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!
10 comments:
You are right, that mouse is for a quest.
Anyway, about Characters joining you, you can tell them to leave later, so you could have let that char (I suppose it was the gypsy) join you and later when your party is too big tell him to leave.
That's what I do anyway. I like to get all the characters in a game :)
When you find strong enemies you should put all the party in manual... Their AI is not that good...
The text in your screenshots looks better then the text in my copy of Ultima 6. Is it just the screenshots making the text look that good because they are high res captures or are you using some kind of mod?
"Now the new viewpoint is confusing because it's hard to know where you're going."
Part of the reason for that simply is the size of the viewport.
In U3/4/5 you had your character in the middle of an 11x11 square (=121 tiles) - so you can look five tiles in each direction.
In U6 you have a 9x9 square (=81 tiles) - you can look only four tiles in each dir.
This means that you loose 20% of your sight in every direction!
This also means that your viewport is reduced by nearly 33% overall - regardless of the detailed tile graphics because the game mechanics still deal in tiles.
Finally, if you compare U6 with U1/U2 its even worse, and though the World of Ultima games are a bit better (left and right are 4.5 tiles visible) the need for a better view was answered with the fullscreen U7. You'll love it ;-)
take care
Calibrator
Anonymous: I am playing all of the games in dosbox with the hq3x scaler. It is by far the best scaler of its kind, making everything round and pretty without the blurriness usually associated with scalers.
@ Anonymous:
I believe he is using a filter called HQ3X ( more info on that here: http://www.hiend3d.com/hq3x.html ) to smooth the pixel look of the game.
It's probably easier on the eyes in these days. :)
If its not HQ3X its probably its predecessor HQ2X (look for it on the menu on the left).
Thanks for the info. I wish I could use Doxbox as the graphics definitely look better on your end then on my real dos computer. I can't though as I rely on a Roland SCC-1 and a Roland MT-32 connected to it for midi sound. The SCC-1 is an old ISA card that my main machine does not have anymore. So basically, I am giving up the prettier graphics of DosBox for better music on my DOS computer.
Hmm, I think I'd rather have the music to be honest, although the adlib music in ultima 6 still sounds pretty good I guess. I'll also have to use adlib for the two worlds of ultima games.
Adlib sounds awful in UW1 and 2 though, but luckily it seems that dosbox's GM emulation isn't as bad as its MT-32 emulation because the music doesn't sound too different from the original GM samples I listened to, especially after I installed the GM patches from Ultima: The Reconstruction.
When I reach Ultima VII I'll have the best of both worlds with exult. I'll be able to use an hq filter AND play the original general midi soundtrack.
Yep, can't wait till I get around to playing Ultima VII on exult myself. The higher resolution option makes the game look really nice. :)
So now the mice talk? Britannia's getting kind of Narnia these days.
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