Monday, March 8, 2010

Game 8: Exodus: Ultima III (1983)

      
Exodus: Ultima III
United States
ORIGIN Systems (developer and publisher)
Released in 1983 for Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64; 1985 for DOS, Macintosh, PC-88, and PC-98; 1986 for FM-7, Amiga, and Atari ST; 1987 for NES; 1989 for Sharp X1
Date Started: 7 March 2010
        
My first impressions of Ultima III are that it redeems Ultima II. It feels like a real game instead of Richard Garriott screwing around. It (at least so far) keeps the game grounded in more standard fantasy conventions without involving light swords and rocketships. Combat is more tactical and interesting (if longer), equipment and items are more varied, the magic system is more sophisticated, dungeons have a reason to exist, and the overall gameplay, to me, is a lot more satisfying. This is the first game from Origin Systems, Richard Garriott's company; his first two games were published by established game producers.

Ultima III was released in 1983 for the Apple II, the Atari, and the Commodore 64. I'm playing a DOS port from two years later. In fairness, I should mention that I also downloaded and installed a graphics and sound upgrade package designed by some cool programmers over a decade ago. Compare the screen shot above to the original below, and you'll see why.



Ultima III begins an era of games in which it really pays to read the manually carefully first. The manual and its accoutrements are one of the things that Garriott and Origin really excelled at. Each game in the original series came with a hand-drawn cloth map (I read somewhere that it took Garriott a long time to find a publisher for Ultima II because he insisted that they produce the cloth map with every game) and an ornately-decorated, magniloquently-written game manual. Consider the opening paragraphs of the manual:

Welcome back, oh illustrious adventurers! Long has been thy sojourn in this strange realm, though 'tis a fitting respite for great heroes. Glorious are the names of those adventurers who slew the mighty Wizard Mondain and his evil consort Minax. Lord British's minstrels still sing thy praises for the epic battles waged in the overthrowing of those two crimson necromancers. The chronicles of Ultima I and Ultima II bear witness to thine effects on behalf of the good subjects of the realm of Sosaria.

"The time of thy rest is now o'er. Thou wouldst not be here if thou hadst not heard the distant braying of the war horns, or felt in thy blood the cry of kinsmen in dire peril. Thou art Called, and from such a Calling none of the People may turn aside. It is thy duty and thy destiny.

Aside from the fact that Ultima II has nothing to do with Sosaria, it's beautiful prose. Sometimes, they go a bit campy with their metaphors. Nothing beats: "With the fall of Mondain and Minax, peace had flowed like molten honey around all of Sosaria." Yes, there's nothing like the molten honey of peace.

The basic setup is that a new evil, called Exodus, the "child" (either metaphorically or actually) of Mondain and Minax has appeared on an island of lava in the middle of the ocean. None know whether Exodus is "man, monster, or daemon." The only way we know its name is that the word "EXODUS" was found written in blood on the deck of a ship from which all crew had vanished, "as if plucked by some evil force." Also, a "shattered man found wandering the groves" outside Lord British's castle had this to say: "from the depths of Hell, he comes for vengeance." I tell you, I just eat this stuff up. In a modern game, this would all be handled with a cut scene, but I almost find the manual more fun.

Nothing compares to the spell manuals, though. Ultima III follows Wizardry's (and, for that matter, Dungeons & Dragons's) example of dividing spells into priest spells and wizard spells (or holy magic and arcane magic, if you prefer). In-game, you cast a spell by specifying the character and the spell letter. There are 16 spells on each side, each with a letter from A to P. Cleric A is turn undead while wizard C is light. But, God, how the spell book describes them!

I didn't put this much effort into my wedding vows.

To cast a light spell--or "Lorum," as the book has it--you don't just type (c)ast and "c": you chant "obrey uricum obla sum" while casting into the air a small portion of lorum dust, collected from "a spider's bath, which has been warmed by strong sun for many hours." This is art, people. I almost feel bad that I created a little text file as a reference. There are a couple wizard spells so thickly described that I still have no idea what they actually do.

Ultima III is the first game in the series to allow multiple party members, and the classes and races have been expanded to include some that will not only never occur in any other Ultima game but as far as I can tell never occur in any game. For instance, one race is a "fuzzy"--literally little furry creatures--that I suppose could become the emps of Ultima VII but are never a player race again. In addition to fighters, thieves, wizards, and clerics, classes include paladins, barbarians, larks (basically a synonym for bard), illusionists, druids, alchemists, and rangers. Each has a different combination of combat and magic skills, so you have to choose carefully.



Gameplay is in some ways very similar to the previous Ultimas, with a top-down perspective and with actions tied to single keyboard letters. There is more depth to the game world, though, including an early type of "fog of war": you can't see around corners or through dense wooded areas or across mountains. There's also a mysterious (o)ther action command that allows you to do special things you have to discover along the way.

Combat is what makes this Ultima stand out from the others. During the main part of the game, your party of four is represented by a single icon, but when you enter combat, you become four distinct party members, each of which performs an action in turn, including fighting or casting. There are both ranged and melee weapons, plus a wide variety of offensive and defensive spells (although limited spell points), so battle is far more tactical than in many other games of the era. One annoying thing is that monsters can attack diagonally but you cannot. Different icons represent different character types so it's easy to figure out whose turn it is. I'm pretty sure this style of combat remains all the way through Ultima V.



As with previous Ultimas, dungeons are first-person, although a little more interesting in color and items. But the series continues its obsession with food, and keeping from starving is just as difficult as it was in Ultima II--more so, in some cases, because in the dungeons you keep running into gremlins which steal it.



Hit points are dependent upon leveling, not upon bribing the nearest sovereign. You increase in levels by visiting Lord British, who as usual provides no helpful information. I note that Iolo, Gwino, and--making an appearance for the first time--Chuckles are all found in Lord British's castle, and it doesn't look like I'm going to have to kill them this time.

You're not going to demand a tribute from me?

In the early stages of the game, I've been exploring and mapping Sosaria--which isn't all that large--visiting towns, and getting clues from the locals. As with Ultima II, each person gives you exactly one line of dialog and most of them offer stock responds (although not as dumb or annoying as in Ultima II). From those that have something original to say, I've learned that Exodus lies beyond the silver snake, and I'll need to find exotic arms to defeat him, as only they will protect me from great evil. Other clues--and I'm not sure how they relate yet--tell me to seek a place called Ambrosia, seek the Shrines of Truth, journey through a whirlpool (I have a feeling these are all related), seek the jester in the Castle of Fire, and to find "marks" and "cards." There are apparently four of the latter, and I need to use the command to stick them into panels somewhere.

I haven't gotten a ship yet, and I can see towns and dungeons off shore, so I need to find a frigate next.

One word on the mapping: the game isn't conducive to graph paper, so I imported the cloth map as a raster image into a geographic information system (GIS) program called MapInfo Professional. I then created a vector layer to draw on top of the map, so I can note the locations of towns and their names. Overkill? Perhaps. But fun.


38 comments:

  1. I'm enjoying your level of commitment to these games. It makes for a very interesting read.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you, Brian. It's nice to know people are reading. Google doesn't seem to provide any kind of hit counter, so the only way I know I'm not just writing to myself is when people comment.

    ReplyDelete
  3. > the only way I know I'm not just writing to myself is when people comment.

    oh noes! a guy who puts scanned cloth maps from 30 year old rpgs into mapping (pro!) systems to tag custom points of interest surely knows better than that! ;))

    check this sweet toy: http://www.google.com/analytics/

    and here's how to make it work with your blog: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55604

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Rizla. That took literally all of five minutes to complete. I don't know why I didn't search harder.

    ReplyDelete
  5. glad to help, i've been pondering possible traffic here myself... it's an extreme niche nowadays, but then again, quite a unique approach, so i'd wager quite a few people will show up. well, now _you_ will know, which is good. (though i have to say i totally digged the first who-knows-if-anyone's-going-to-read-this-at-all posts here ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Disorganized comments, par for the course:
    - Those updated graphics look great!

    - The old cloth maps were great. I remember that in Ultima 3 they were using the runic alphabet that they continued to use in later Ultimas, but they didn't offer a translation key. I can even now being in fourth grade, taking the map, and by knowing the names of a few towns figuring out the substitution key.

    - The major difference between the combat in U3 and U4 and U5 is that in U5 you FINALLY got the ability to attack in diagonal directions. In addition, U4 added in terrain that you had to strategize around.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Nice read, keep up the good work! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  8. I love (re-)playing old games too. Making them work in emulators like NES/Wizardry1 or DOS/Ultima1 and enabling HQ3/4x scalers gives them an almost new and shiny appearance :D

    I really enjoy reading your Blog and by that deciding which game to try next. Pity, that you decided to try only commercial games. I'd like to read your opinion about a few non-commercial RPGs as well :)

    Let's see what you will do after that first list from Wikipedia ;-)

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Although Fuzzies are never player characters again, they are explained in Ultima VI. There's a museum, I think in Britain, where there are exhibits that speak of Sosarian oddities. I'm pretty sure they have a Fuzzy skeleton.

    My main beef with this game is that it changed its own rules without explaining that it could/would do so. When I first started playing, I went in to the castle and "transacted" with Lord British. He made some statement and I forgot about him, assuming that he, like every other character in the game, had only a single sentence of information to impart. I had a Level 68 Fuzzy Mage before I found out you could improve your Hit Points in any way...

    ReplyDelete
  10. @Anonymous -- I can't find info on Fuzzies ever appearing or being referenced after Ultima III. There's a peaceful vegetarian tree-dwelling race in Ultima VII that is somewhat alike called Emps, but it wasn't mentioned in the games whether they were the same thing, according to the Editable Codex, which is hard to beat for Ultima info:
    http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Fuzzy
    http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Emps
    (I love the manual's image they've posted of a beer-drinking tavern-lounging Fuzzy... Somehow I can't imagine Emps doing that.)

    ReplyDelete
  11. Napkin: When I get done?! Ha! My list has more than 1,000 games and I'm on #25. Don't hold your breath for a first-person shooter or console-based RPG blog.

    Anonymous/Xyzzy: I'll settle your debate when I get to Ultima VI/VII in like seven years. In the meantime, I'm inclined to agree with Xyzzy: they were a one-shot.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I wonder if a Fuzzy was like a Little Fuzzy from the H. Beam Piper book of the same name? < http://manybooks.net/titles/piperh1813718137.html >

    I have very fond memories of Ultima III. It is one of the few CRPGs that I have actually finished.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Damn, Katy. I think you may have solved it. Garriott was a known connoisseur of science fiction literature and films, and that sounds like just the sort of thing he would have read. Nice going!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Wow. Mapinfo for mapping in the game? Nice use of GIS tools!

    ReplyDelete
  15. About time someone commented on that!

    ReplyDelete
  16. You sir are hard core in the hardest sense. I just got through playing The Bard's Tale with help from a clue book and I found that hard enough. Keep up the great marathon.

    ReplyDelete
  17. My first cRPG! You make it sound so easy but for, at 10 years old, this game was a BEAST!

    Your map solution is very impressive. Great work on all on all of this, wow. Onto the next...

    ReplyDelete
  18. argh meant to say 'for me'... It's late.

    ReplyDelete
  19. I love that you did all that work to create a map... putting the "addict" in your domain name!

    ReplyDelete
  20. Yeah, but for whatever reason, I didn't do that for Ultima IV or Ultima V, where it really would have made sense.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Addict, you didn't mention a speed problem. I obtained 2 versions of the game and for both, had to slow the CPU down to 30% before the game seemed to run at intended speed.
    This is the first game I had to do that for - even Ultima 1 worked perfectly without fiddling. I'm using a front-end; could you share what your Machine settings are when you play this? (machine, cpu type, cycles).
    Thanks.
    (I know, its been months since you loaded it up!)

    ReplyDelete
  22. Yeah, there's no way I can remember at this point. I have generally just adjusted the CPU settings liberally to whatever seems to work. I probably fiddled with it like you did and settled on something like 30%.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Sorry for the late post, I've only just discovered this blog on a slow day at work (it's fantastic by the way). This was my first CRPG and I played it on the Atari ST. The graphics were the same as the upgrade you are using. I did actually manage to map Sosaria, Ambrosia, all the towns and most of the dungeons on graph paper. Nowadays I take screenshots and stitch them together - less time consuming. Can't remember why but I didn't complete the game. Looking forward to Ultima VI. I nearly completed that until my game disk corrupted and I lost the will to start over.

    ReplyDelete
  24. One of the things I like about playing these games in the modern era is that it's far less likely you'll suffer file corruptions. It HAS happened to me--most notably with Ultima V--but I remember living in constant terror of it in the 1980s.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've had terminal file corruptions on all the mainline Ultimas from IV to IX at a one point or another.

      In IV, my ships all disappeared and stopped spawning. In V, my Dungeon disk never loaded. VI - I think something important like one of the lenses just ceased to exist.

      VII and Serpent Isle were full for bugs on release and I must have stumbled across all of them. VIII - magic is integral to progressing the story and on my first playthrough, fire magic just refused to work. I lost my save games in IX on several occasions, once just outside the final room.

      Even my beloved Master System version of IV has bitten me on the last two attempts. In one, my save game corrupted just getting the balloon. On the next attempt, the white stone was maddeningly absent.

      I keep coming back though...

      Delete
    2. Well, sure - Ultima IV has to be one of the greatest CRPGs of all time, IMHO.

      Delete
  25. I hope it served that purpose, then. Good luck with the game.

    ReplyDelete
  26. As a bit of additional background information, like the previous two Ultima's, you can get this one from GOG, in a bundle with games 1,2,3.
    It was also ported /very/ widely, including the Atari ST, Amiga, C64 and even the NES of all places.

    Not sure which version is the superior. I know the Amiga version gives you mouse controls and nicer graphics. Unfortunately when I tried playing it on my real amiga, rather than emulation, the game ran too fast, even on a 56 mhz processor, making the combat turns only a few seconds long.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's also a homebrew version on Game Boy Colour, based on the Apple version rather than the NES version. The menus are a chore but apart from that it's great.

      Delete
  27. I played this game on NES. Picked it up at a pawn shop for next to nothing. I thought Dragon Warrior was hard! I must have been 10 or so when I played it and I never figured that moon gates appeared and disappeared when I was young, so never finished it. It wasn't until years later that with the help of an internet walkthrough I was just glancing through did I find out about this. Needless to say, I dusted off my NES and started it back up. Never felt so satisfied to BEAT a game.

    ReplyDelete
  28. I played this game years ago on the NES before I ever played an Ultima game, still have only played IV. Couldn't get anywhere since I didn't use a thief and couldn't collect enough money to heal my characters of Poison before they died. Strange since I did play other games which used thiefs to unlock chests like might abd magic but before Ultima I only played Dungeon Warrior and Final Fantasy. You inspired me yo go back and look at Ultima 3 but the computer version.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Every year around end April, someone's gonna comment here that they've played this game on the NES.

      Delete
    2. I played this game years ago on the NES. In fact, NES has the best version of Ultima III, by far. Charming graphics, larger sprites, astronomically better music....yes, it was an excellent experience. A whole generation of people discovered Ultima because of this version. Ultima IV on the NES was quite interesting as well. The combat was actually tactical, virtually no games on the NES forced you to make moral decisions and the battle music is still my favorite battle music out of any game, ever.

      Delete
    3. *raises hand*

      Oooh, oooh, pick me, pick me!

      I played this game on the NES! :-)

      Oh wait, dangitall, I'm late by a good week... :-(

      Seriously though, Ultima:Exodus (as it was called on the NES; I don't believe it carried the III moniker) was my first introduction to the Ultima series. I must admit though, that it was a bit before my time (I was quite the young lad back then) so I rented it numerous times, and I believe that I eventually bought it, but never seemed to make any headway. I think the game was just simply too advanced for me at that time, and the non-linear progression was quite contradictory in contrast to the other RPG's that I was used to at the time, such as Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and, one of my all-time favorites, Phantasy Star (one and two).

      I think, however, it may be time to revisit this old gem, as I'm looking a bit more objectively at really what made old RPG's great.

      In my endeavor to finally build a game from the ground up (in C++ of course) I find myself asking the immortal question of "What made CRPG's great?" Today, with the genre being flooded with the same micro-transaction piles of dung and WoW-clones, it's difficult to see what is so great about CRPG's today unless you're an old fogey like myself that still has memories of the THAC0-driven "Good 'Ole Days" to cling onto.

      Delete
  29. Gee, what you did with the map scan is quite awesome. Really shows you're playing these games with a "modern" mind-set.

    Back in the day, I did something similar when playing Ultima V in my C64 : I remember preparing little paper labels (same scale as the existing map text) and taping them to the cloth map. For my 11-year old mind this was the obvious reason that Garriott packed cloth maps with his software. The cellophane tape would have damaged paper maps, especially those that used glossy magazine-like paper and inks. I know becasue I tried the same thing on my glossy "Times of Lore" map and some of the printing came off with the tape. I assumed that this meant that Times of Lore didn't require "map-notes", and finished it without them.

    Nowadays, when I use scanned maps I print the ones that are really useful and annotate them with a pencil, to help with the old-school mood. Others I just load up in Paint.Net and annontate with text boxes and crudely drawn arrows.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My freshman year of college, spring of 1986, a close friend from high-school (named Jon) and one of his school buds stopped by my dorm to visit ... and he came bearing gifts! Wizardry V, no less, which I'd never played, so I was stoked.

      But he also had something else with him.

      Caveat: I'm telling this to the best of my memory, which ain't what it used to be lol, so if there are mistakes ... sorry!

      Anyway, Jon had what looked like a bunch of pieces of 8x10 sized paper, taped together at the edges, and the whole thing folded many times.

      Jon and his friend worked to unfold the mystery and then held it up between them, standing on two chairs on either side of the little dorm room ... just so I could see the whole thing.

      It was Ultima IV's Britannia; Jon had painstakingly mapped the entire thing on graph paper.

      Here's what's really crazy: I think he used graph paper with 1/4 inch grid boxes (they weren't tiny, I definitely remember that).

      Ultima IV was 256 tiles by 256 tiles. So, it would have been something like ... 10 pages wide, and 7 pages tall?

      Now, if he'd used paper with 1/2 inch grid boxes ... well, he didn't, the thing would have been as big as a house and would have smothered all of us. A Gelatinous Cube, only ... made out of paper. Hmm.

      I've played all of the Ultima games completely through, and boy what a mixed bag they are. I've always felt that VIII is so awful it shouldn't even be called "Ultima". The first two are tolerable only for nostalgia's sake, and III and IX are only marginally better, in my estimation.

      But I really enjoyed V, VI, and both parts of VII; and I've long considered Ultima IV to be not only the best entry of this storied series, but one of the best CRPGs ever made.

      Thing is, I only played any of them because Jon had gotten me into Ultima II in high school computer class, and then made the mistake of showing me Ultima IV at his house, ultimately distracting me from playing Wizardry I, II, and III at home.

      The first game in the Ultima series that I owned and played through was the Apple ][e version of IV (I have the brown/red cloth map). I also have the boxed version of V, for the ][e.

      VI was my first boxed version for IBM PC, as were VIIa and VIIb, VIII, and IX. I later went back and bought the first three games in one of those bundles; Ultima Archives, or something. But now I have the entire series on GOG, and I do intend to replay them all some day.

      I haven't talked to Jon in years but I've sometimes wondered if he still has that map. Talk about a labor of love (or an obsession, or both, depending on your point of view heh).

      Delete
  30. Someone created a "Sosaria Mod" which, according to the description, "is a world mod to Ultima’s 2 and 3 that allows both games to be set in the “Lands of Lord British” from Ultima 1. This effectively keeps the first three games all on the same consistent world":

    http://exodus.voyd.net/projects/sosaria-mod/.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It looks like they never finished the one for 2,sadly.

      Delete

I welcome all comments about the material in this blog, and I generally do not censor them. However, please follow these rules:

1. Do not link to any commercial entities, including Kickstarter campaigns, unless they're directly relevant to the material in the associated blog posting. (For instance, that GOG is selling the particular game I'm playing is relevant; that Steam is having a sale this week on other games is not.) This also includes user names that link to advertising.

2. Please avoid profanity and vulgar language. I don't want my blog flagged by too many filters. I will delete comments containing profanity on a case-by-case basis.

3. NO ANONYMOUS COMMENTS. It makes it impossible to tell who's who in a thread. If you don't want to log in to Google to comment, either a) choose the "Name/URL" option, pick a name for yourself, and just leave the URL blank, or b) sign your anonymous comment with a preferred user name in the text of the comment itself.

4. I appreciate if you use ROT13 for explicit spoilers for the current game and upcoming games. Please at least mention "ROT13" in the comment so we don't get a lot of replies saying "what is that gibberish?"

5. Comments on my blog are not a place for slurs against any race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or mental or physical disability. I will delete these on a case-by-case basis depending on my interpretation of what constitutes a "slur."

Blogger has a way of "eating" comments, so I highly recommend that you copy your words to the clipboard before submitting, just in case.

I read all comments, no matter how old the entry. So do many of my subscribers. Reader comments on "old" games continue to supplement our understanding of them. As such, all comment threads on this blog are live and active unless I specifically turn them off. There is no such thing as "necro-posting" on this blog, and thus no need to use that term.

I will delete any comments that simply point out typos. If you want to use the commenting system to alert me to them, great, I appreciate it, but there's no reason to leave such comments preserved for posterity.

I'm sorry for any difficulty commenting. I turn moderation on and off and "word verification" on and off frequently depending on the volume of spam I'm receiving. I only use either when spam gets out of control, so I appreciate your patience with both moderation tools.