I got around to do :

– Added the missing monsters in LB’s jails… Had never gotten around to it.
– Added Jukebox script to LB’s castle and the four shrines (Jukebox script are the Background SFXes (Torches, fireplaces, clocks, etc) that play when stepping on an appropriate tile).
– Fixed some SFX conflicts (transitioning from a SFX-present square into another one which also had SFX meant the first one’s would keep playing instead of the new one).
– Completely finished optional quests for between Montor West and the Shrine of Intelligence.
– You can now search for the cards, find them, and pick them up. Complete with a small cutscene showing them in their entire glory.
– Sosaria was missing it’s north-east tiles, which meant that map wrapping from S-E to N-W using that land corridor was broken. Good thing I caught this as I very rarely travel in that area of the map.

He also showcased a few screenshots of the process of finding a card:

The overhaul process continued into late November, and Francois also focused on adding music to more of the world…and the character creation sequence as well. He also squashed a bug with random encounters, and opted to dial the frequency of these back from around 80% (making traversing the overworld into something of a slog) to a more managable level.

At the start of December, he announced that he’d begun implementing another key element of Ultima 3’s plot: getting past the Great Earth Serpent so as to access the Isle of Fire:

…finished programming the Great Earth Serpent. You can interact with him/it (Serpent Isle had HIM with a male voice) in four distinct-or-so ways.

#1- No Mark of the Snake and no Silver Horn… Good luck.

#2- You have the Mark of Snakes but no Horn… Good luck, but if by some miracle you would win the fight?… Nah, he would fight you again and again… Good XP tho. I do not see HOW one would win, but, heh, never underestimate the players.

#3- You have the Silver Horn of Evocare, but no Mark. Now this one is a bit more interesting. But you still won’t be able to pass. The Great Earth Serpent acknowledges you, but thou shalt not pass.

#4- You have both the Horn and the Mark. And you go thru to w/e business you have beyond the Serpent.

Included in the picture are 4 poor souls without either the mark or the horn… poor fellows have not even chosen their race/class yet, hence looking… ghostly. WhAt CaN pOsSiBlY gO wRoNg !?

Most recently, Francois posted a brief update to show off the Silver Horn, which he recently added to the project:

I revisited Yew, more specifically the Circle of Light. I added the cutscene if you manage to contact the presence and get the Silver Horn. Also added a check to make sure you couldn’t keep doing it and basically keep getting Silver Horns until your face turns blue. Not that it changes anything as Key Items are limited to just ONE and not 99. But still, felt silly to let it happen. So once you ran thru the event and got the horn, you get a different message next time.

The above will probably be the last Ultima: Exodus update we get for the year; Francois is going to be taking some time off for the Christmas and New Year’s break. However, when he does resume working on the project, you can count on seeing many updates about it posted to the Ultima Dragons group on Facebook.