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Ultima Were there Civil Wars in the Ultima community?

Delterius

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I'm well aware that fan memory of Ultima 9's legacy is still in contention. But I'm always amazed at how much the series as a whole changed between installments. If I'm not mistaken, Origin even had this strange rule about writing everything from scratch with every release. So I wonder: how did the community take in all design innovations between U4 and U9? Was it always a warm reception or were there proto codexers, already speaking of Decline past the Quest of Avatar?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I'm well aware that fan memory of Ultima 9's legacy is still in contention. But I'm always amazed at how much the series as a whole changed between installments. If I'm not mistaken, Origin even had this strange rule about writing everything from scratch with every release. So I wonder: how did the community take in all design innovations between U4 and U9? Was it always a warm reception or were there proto codexers, already speaking of Decline past the Quest of Avatar?

That's a good question, one that was tangentially brought up in some discussions I had on the Ultima Codex a few years ago. Unfortunately, most of the series was released before the Internet became widely available so there's no record of this, only hearsay. If you look at the earliest posts in newsgroup archives, you can find some contemporary rage about Ultima VIII, but AFAIK the community was pretty much united in its hatred for that, so no civil war. Ditto for Ultima IX, its modern day rehabilitators notwithstanding.

I can't imagine there weren't people who were pissed off that Ultima VII went real-time, or that Ultima VI dropped the classic tiled look and dual-scale map, but their laments are lost in time, like tears in rain. All I know is that by the time I became part of the community in the mid-90s, nobody was talking about that.
 
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I'm well aware that fan memory of Ultima 9's legacy is still in contention. But I'm always amazed at how much the series as a whole changed between installments. If I'm not mistaken, Origin even had this strange rule about writing everything from scratch with every release. So I wonder: how did the community take in all design innovations between U4 and U9? Was it always a warm reception or were there proto codexers, already speaking of Decline past the Quest of Avatar?

That's a good question, one that was tangentially brought up in some discussions I had on the Ultima Codex a few years ago. Unfortunately, most of the series was released before the Internet became widely available so there's no record of this, only hearsay. If you look at the earliest posts in newsgroup archives, you can find some contemporary rage about Ultima VIII, but AFAIK the community was pretty much united in its hatred for that, so no civil war. Ditto for Ultima IX, its modern day rehabilitators notwithstanding.

I can't imagine there weren't people who were pissed off that Ultima VII went real-time, or that Ultima VI dropped the classic tiled look and dual-scale map, but their laments are lost in time, like tears in rain. All I know is that by the time I became part of the community in the mid-90s, nobody was talking about that.

Actually I'd contest the community hatred being united on U8. Internet was around then, but the debate was on alt.games.ultima (or whatever it was called, that's my memory of it, but there was definitely an ultima-specific newsgroup and a separate crpg-newsgroup with heavy ultima fandom).

I hated it, because the fucking thing corrupted my hard drive. Twice. Ok, the second time was my fault, because the computer techie (I borrowed my father's computer techie, well not his employee but the guy he used to come out and do computer techie stuff at his business) warned me the 1st time that U8 was the cause, and I didn't-believe-sort-of-half-hoped-didn't-want-to-believe him, and ended up binning a 2nd hard drive because of it.

But there was praise for the magic system, and after the patches removed the platformer elements, the game itself. It was different to previous ultima games, but continued the tradition of being nothing like anything else around, and felt like it was pushing things forward in a sense - some steps backwards too, but definitely not a popamolisation.

The main long-term complaint was actually thematic, not gameplay. You had the Avatar doing all these horrible things to survive - things totally against everything he stood for - but in a world that isn't that of the rest of the series, eventually leaving that world as it's destroyed and escaping to the main world.

There were two camps regarding that, each with good reasons. It's the kind of instalment that turns heavily on what they do in the next 'episode'. Having the Avatar face a world where the Guardian reigns supreme, where everything he fears could happen to the main ultima world has already happened and he has to do terrible shit to survive because this is a world where the virtues were never saved, where there was no great avatar or Lord British to pull it from corruption (imagine the world of U1-3 continuing onwards, without U4-7) is an interesting concept. But whether or not it's a betrayal of the Ultima values, or a fantastic chapter that shows how critical those values are, i.e. it shows exactly what the world has to lose if the Avatar fails in U9, depends entirely on U9 providing a satisfactory pay-off. That never happened, but simultaneously, U9 was butchered in a way that we'll never know whether U8's 'do-whatever-it-takes' win requirements were brilliant or face-palm-stupid.
 

Neanderthal

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I remember a fair few fans bein pissed off that there were no camping animations anymore, an there were a feelin that U7 had dumbed down an streamlined a bit too much, but this were swept aside by all U7 did right. There were a bit o resentment from real old grogs that you had to use a mouse in Black Gate an all. Apart from that I can't remember much outrage til Pagan turned out to not be what we'd thought on when Forest Master described it on Serpent Isle, what were really fuckin a lot o folk off wi that was we'd seen Guardian dominated worlds done right in Labyrinth of Worlds.
 

asfasdf

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I remember a lot of complaints over U7 combat system (or almost lack of) back then. Both installments did shine in many other aspects though.

Pagan did cause a lot of trouble, being large unfinished and lacking so many of the previous games features. A shame, really, the story isn't that bad and it could have been turned into a decent Ultima game with proper effort.

Ultima 9 is pretty awful overall, and received the deserved flak.
 

smileyninja

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I remember people being pissed off that U7 required a 386 cpu. It was the beginning of the "upgrade your hardware every year to play the newest game" cycle. Dropping $60 of 1990's money on a game then having to pop another $3000 for the next gen computer to play it on was an experience my kids will never know. I got pretty good at wringing every last bit of memory in my autoexec.bat and config.sys files.
 

Saduj

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I remember people being pissed off that U7 required a 386 cpu. It was the beginning of the "upgrade your hardware every year to play the newest game" cycle. Dropping $60 of 1990's money on a game then having to pop another $3000 for the next gen computer to play it on was an experience my kids will never know. I got pretty good at wringing every last bit of memory in my autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

This is most of the reason I never played an Ultima after V. When VI came out, my family had a C64 and an ancient IBM PC with a monochrome monitor. My father had bought III, IV and V as much for himself as for me and my brothers but getting a new computer just to play VI was too big an ask.

I also didn't like the looks of VI or VII. VI in particular looked cramped with the bigger characters and small viewing window. VII came out when I was 19 and most of my free time centered around drinking. VIII just seemed like heresy and I stopped paying attention after that.

I remember when getting a new game to work could be a 5-6 hour ordeal between installation time and configuring the boot disk just right.
 

oldmanpaco

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U7's real controversy was its memory manager.

I remember U8 getting shit on because it dropped the party in favor of jumping on stones over lava or something. Been years since I played it.
 

taxalot

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Ultima VIII was nicknamed "Super Avatar Bros.". When they revealed the first screenshots of Ultima IX in the final engine and announced they dropped the party, there were fear in the Ultima Dragons forum and comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg that this would be a "tomb raider" clone. Those were quite stupid discussions considering absolutely nothing felt like Tomb Raider nor in the final game nor in the previews. They missed the closest comparison : U9 was the closest to Ocarina of Time we ever had on PC.
 

Roqua

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I'm well aware that fan memory of Ultima 9's legacy is still in contention. But I'm always amazed at how much the series as a whole changed between installments. If I'm not mistaken, Origin even had this strange rule about writing everything from scratch with every release. So I wonder: how did the community take in all design innovations between U4 and U9? Was it always a warm reception or were there proto codexers, already speaking of Decline past the Quest of Avatar?

I started computer gaming around u5, but played some ultima on the NES. I saw nothing but rave reviews of U6 in magazines. I thought it was okay. U7 was so loved by magazines it was laughable. It took me a bunch of fucking around with a boot disk to finally get it to play, and I was very disappointed. The combat sucked, it throws a whip wielding boy at you right off the bat, and if that doesn't scream pedofantasy nothing does. And then it never got better as the inventory got more and more unmanageable. I saw ads for u8 when I was in the army and thought it looked better than u7 since it didn't look like it had recruitable companions which would cut the pedophilia in half. I still have never played u8.

I got a 60/60 and bought a really expensive computer to have a large direct deposit that lowers the money the army could take from me, and I got u9 and the new krondor game (I thought it was the second, but there is a BoK type game I have on GoG which may be the real second, I'm not sure). Both of these games were precursors to the consolification of rpgs. Both were just superficial shit that put all their effort into graphics and had rpg-lite shit gameplay.

I did have the internet for a bit when I was in the army, but I honestly had no idea it was used for anything besides trying to get laid. I also thought AOL was the internet. When I got out the army I had my own place and got cable internet and no AOL and that is when I first learned about forums. The first forum I remember going to was RPGDot. I got banned almost immediately and then just lurked for a bit. Fast forward a couple years I am married and live in another state with a pregnant crazy slanty eyed devil and I rejoin RPGWatch as Roqua, a name a got from a new game I was playing. I joined to whine about the direction rpgs were taking. Fast forward a couple years or so and I somehow was invited to this thing called the non-flamers guild on RPGDot. I felt trapped. All these awful things to say were just being trapped in me because I was not supposed to say anything colorful to anyone. It was very repressive. So, I joined RPGCodex. This site actually had a lot of people with good taste back then. People knew and understood common terms, and there was a shared base of knowledge we all had and understood. This allowed for worthwhile conversation for the most part, and console retards or rpg-lite morons were flamed ruthlessly and mercilessly. Then all you retards joined and I left for almost a decade. I come back some time a go (at least a year, maybe two?) and you retards bred like fucking rabbits and now there is barely anyone on here that could actually competently explain what TB combat is.

Fuck you, fuck U7, and fuck pedophiles. This is the history of Ultima.
 

Deuce Traveler

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I loved the Ultimas up until Ultima VI, then I became a teenage grognard ranting and raving about the change from top-down to isometric view. I didn't think the view was intuitive in movement and didn't like the lack of detail in the graphics as opposed to Ultima V where I thought the graphics were easier to determine items. Also, I hated the new inventory system. I wasn't the only one, but we only complained in limited BBSs, so it's not like today where you can reach out to a fuller community.

I beat the Exile games before I ever beat Ultima VII, and I still have beating Ultima VI on my to-do list. So I guess I was a grognard before I grew old.
 

taxalot

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I am one of the suckers who loved the entirety of the series. Ultima is a perfect lesson of how gaming managed to evolve throuhgout the years. It embodies everything perfectly, from the simple way they were programmed in Apple Basic in their earliest iterations and sold in plastic bags to the multi million development hell that was Ultima IX. From the very basic, straight to bones gameplay of Ultima I to III (yet gameplay that learned from its mistakes and became more precise with each iteration), to the experimentations that were a sign of games to come in Ultima 7 to 9, UO, and both Underworlds. Each time I read "NPCs have their own lives and go to bed at night !" in a 2016 RPG, I can't help but remind people that this stuff was already working on machines with 48K of RAM in Ultima 5, and that we had already a great physic engine in Ultima Underworld.

Loathe or hate Richard Garriot, It is a special series, truly. Each game is both a product of its time and before its time, by impulsing new directions in which games would inevitably follow, showing progress in some areas, decline in others. Ultima VIII felt terrible as an action RPG, yet it looks like standard gameplay from a more modern era. Ultima VII had dumbed down combat, yet its open world system is something Bethesda tries to copy with each iteration of their games. Ultima IX had a completely streamlined story compared to what was initially planned, yet there is a beautiful simplicity in it that is a nice throwback to the second trilogy (I once read that U9's story is a lot better if you pretend U7 & 8 never happened, it's actually true). It's just a shame that the writing was terrible. Even dreaded Ultima IX was one of the most immersive games of its era, the graphics were stunning and the dungeons were imaginative.

All of this happened because of technological improvements. Each change in the Ultima series, whether good or bad, was justified by an increase in RAM, storage size, and raw processing power. If you do however, look at today's games series there is clearly a sense of stagnation. Both on the indie and on the AAA front, it looks like game have stopped to evolve in a way that was not "better graphics", and even on this front, the changes are getting hit by a severe application of the law of disminishing returns. Even on the storytelling front, you can't argue that Ultima was trying something with each post U4 game, and that's not something I'm seeing in today's games which are actually struggling to come back to the standards of the past. I'm still hopeful : the incline of the kickstarter crowd of devs has to first reach back the quality of the earlier games before trying to improve on them. But it hasn't happened yet. And on the gameplay side, loathe it or hate it, each Ultima tried to push barriers and to do something new, all thanks to the power of new computers.

It's almost like machines have stagnated. They have not. Something else has. When both guys from Origin Systems, Richard Garriott and Chris Roberts announced their new games on kickstarters, I backed and supported them because while they felt too ambitious, they were still at least right in a thing : games need new frontiers, and boundaries that need to be pushed. Not "Iteration #74948 of previous engine but a bit better.".

Not that I'm actually expecting anything to come out of SC and SotA. Legends of the past have gotten old.

There was nothing after Ultima IX. Considering that games have stopped improving, evolving on their formulas since that game came out, is it that big of a deal, though ? A Francis Fukuyama of gaming could have easily written "Ultima IX : The end of gaming history.".
 
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Trash

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Been playing Ultima's since the earlier ones on the MSX. And yeah, I do remember how every other Origin game required you to buy a new pc. Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle were massive and ambitious games that really pushed the envelope. The games press of the time where more hobbyist in nature and, at least here, where unanimous in how impressed they were. For me the biggest memory was the endless tinkering with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the damn games running. And then more tinkering to get the sound working.

Games of the era used the growing power of home computers to constantly push what was possible. Origin was special in that regard but lots of developers of the time where ambitious and willing to experiment. What happened is that what was a fringe hobby turned into an industry. Games got more expensive to build, the small teams that build something out of their basement vanished and publishers started to play safe. Everything got more professional and with that lost a lot of the soul of those days. It's a shame and I don't really expect it ever to change again.
 

Neanderthal

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I never got complaints about U7 inventory, it were intuitive an natural, requiring a little bit o management to keep on top of. Nowadays for some reason retards who've not played game keep talkin about bagception, an infinite bags wi in bags, thats bollocks as you can't put bags in others if you've got someat in em. Thinks its because modern players want games to play emsens an cheer on any kinda loss of interaction, me I regard managing me inventory as satisfying an part o preparation which is something I like in games. A welcome fuckin break from usual stuff you're doin in games an all.
 

Roqua

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I never got complaints about U7 inventory, it were intuitive an natural, requiring a little bit o management to keep on top of. Nowadays for some reason retards who've not played game keep talkin about bagception, an infinite bags wi in bags, thats bollocks as you can't put bags in others if you've got someat in em. Thinks its because modern players want games to play emsens an cheer on any kinda loss of interaction, me I regard managing me inventory as satisfying an part o preparation which is something I like in games. A welcome fuckin break from usual stuff you're doin in games an all.

You should get a job packing things. Judging by your communication ability your job options are limited. Let me guess, SSD?

While you were having fun playing Barbie backpack, I was playing good crpgs like RoA and scratching my head at how much love a game with retard combat was being jerked off over. You like shit. You like superficial bullshit like picking up forks that does nothing and adds nothing to the game. I like games with good gameplay, because games are for playing - not for looking at. And this game somehow invented an inventory system worse than the standard console list that I fucking hate with a passion. The order goes u7 type inventory at the bottom then 10 tiers above that is console style list inventories than 2000000 tiers above that is real crpg inventory systems. Fuck u7. U6 was the last decent Ultima made, and that still sucked compared to the good crpgs of the time. Fcuk gypsy whores and their cards. Give me real chargen and good chardev aimed at adults with brains.
 

Neanderthal

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Whats an SSD? Assumin its not solid state drive.

U6 inventory drops were tiresome as fuck.
 

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