It’s been known for years that Ultima 7’s engine includes a Z-axis; although the game world is composed of 2D objects that appear to be arranged on a level plane, the engine is “height aware” and can treat different tiles as being above or below each other. Ideal Dragon has found a way to push this aspect of the engine to something of an extreme in his ongoing effort to re-create Ultima 8 using Exult:

ULTIMA 8: EXULT – PLATEAU EDITION

I’ve spent a very, very, very long time, countless hours figuring out how to build Mythran’s plateau out as an actual, genuine plateau on the map. You aren’t teleporting to another map, there’s no art tricks, it is genuinely higher up.

The ground level at the top of the cliffs is genuinely 10 z-levels higher than the ground below, and stored all on the same map. Mythran’s home will be up on top of it. You can go through the dungeon to get there like in the original game, but a keen eye may find a way to climb up!

This wasn’t previously possible to do in Ultima 7 before Ultima 8: Exult and all our constant feature requests to the Exult team!

You can see an example of the plateau in the screenshot above; note the stacked stone cliff faces. It’s worth noting, too, that this level of height change isn’t possible in the original Ultima 7, nor was it possible in Exult until…well, as Ideal puts it, his team bombarded the Exult team with constant feature requests.

The First Age of Update: And if you want a bit of a laugh, click on over to the Ultima 8: Exult development channel on the Ultima Dragons Discord server for an early look at how Ideal Dragon has implemented exploding mushrooms.