Ultima VI day 2

I'm back! Yeah, I've been gone a while but what can I say, college is hard! But now I sort of have gotten a hang of it so I'm expecting to be able to play at least once a week.

Let's get to it!

After roaming around in Britain during my last game I decided to head to yew. Now the funny thing is that I don't remember why I wanted to go to Yew, but I think I wanted to ask Jaana to join me. I also thought that liberating the shrine of justice first would be a good idea.

So I headed off towards Yew like the good traveler I am, but when I reached the western crossroads I took a quick look at my map and saw that Skara Brae was really really close by. I didn't think I would be able to go there on foot of course, but I still wanted to check it out.

To my surprise, you can now effectively walk to Skara Brae! So there I went and I promptly started my information gathering.









The whole town of Skara Brae is up in arms over the murder of a man. The rumors seem to pinpoint the murder on gargoyles, but it really looks much more complicated than that. After a lot of talking and prodding I learned that the murdered man's daughter has the rune of spirituality, so I went and talked to her. She talked about an amulet she got from her father and whatnot, so I figured that her possessions must have been in the chest right next to her. I opened the chest and low and behold, the rune of spirituality!





I wanted to solve the murder but at this point it doesn't seem I can. I tracked down the ghost of the murdered man but I couldn't talk to him. I then checked out the spell book that comes with the game and noticed a spell to talk to the dead. At first I thought: "This is it!" but I quickly found out that in Ultima VI you can't just cast any spell for which you have the necessary level and reagents, you also need to have the spell in your spellbook. Unfortunately I did not have that spell, but I had heard of an hermit that specialized in magical stuff who lived just north of Skara Brae. I took a skiff from the harbor and went to the hermit's island. The hermit did sell spells, but he wasn't selling the one I wanted. I had to resign myself to come back later to solve the mystery :(


















In the picture of the spellbook you can see that firefox is opened to a page called "How to rest". I couldn't seem to figure out how to sleep in beds so I googled it and I never found anything. It clearly seems that you cannot sleep in beds in Ultima VI which is quite retarded! My back is aching for my characters!

Now everything I just wrote happened when I played a bit about 3 weeks ago, or maybe it was two? Time goes by very slowly these days :) What I am about to write happened today.

So after Skara Brae I decided to head up to Yew like I wanted to. I took the road and headed north, all the way to Empath Abbey. Not much was happening in the abbey, it seems to have transformed itself into a winery. I honestly did not see much of importance, but I surely missed something. One thing about Ultima VI is that I am a lot less thorough in my investigations. In the previous Ultimas, I would literally plunder the towns of their information on my first visit there. But in Ultima VI the towns are large and kind of hard to visit so I'm not as thorough in my gathering. I'm expecting to have to visit each town more than once that's for sure.

Oh I didn't mention my encounter with Smith the talking horse. Quite a funny one :D Didn't seem to have anything interesting to say though.










So after talking to a few people in the Abbey I headed east to Yew. I encountered a couple reapers, who summoned what seemed like a million insects. The reapers were sort of easy, and didn't give much treasure which is an unfortunate change from the previous games :) Not a lot of battles in Ultima VI so far, the focus has clearly changed from fighting to adventuring that's for sure.






Didn't take me long to reach Yew. Once again I did a quick talkthrough and it quickly led me to the thief in the prison. I needed the key to talk to him so I went and asked the mayor or whoever she is to give me permission for it and she agreed.

The man told me that he stole from the grave of the previous mayor to feed his kids and all sort of sad things. He told me that If I could get him out of there that he would tell me where the rune is. So I went back to the mayor and asked her if she could release him and she said "NEVER!". I then asked her about his kids and she told me he was lying, that he didn't have any kids! So I went back to him and he admitted to his lies. He then asked me to take the rune from the city if he told me where it was, and to that I obviously agreed since that is what I was going to do with it anyway! That's when I learned that he hid the rune under a plant in 'the Slaughtered Lamb inn'.

I looked for the Inn and quickly found it, and guess who was sitting there? Jaana! And she looked like she had just turned 95! She honestly seems to be falling at the seems, she looked so bad that I hesitated to ask her to join me. I sure as hell ain't keeping her in my party, she's distracting me with her granny looks! Afterwards I grabbed the rune, under the watchful eyes of granny here.










I then thought I was done with the city for now and decided to go liberate my first shrine! As quick as the wind I headed up the path to the shrine and got the living hell beat out of me! Not once but twice! Those gargoyles are TOUGH! Not only tough but the big ones with wings seem to be invincible, I couldn't even touch them once. I'm guessing I need magical weapons for them. Oh well. I don't have much of a choice but to come back later.






I ran for my life to the east and stumbled upon a pair of skiffs. I quickly embarked on one, looked at the map and headed for Minoc. Before going there I thought that it would be interesting to see if I could reach Stonegate without any sort of crazy rappel shenanigans. To my surprise I stumbled on a kid who told me he was the adopted son of...cyclops?!? Holy crap!




















He also told me that there is a bunch of stuff laying around Stonegate, so I went and talked to his 'mother' and she told me that everything down there is locked and that I need the key. The 'father' was obviously holding the key so I went and talked to him and he told me that he would trade the key for a fish. I like that trade!







I grabbed a fishing pole and quickly got me a fish. I gave it to him and I got the key! YES! But what the heck was I supposed to do with it I asked myself. The key wasn't working in the portcullis on the lower level. At first I turned off every brazier but that didn't seem to be working. I then searched every wall but couldn't find a thing. I then went upstairs and started to search the walls there and I found a secret door! I went down the stairs I found there but couldn't see anything except a weird blue square. Couldn't seem to do anything with the square so I searched all the walls, nothing either. I was becoming a bit irritated so I headed back up and..what? When my teammates disappeared I saw that there were switches below them! I quickly headed back down and flipped all of them on. They opened the portcullis below!




















That didn't help me much though. After roaming for a while I had to come to the conclusion that I need to be able to open magical doors to get anywhere. At one point I found a secret door BEYOND a magical door which was quite annoying. Disappointed, I headed back outside, saved, and decided to call it a day.







So far I've realized one thing: I need more stuff! I need magical weapons and more spells! That will be my quest from now on. Expect to hear more from me in a week!

Ultima VI day 1

Yeehaw it's time for Ultima VI! I played more than 2 hours yesterday and guess what? I didn't do crap! In the way that this game is so large that it feels like I haven't accomplished anything in my first two hours. That's thoroughly impressive :D



Ultima VI is LARGE compared to Ultima VI, or at least it feels like it. After killing the gargoyles and conversing with LB, I proceeded to loot the castle clean. I then went down the sewers once, fought some rats, went down again, now it became serious since it sort of looked like a dungeon. Is this the return of Hythloth beneath the castle? Maybe so. I killed a party of headlesses and cyclops and they looked GREAT! Honestly it feels so good to have finally crossed over to a more modern look. Not that I dislike the old look, but after five games it sort of started to grate on my nerves!



But no more! After killing those monsters I decided now wasn't the time to clean out the dungeons so I headed back up but instead of getting back to the castle I wound up in Britain! What how where uh? I realized it when I opened a chest and took the money inside. A big STEALING! scrolled up my text window. I went back down immediately and managed to get back to the castle.

I finished my looting, talked to a few dudes and then decided to get out. I opened the gates and lowered the drawbridge and stepped out in the real world.



Now the new viewpoint is confusing because it's hard to know where you're going. That means I constantly have my nose in the map to orient myself. Also the NPC's have so much more to say than they used to, and there are so much more of them too. Even the merchants talk now which is a real good improvement.


Even though everything is overwhelming right now I am really impressed with the game. Did I mention the new equipment screen? I love it, it makes equipping stuff really fun unlike how it was before. So yeah, so far, I've looted LB's castle, went down the sewers, killed some monsters, went back up, finished the looting, left the castle, talked to a whooole lot of people in Britain and sold some stuff. That's pretty much it.







Oh and I also really like the way you get stuff off of monsters. You kill them and then search them. I have no idea why but I really like it. I think I'm crazy about this whole 'seamless' thing, it feels fresh doesn't it? It sure does to me.

You can also assign auto-battle profiles to your companions. Now that is both good and bad. The good is that it will make battles much less of a pain. It will allow me to concentrate on my avatar and give some pre-made tactics to the others. The bad though is that it might make battles much more bland and give them a feeling of unimportance. This is probably the Ultima that will transform Ultima into more of an 'Adventure RPG' rather than the 'RPG Adventure' it was in Ultima IV and V.

There's a problem though. All of my guys have enough experience to go up a level. Grahf can go up to 5, everyone else up to 4. But in Ultima VI it seems that I need to pray at a shrine to go up a level, but every shrine is under gargoyle control. I'm not sure I'm strong enough to free one yet but I'll have to try because I want those levels!

Maybe I should make a trip to Yew and see if Julia is hanging around? Oh now that I think about it, I met someone in Britain who wanted to join my party. I told him no because I didn't know him and I don't want generic characters in my party, preferring to keep it to the 'classic' Ultima characters.

Talking of classic Ultima characters, Geoffrey is a jackass in this game, he barely speaks! He's actually giving me the impression that he is too busy to speak to me, the avatar! Darn!

Oh and what's up with that mouse? I know that when I dabbled in Ultima VI in previous I got her to join my party, but why in the blazes would I want a mouse with me? That doesn't make sense. Is there a special quest that I can only do with her in my party or something? I'm curious.





I'll keep you posted!

Ultima V review and notes

I will start by answering the comments I received in my last post:

I will play through the Undeworlds and I also plan to play the two Runes of Virtue games.

I will play Ultima IX twice. The first time I will play the original version, the second time I will play the game with the dialogue, economy and monster fan patches.

I also plan to play through the NES version of Ultima III since I bought it and will also play Ultima V Lazarus. I will play those three games (Ultima III NES, Ultima V Lazarus and Ultima IX with patches) at the end as the final three games.

This is how it is going to be I think:

U6 (Yeah I guess I'm leaning towards playing it before the two Worlds of Ultima game now that I've thought about it)

RoV1

RoV2

SE

MD

UW1

U7

UW2

U7-2

U8

U9

Ultima III NES

Ultima V Lazarus

Ultima IX with fan patches



There's also an Ultima VI remake in the works but I doubt it's going to be finished by the time I'm done. But if it is I'll play it.

I could play Ultima III NES earlier, but I want to put some distance between the two times I am going to play Ultima IX so I'd rather put it there.

Okay so I'll paste my review of Ultima V here:

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

"An incredible leap over Ultima IV

Ultima V is a thoroughly impressive game. It takes everything Ultima IV brought to the table and polishes it many times over. If this is a sample of what is to come then I am truly excited.

Unlike Ultima IV there is actually a story in this one, one of total chaos to boot. Lord British is gone, Blackthorn is reigning supreme and the shadowlords are running amok. Throughout the game there is that heavy feeling of oppressiveness which is really well done for a 1988 game. The fact that the early game is incredibly tough contributes greatly to this feeling; early on you have no idea what you're supposed to do and feel very lost. Help is hard to get because everyone is scared of Blackthorn, the guards who are enforcing the new laws or the shadowlords themselves. The general gameplay is pretty similar to the previous game. You need to talk to people, gather hints, solve clues, find objects and solve the game. At first the amount of speech is overwhelming but you soon find out that it is only a facade, they don't really talk more than in Ultima IV they just pad out what they are saying more. The text is also much better written and lively which makes the hint gathering portion of the game much more enjoyable.

It's still not perfect though. Although the dialogue is much better written, it is incredibly dry. I don't think I've ever felt a hint of an emotion while playing this game. There's a part where you go down the underworld and talk to a shipwrecked captain. He tells you his story of having killed his shipmates while under the influence of the shards, causing them to become the shadowlords. Now in a modern game that would have been an absolutely gripping confession, but in Ultima V it is said so blandly that it didn't elicit much of an emotional response from me. The whole game is like that, total lack of emotional involvement. This truly drags the story down a couple of notches. There is also a lack of reaction to your accomplishments. No one notices that you've killed the shadowlords, no one compliments you on a job well done. Without the shadowlords Blackthorn should go back to normal, and even if Lord British had been lost forever Britannia could have strived under a new ruler or the council. Still no one notices that the shadowlords are gone, it is sort of a bummer.

This game also introduced night cycles. It is a good idea however it can be a pain sometimes. Simply put, nothing happens during the night. Very few NPC's are awake during that time, so the only thing you can do yourself is sleep. I've played this game for 7 months and 6 days of in game time and most of it was spent sleeping to skip the nights. The concept is good but it needs to be executed better in the future. The world of Britannia is much richer in this game. The castle of Lord British has suburbs and there's keeps and huts scattered throughout the land. This makes traveling more fun than it used to be because you're always stumbling on something new. The dungeons are greatly improved. Most of these improvements are graphical; dungeons are now fully detailed, each sporting a different look than the next. They also feel less maze like, but that could be an illusion stemming from the fact that the added clarity of the graphics makes them easier to navigate. At the bottom of the dungeons there is a new landmass called the underworld. It has the same exact proportions than the overworld and is quite fun to go through. The monsters are really tough and come at you often. You also don't see much around you down there and everything is hilly so you often have to follow a set path. It definitely feels different but to me that was one of the strongest part of the game, I loved going down there.

So far I've only been heaping praise on the game so why the 7.5? Well obviously this game is old. The graphics are good, I sort of like them. At this point you could say that they are "simple but clean". However, this is the fifth game in the series that has been using the same overall graphics engine and it is starting to wear thin. Luckily it is also the last. I'm tired of all that black!

The battles are better than in Ultima IV but they're also somewhat more annoying. In Ultima IV everything was way too easy, monsters were simply XP fodder, it was a contest of who can kill what faster. There was absolutely no challenge to the battles. Think about it, near the end of the game my party was put to sleep for about 30 minutes by reapers, and the surrounding monsters weren't able to finish us off since they couldn't hit us even while we were sleeping. If something like that happened in Ultima V, my whole party would be dead within 20 seconds. That is a good thing.

But there is also some bad. Your characters are incredibly inaccurate and they often hit your own party members rather than the monsters. I could understand at level 1, but level 8? How can a maxed out level 8 avatar throw his magic axe sideways, hitting his teammate, instead of forward? It seems to get worse when everyone is crammed closely with the monsters, it's not uncommon for your party to be hitting each other more often than the monsters.

Even when they're not hitting each other they might miss like crazy. At one point my 29 DEX avatar missed a mongbat like 6 times in a row. Just imagine how much the other party members were missing. A reason for might be to focus on magical spells. Simply put, magic is devastating. I don't want to imagine how hard the last dungeon would have been without eight level spells.

The music in Ultima V is absolutely astounding. Granted I am using the music patch for the PC version, you'd have to be an idiot to play the game without it. The music has none of the problems found in the previous games. It doesn't feel repetitive like in Ultima III and the songs are great across the board unlike Ultima IV. Ultima V also marks the introduction of the traditional Ultima soundtrack with 'stones' and the like which is quite pleasant. Overall I loved the music.

I think I've pretty much covered it. In the end this game is really close to an 8/10, which is a 'Great' game according to Gamespot's ratings. A higher rating wouldn't have been achievable for this game because it is simply too old, I'm not giving an 8.5 or a 9 to a game this ancient, except if the game was absolutely perfect from a gameplay standpoint. It isn't but it is pretty close, at one point during the game I was loving it so much that I thought about giving it an 8.5. In 1988, this game was a surefire 10, no doubt about it, especially since at the time no one would have been looking for a deeper, more emotional story. To me though, Ultima V is the first truly great Ultima."

END OF REVIEW

I really hesitated between an 8 or a 7.5 but I eventually settled on the latter. Usually when I hesitate on a score I like to give the lower score. In Gamespot's old review system I would have given a 7.9 or 7.8 to Ultima V but you can't do that anymore.

So there it is! I'll probably play Ultima VI next so stay tuned!

Ultima V day 8 - FINAL-

Yes I'm done!

Doom wasn't very fun. It really felt more like the mazes in Ultima IV, as in quite mazelike and confusing. None of the other mazes are like that in Ultima V. It got to a point where I would shoot every wall of every room just to make sure.

The battles themselves were not too tough. Luckily my avatar was level 8 so I used IN VAS GRAV CORP profusely. That spell is really really good.

I was surprised that LB asked me for the sandalwood box. I was even more surprised when I replayed the ending and realized that without the box you can't finish the game. I honestly found that box by mistake, no one ever told me to look for it. Kind of crazy isn't it?

The last post is always pretty short from me, that's because at this point all I want to do is move on to the next game! That's what's it's all about: progress! I still haven't decided which game I am going to play next although I am still leaning towards Savage Empire, basing this on the fact that although Ultima VI is not necessarily better, it's probably bigger and more ambitious. And well, probably better too but who knows. In the end this Ultima quest is all about the main Ultimas so I'd rather keep those for the end and play the sidegames first.

However chronologically SE happens after Ultima VI so that bugs me a bit. I wouldn't want to be spoiled you know? I'll play them a bit tomorrow and make my final decision then. If Ultima VI feels like the superior game I'll go with the others.

There's always the possibility of doing SE, UVI and then MD. It would be weird, but possible. Choices, choices, choices.

I'll write my Ultima V review tomorrow and post it on the blog. Take care till then!

Ultima V day 7

I'm back again after that huuuuge post. Honestly that post was too big, I think it scared some of you away!

This one will be shorter. I played a LOT yesterday however what I did was quite simple. I went and got the last two remaining shards and destroyed the shadowlords once and for all. It's simple but it took me a while.

The first thing I did that day is get out of the underworld via Destard. The first room you get into has like 4 dragons and is quite hard, but I managed to put to sleep all four of them. They don't asleep for long though unlike mongbats so I barely had time to kill two before they woke up.







I then worked my way out to Britannia. Since I had so much money at this point, I decided to max out my karma. So I gave 8700 gold pieces to the shrine of compassion and now I am truly an avatar of great value! So much for having to follow the virtues and all that :)








Afterwards I decided to go after the shard of hatred (I think). I have no idea why but I was SURE that it was at the bottom of the dungeon Despise, which is the first dungeon I tried, remember? So I go back to Despise, make my way down quite quickly and start looking for the shard of hatred. I couldn't find it. I looked again and again and no sign of the shard. I did find a weird keep (well actually it's a boat but on the overworld map it looks like a keep) with a wizard called Johne who told me a peculiar story. Seems he got stranded in the underworld way back when and killed his three comrades when he was under the influence of the shards. His comrades then became the shadowlords! Darn!












He also wanted to join me but I was already full so I said no. Natreg seemed to imply that I should take him with me. I'm guessing he has pretty good stats but at that point my two wizards were already close to reaching level 5 and I'm not interesting in having a level 2 or 3 character in my party. Maybe in Lazarus :)

I then looked at my notes and saw that I had entered the wrong dungeon, I had to enter through DECEIT to get the shard of falsehood (oh so I was looking for falsehood not hatred). DARN! I then read that the shard of hatred was below the region of the lost hope bay. But wait, isn't the bay just east of Despise? Maybe I could get there without having to go back up? I went as far east as I could and guess what? I could see grass to the east! And when you see grass, you can blink there!







And so I did and it worked! I took a quick peek at a gem and saw that weird clearing to the north and thought that the shard was surely there. I managed to climb my way through and yep, as I thought, here was the shard.











Next I tried to do the same thing for the shard of falsehood but I was never able to find a spot to blink. After looking for quite a bit of time I had to resign myself to go back up a dungeon. I went north, spotted covetous and decided to give it a go.

Man do I love the dungeons in this game, THEY LOOK GREAT! Covetous looks totally different than the other dungeons! Despise is like a natural cave formation, Hythloth looks like a mine but Covetous is more like a man made crypt. Just take a look at this screenshots and compare them to the other dungeons. This game is crazy for 1988.











The minute I got back to Britannia I headed for Empath Abbey and took care of the shadowlord. Two destroyed, one to go!

I barely took the time to heal and went right back inside a dungeon, this time Deceit. Deceit also looks like Covetous strangely, I'm guessing they were both man made for specific purposes. There's less skeletons though.

The fun thing about Deceit is that there is a hole right in front of the entrance that will take you all the way to the eight floor if you decide to drop in. It hurts a bit but it's worth it.








The eight floor is a bit confusing because there is no visible down ladder when viewing a gem so you need to find it yourself. One interesting note is that it is totally easy to abuse the monsters in those four little rooms you can see on the map. If you enter them via the middle instead of using their extremities, it's easy to place your avatar in such a way that the dragons will constantly try to shoot at your teammates instead of you. Of course their shots get blocked by the pillars of their 'cage' so that allows you to kill them with the avatar. I cleared out all four rooms obviously since I needed the experience to reach level 8.












That room at the bottom of the floor is extremely confusing. You see a down ladder but there's a huge wall blocking off the access. The first thing I did is grab all of the hanging torches but that didn't do squat. Second I stepped on every tile with my avatar and you guessed it, nothing. Third out of desperation I shot at the walls and that still didn't do a thing. Only at the did I throw a random axe at the upper right wall and that worked. I honestly was THAT close to getting the hell out of there. After that it was a simple matter of killing the monsters and hitting the right switches. Whew.










Coming out of Deceit it was easy as hell to guess where the shard was I mean just look at that screenie. And I knew it because the two sisters in cove told me that the shard was on an island in the underworld so there it was. The hard part was learning how to get there but it didn't take me too long.











Getting back up the dungeon was harder than going down since there was no crazy hole to drop through. At this point though I'm pretty good in dungeons so I managed.

Then, you guessed it, I destroyed the third and FINAL shadowlord. YES! I am finally at the endgame point of Ultima V, I can hardly believe it. I think if I had told the me of 10 years ago that I would ever finish Ultima V legit like that he wouldn't have believed me.

I don't think he would have believed me if I told him that I finished Ultima IV legit either :D

Natreg's comment on my last post made me go OH MAN CRAP. I had TOTALLY forgotten about those glass swords! I had learned everything about them in the early game, if you go back a couple of posts you can see me talking about them. Still they had totally left my mind until Natreg reminded me. I immediately went to the spot where I found the white stone in Ultima IV and climbed the mountains. As I thought, there was a grass spot here containing a glass sword. Yes, I said A glass sword. How can there be only one? That doesn't make sense. I left the moutains, thought about it a bit, equipped the glass sword and went back to see if it made others appears ala mystic weapons in Ultima IV. It worked! So I managed to get 7 glass swords that way. Sweet!






Now all there was to do was get ready for the endgame portion. I had so much money that I had no idea what to do with it so I spent it on maxing out my food supply, making a bunch of spells and then buying new reagents, maxing out on torches etc. Basically if I could spend it on something I would. After doing that for a while I felt prepared and headed for Shame.


The first floor was confusing since it's basically an empty room but that last room in Deceit taught me better. I threw my axe everywhere and managed to hit the switches. I was surprised to see rocks in the way though and even more surprised when I realized that I could climb rocks in this game. Kind of useless though :) In general design Shame looks like Hythloth, which means it looks good, like all the other dungeons in the game :)













Shame was quite easy overall and it didn't take me long to get to the underworld. The dungeons in Ultima V are either much easier than the ones in Ultima IV or I am a master of them. Or maybe both!

I went east since the center of the underworld was that way, blinked once to cross the vast area of mountains and oh crap, what the hell is that? I have no freaking idea but it must be what the codex called "the gate to the core of the world". I flew around the island to see if there was a path of non shallow waters to cross through but there wasn't so I just flew over the turbulent waters.










At this point it was about time for me to stop playing but I was incredibly close to reaching level 8 with my avatar so I fought monsters after monsters. Eventually I reached 6400XP and was awarded my eight level by LB but..wait...WAIT, HE GAVE ME A POINT IN INTELLIGENCE! But I'm hardly maxed out in that stat I need points in DEXTERITY! When I saw that I immediately did a quit and load, hoping that the allocation of points was random. But he still gave me a point in INT the second time. CRAP, that really really sucks! I was hoping to have that perfect character like I had in Ultima IV. I am honestly thinking about modifying my save file to give me that 30 in DEX, I think I've earned it. It's unfair to be given a point in a stat you've already maxed dammit.






Oh well. I stopped playing at that point. So next time I play Ultima V, it will be to finish the game!

Btw Natreg, I didn't go talk to that person who knew about moongates since frankly that would be kind of useless to me by now, I'm at the end and I've never used the moongates except to reach the shrine of spirituality.

Get ready for the final post! :)


EDIT: Well I sent my save file to my friend and told him to check out if he could so something about the faulty dex and guess what, he did! Look at that beauty!

Ultima V Days 4 , 5 and 6!

Oh man three days of intense gaming to talk about! First things first, this game is GREAT! Oops I said it once or twice before didn't I? Well I'm saying it again, this game is RAD. Loving it!

Now I'm checking out screenshots of my first day and I barely remember what I did. Let's see.

1. I seem to have gotten the word of power INFAMA from the sleepy guy.
2. Learned about the HMS Cape's plans.

DAY I

Oh yes! That's a good story. So here I am learning about the plans so I immediately head to Britain to have a chat with Master Hawkins. Or is it North Britanny? I think it's North Britanny. Whatever.

Here I am and I realize that Hawkins is the merchant and merchants don't speak! I'm a bit perplexed at that revelation so I ask the little dude in his shop about it and he tells me that the master lost his plans! WHAT! Now I'm panicking a bit because no one seems to know where the damn plans are! I decide to loot the place just in case the bastard left them in his own shop and there they were, in a desk at the end of his shop! Whew!





So what else did I do? Oh darn that's the day I went to Blackthorn's castle! I had gotten the badge from that crazy woman on her island and I felt ready to try my luck at the crown. Armed with the badge and the carpet I headed for the castle. It was actually quite easy overall since the guards would leave me alone after I told them the password of the oppression. I just headed up until I reached the crown, grabbed it and then made my way down, freeing a poor soul in the process. Oh and I paid a visit to Blackthorn and he recognized me! He tried to kill me but luckily I have the almightly power of the quit and load which I promptly used!

What's up with that corridor filled with doors anyway? Who built that? :| Oh wait I know who did, I met a dude in some prison who told me quite proudly that he was the one who built Blackthorn's fortress with pit traps and all. He told me "If you fall, think of me HAHAHAHAHAH ROFLMAOOMFGBBQ". Luckily that wasn't much of a problem on my trusty carpet!

























Wait why wasn't I using the carpet in most of those pics? Am I an idiot or what? Maybe I just didn't want to look 'suspicious' you know? Imagine you're a guard in the castle of Blackthorn and you see six idiots crammed on a carpet flying around, what would YOU do? Yeah, exactly.


Next I decided to tackle this "Scepter problem". I first went to Minoc like Natreg told me to and investigated the skull keys. Someone in the Lycaeum told me that she had gotten the keys from a man named Shenstone. So what do I find? This shenstone is the merchant running the weapons shop in Minoc! DARN! Another merchant! So once again I panic and go ask his smith about the keys which he doesn't know anything about. I check out his place and I can't find any keys. Now I'm wondering what the hell is going on and all of a sudden I see him leave. Now that's not necessarily weird because in Ultima V, NPC's take breaks from time to time. But as I was watching him go he suddenly left the path and headed into the back of the town. That was weird. I followed him and saw him next to a tree, CHA CHING. Searched it and found some keys! Thanks Natreg!












Now it was time to get that sceptre. Following the instructions given to me by Sir Sean I went all the way down the bay of lost hope, or the lost hope bay, whatever they want to call it, and climbed those mountains. Didn't take me long to find what I was looking for, however I got a bit more than I bargained for..













The shadowlords are in the houuuse! DAMN! Okay that ain't good! On top of that there's like a gazillion bats flying around. After whacking a couple on the head I enter and find myself face to face with the 'fearsome' deamon Balinor. I didn't think he was that fearsome but eh to each his own! So he asks me this question which sounds like "What is round like a cup and as tall as a house?" and I'm like, what? The first thing I thought about was a well but that ain't as tall as a house, so I answered LOL and he attacked me. I thought I could take him on but he possessed my avatar and then it became a pain so I reloaded my game. Then I thought about it a bit.

There must be a way to stop possessions? How? And it just came to me that the Crown would probably do the job, it's supposed to stop every magical attack right? And indeed it did! And this time I answered 'well' like I first thought and that was also the right answer!

But that greedy SOB attacked me anyway! No big deal he got it and good too!








Next was grabbing that friggin scepter. Now there's a shadowlord west, north and east and they all come out ready to rumble. The scepter is over some pits but that isn't a problem since I'm on my carpet. The problem here is to get the scepter without getting attacked by the 'lords. After a lot of trial and error I managed to do it! I also found out the hard way that if you get attacked by a shadowlord while you're holding the scepter they take it back! But I won't let that happen, not with my trusty quit and load!










It's strange that the third shadowlord hadn't yet come out when I got the scepter. Maybe he got stuck? That poor bastard hahahaha thanks dude loved the help!





Afterwards I checked out my notes and saw that I was lacking the names of the shadowlords of falsehood and hatred. Someone told me that a deamon who knew a lot about the shadowlord of hatred was living in the eastern desert so that's where I went. As I was told, a deamon was living there...farming crops? Right. Without much prompting he told me the location the shard of hatred and the name of the shadowlord, which is ASTAROTH.







I'm not sure what happened next but I found myself in the basement of LB's castle looking for the armorer. I found a suspicious locked door to the south and decided to check it out. Oh my, it's a treasure chamber! I opened a few chests and picked up a magic bow and some other great goodies but then I thought that I shouldn't be doing this, I'm supposed to be the avatar and all that crap so I stopped did a quit-load. Let me tell you that my viewpoint on this matter changed dramatically the next day :)








I finished the day by going back to Jhelom to talk to that confused mage. The first time I talked to him I couldn't learn anything from him but this time I had the idea to talk to him backward like he does to me. It worked :|





That's it for day 1.

DAY II

The first thing I did is get some nightshade, as you can see. I never looked for it in Ultima IV so I wasn't sure where to look but my instructions were to look for the "most forested spot in spiritwood" and I found it quickly.





Then I decided to equip myself a bit better, bought a bow for Gwenno and a crossbow for Iolo and headed out to complete some shrine quests. I did the one for spirituality which gave me a nice +1 boost to every stat and then headed to the codex to do the one for humility. Oh man was I in for a surprise. This is what it looked like:





My runic isn't so bad these days so I managed to translate it all. It told me how to enter "the core of the world" from Shame. Right. I think the codex took some good stuff before I got there.


And then, THEN, it was finally time! Time to enter my first dungeon! Woohoo! I was ready to hate again but it wasn't to be! The dungeons are...well I wouldn't say amazing, but much much better. They're detailed and actually look like caverns and not..you know, bunch of grey stuff. I'm loving the details, even the monsters look good!









One thing I found strange is the total lack of rooms in the dungeon, which was Despise btw. I went down the floors quickly and then at one point on the eight level saw a ladder down. I thought oh hell there's a 9th level!?!

Oops...








The underworld! Finally! Man I was really happy to finally reach it however I was a bit scared since Natreg told me it was pretty much a hell on earth. I decided to go further in it just to check it out, you know, a little bit. I fought some spiders, some rats, ran around a bit, and then faced a party of mongbats. They killed me in like, 30 seconds. I did a quit-load, same thing, killed me in 30 seconds. I thought "Holy hell if I'm not good enough to fight mongbats imagine how I'm going to fare against stronger monsters? I'm getting out of here!".

It is at this point that I decided to drop this whole holier than thou thing. Heck my equipment was awful and I had NO money. Look at at first dungeon screenie, I have EIGHT GOLD PIECES. I mean come on now! So I headed up the dungeon and went straight to LB's castle, down the ladders and to the treasure room. I looted that room lord knows how many times. I would loot the room, get out, get back in, loot it again, repeat about 10 to 15 times. I was fed up with being a weakling. And you know what? It worked beautifully. I managed to buy magic axes, plate mail and magical shields for all of my characters. Only Mariah couldn't wear the plate because she wasn't strong enough so I gave her chain. The only bad point is that now when LB appeared he would tell me "You have strayed far from the path of the avatar, come back before you are lost forever!". Oh well. I'm not sure how to come back yet but I guess giving money at shrines is a good start.


Now after equipping myself with the best stuff money can buy I thought "Okay, let's complete that notebook". I still had to find the name of the shadowlord of falsehood so I headed for the lycaeum, but I somehow stumbled on something pretty strange..:






You gotta love that name!


Once I got to the Lycaeum it didn't take me long to find the person who knew about the shadowlord of falsehood or should I say FAULINEI? Mouahhaahah!

At this point what else was there to do than plunge in another dungeon? I decided to hunt down the shard of cowardice so I headed south to Hythloth. Oh my, the amount of detail in the dungeons is incredible! Hythloth looks completely different than Despise! I absolutely love that attention to detail, it makes the game much more immersive and it allows me a minimum amount of liberty in movement since I can recognize my surroundings much better than I could in Ultima IV.






I have to admit that I got lost a few times, hythloth is a pretty complicated dungeon. But after a bit of trial and error and a lot of gem viewing (with a lot of quit-load afterwards) I managed to make my way to the underworld. Once I got there, I viewed a gem and saw a weird volcanic formation to the north. I also noticed that I was basically stranded in the middle of nowhere. Then I remembered what the keeper of the flame of courage told me, which was that I would need to cast a specific magic many times to reach the shard. At this point it was obvious that the spell in question was blink.

So I blinked northward to check out that lava, swam right to the middle and searched and HOLY CRAP I found the mystic armors and weapons. I guess I was so excited by that discovery that I didn't take a screenshot which is kind of lame but oh well. I didn't equip the swords because they're short range weapons but I equipped the armor on everyone. Yay!

That was it for Day 2.

DAY III

I got curious about the transferring my character to Ultima VI. I knew that I could transfer either my Ultima IV or V character so I wanted to check it out. Transferring my Ultima IV character results in the same guy I got in Ultima V, 25 in every stat and 999 experience points.

However, transferring a character from Ultima V is much more lucrative because the transfer keeps the stats point for point. At that time I had 30 STR, 29 INT and 29 DEX and that's the character it gave me in Ultima VI. Impressive! However the game still divides the total amount of experience by 10 so although that character had better stats he was at a much lower level. There's not much I'll be able to do about that because I'm not reaching 9999 experience points in Ultima V for sure. I'm not even sure I'll be able to reach level 8, that takes 6400 XP and I'm at like 3300 at the moment. When I realized how much of an advantage it was to transfer my Ultima V character over my Ultima IV one I started to set my avatar as the active character in combat, allowing him to be the only one killing monsters. Obviously I can't do that with stronger monsters but it works wonders with the weaker ones.


Now remember when I said that I couldn't beat mongbats during my previous trip to the underworld? Well guess what, I still couldn't beat them! At first that really bugged me because here I was, fully decked out with armors and weapons and I can't be these little critters. I didn't have a choice but to look for applicable spells in the spell book. The first one I tried was Tremor but since these guys fly it didn't do crap to them. I mixed a couple of level 8 and 7 spells only to find out that I can't use spells from a level higher than mine and I was level 6 at the time.

So what was a guy supposed to do? I mixed a confusion spell and it worked pretty well, the mongbats started killing each other and all. However I was worried that it was taking some experience away from my guys since if they're killing each other we're probably not getting any of that XP.

So I looked again in the spell book and saw a sleep spell. Now I hate sleep spells, I've always hated them, always found them useless and retarded in every RPG I've ever played. But this was a MASS sleep spell...sort of interesting. And oh man the results were astounding!









I'm never doubting sleep spells again!


Did I mention that by that point I had already found that shard? Yeah, I was blinking around and fighting and I ended up finding the shard. Wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be, it was simply about viewing a gem, seeing where to go, placing myself correctly, blinking, quit-load and then doing it perfectly without having to view a gem or waste any blink spells. Rinse, repeat.








The hard part was coming back. Somehow the way I took to get there didn't seem to work that well to come back so I had to found another way. I was also running out of blink spells but luckily quit-load saved the day once again!

Now you can imagine that as soon as I got back up to Britannia I headed straight for Serpent's Hold. I wanted to destroy that shadowlord as soon as possible! And I did! Went right up to the flame, called out his name, waited until he was RIGHT on top of the flame and used the shard! BYE BYE!









After that I again looted the treasure room in the castle and filled my pouches with reagents, food and pretty much everything else. When I was looking for Karma tips on the internet I found out that I can press CTRL+K to see my Karma level out of 99. I was at 5. Giving 100 gp to shrines raises my karma by 1, when I'm ready to go save LB I'll gather like 9500GP and give it all to a shrine, case closed.








Then came a fun bit. You know in the expedition journal LB talks about a waterfall east of spiritwood. I decided to see if I could also use it to get into the underworld. Seems I can! I was looking for the waterfall in the middle of night when I couldn't see much and I fell into it and into the underworld! I knew that the amulet LB had was still where everybody died so I followed the journal right up to the amulet. I'm not sure what the amulet does yet, it probably has a very specific function of which I learn more about later.








The fun part about this was getting out! I fell down the waterfall so how was I supposed to get out of there? Now the thing about the underworld is that it corresponds to the overworld map, so I thought about it a bit and looked at my map and realized that I was probably pretty close to Destard so I looked for it but couldn't find it at first. I got lost for a while then came back to the burial ground, retraced my steps upward, was blocked by the waterfall, realized there was another path to the left of there, managed to go back up and finally, on a gem, I saw the entrance of a dungeon.






I hiked my way there and as I thought, it was the entrance to Destard. I opened the entrance with a word of power and saved my game, ready for another day of adventuring. Next time I boot up Ultima V I have a dungeon to climb, I just hope Destard isn't too hard, some dungeons can be pretty savage.

College is starting on wednesday so I don't know how it'll affect the blog. Most likely the posts will be much shorter and with fewer pictures. This one took me a good 2 hours to write, I'm not writing 2 hour long posts while in college that's for sure.

P.S: I started this blog post a 7:14PM and finished it at 11:15PM. Now I didn't work on it non stop for four hours, but I know I spent the last two on it. Kind of shows you how much time these things take. I really have to cut down a bit, this is crazy.

See you later!