So I finally managed to finish Ultima IV. The last few days were AWFUL. Once again the dungeons really really suck in Ultima IV. They probably were state of the art in 1985 but today they just don't hold up. The rest of the game still feels somewhat unique since there aren't any games like Ultima out there today, but dungeons? Dungeons are in every modern RPG thus they make those in Ultima IV feel so old, slow and boring. Crap I almost wanted to kill myself at some points.
I was hoping the abyss would be better but obviously it was much worse. The whole room system is awful, it's slow as hell and you need to steer your characters to the exit yourself which is awkward. Dungeons have just been done so much better afterwards, that's the main problem. Oh well.
Overall though the game is much better than the first three, but it's not quite 'there' yet. I don,t have much to say because what is there to say? I spent the last two gaming days going in the dungeons, grabbing the stones and then when I was done I went in the abyss, used the stones on the altars, answered the question and that was it. It was boring, that's all there is to it :D
I blinked my way to the entrance of Shame which is pretty nifty but since I had already done the trick for the white stone it's not quite as impressive. I used to think that Blink was an awful and useless spell but now I think otherwise, I friggin love it!
I'll be honest I'm anxious to put Ultima IV behind me and move on to Ultima V, a game I have pretty much never played. In a way I have now completed the first step of my journey: I have completed every Ultima game I had played as a child. Now I am getting into the obscure (to me) Ultimas, the one I completely missed at their date of release. Well Ultima 5 isn't exactly like that, we did own it on the Commodore 64 but I wasn't allowed to play it and when I finally did it felt clunky, buggy and it didn't have music. The game kept crashing too so I'm thinking our discs were going bad.
What do I expect of Ultima V? I expect it to be a substantial leap over Ultima IV, a more dynamic game with a much improved story. I'll probably start it tomorrow so stay tuned!
6 comments:
I think you won't like the u5 dungeons either heh
Anyway Ultima V is my favourite game ever, so I hope you enjoy it :)
I soloed my entire way through Ultima IV. It is far less tedious to go through the dungeons that way. Unfortunately I did not know that you would get stuck at the very end of the game without a full party! Fortunately, someone on usenet gave me his savegame so I could just see the endgame.
I think soloing is much harder to do in Ultima V though.
"The last few days were AWFUL. Once again the dungeons really really suck in Ultima IV. They probably were state of the art in 1985 but today they just don't hold up."
"Dungeons are in every modern RPG thus they make those in Ultima IV feel so old, slow and boring. Crap I almost wanted to kill myself at some points."
You crack me up!
I can't await your deeply founded and well explained criticism when you learn to love the semi-autonomous party members of U7, the boring dungeons of Sperpent Isle, the magic system and the nintendoesk nature of U8 and finally the action-adventure they called Ultima IX and compare polygon counts with todays much shallower games...
Natreg: Well I don't know, I'd just like to see where I'm going you know and not have such a jaring change between a first person view and then all of a sudden BAM you're in a fight . At least if the fights went quickly it wouldn't be so bad but nooo, some of those rooms were almost maze like. I tell you at one point in the abyss it took me a half hour to beat a group of reapers who kept putting me to sleep. Ultima 5 can only be better it can't be any worse!
Anonymous: Yeah, I should have done that. I wanted to play the game as natural as possible and that meant recruiting as fast as I could but at the end I was REALLY tired of the combat which contributed to my negative impressions near the end.
Calibrator: Well we aren't all perfect and that includes me. The reason why I didn't explain myself more clearly is that I was honestly really tired of Ultima IV and wanted to move on. Besides what exactly was there to explain? The combat with 8 players is extremely slow and painful and it's even worse in the dungeons with those mazelike rooms. The first person view doesn't really work because the technology I feel wasn't good enough to do them justice. Suddenly stepping on invisible traps or stumbling into magical winds isn't my idea of immersion. And no, I refuse to pull any punches because of their age, I'm playing them and commenting on how well those games stack up to today's games. If I end up saying that the entire series is overrated then so be it but I doubt that's going to happen.
Just keep reading and if you're mad at anything else I write comment comment comment! We need dissenting opinions in this world!
I thought the Bataan death-march through the Abyss was a rather fitting climix, though I have to admit I screamed bloody murder when I had to do it THREE TIMES because you couldn't save except on the surface and my fighting/spelling skills were not impeccable.
I seem to recall that using the Skull was optional and had no effect whatsoever on the length of the Abyss. Was that just an Atari bug?
Ropers. Jeez, I hate monsters that cast sleep.
This is just my personal opinion, but I feel that it is rather idiotic to compare a game this old with games from today. After all would you compare a 486dx processor with a quad core from today...no because it would be pointless but never forget that the older processors (games) paved the road for the older ones and must be assessed differently.
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