Ultima was always one of those games where you muddle through on your own, and then read a walkthrough and realize you've been doing it wrong the whole time.
I feel that only happened for thos who pirated it. This was my first ever owned original game, and it came with a cloth map, basically two guidebooks (on spells and history) and a whole lot of memory problems. It was just sad that so many of the hidden pathways and places were not implemented. I STILL want to know what is behind the effing birthplace of moriens, a place that someone following the walkthrough most likely never visits.
@@ponypapa6785 guilty as charged lol. It was a horrible game to pirate too, since the copy protection was pretty strong on it. I remember there were riddles you had to answer from Iolo in order to advance, and there was a very convoluted workaround that had to be employed. I was only a kid at the time, and hearing about all the stuff that came with it makes me wish I'd bought it.
When I played this game as a young kid I never was able to progress beyond Tenebrae. The sole reason being that the music of Headsman's Valley and East Road just gave me such an overwhelming feeling of "Trouble ahead", like going out in those areas means certain death around every corner, that I instantly turned back into the comforting tunes of Tenebrae. Which was somewhat ironic, considering Tenebrae is actually much more likely to get you killed in a gruesome and graphic fashion than either of those places xD - anyway great job on this remake of the soundtrack. Now we just need a remake of the game to go with it that's not riddled with gamebreaking bugs and useless controls
I was always just terrified of the lower catacombs. The upper ones were nice, but the lower catacombs... crumbling floow, lava, and those damn traps....
That’s so well put. I had similar emotions playing the game, it was genuinely creepy when you went away from civilisation and you felt like you were on your own.
Loved U8. Really enjoyed the game despite the clunky controls. Tenebrae track was outstanding. Wished it offered a wider range of weapons and armours. So much potential, and how sad the execs scrapped the Lost Vale expansion as well as the original isometric version of U9.
Thanks for putting this together! For the last decade I've been stringing together youtube videos of each individual song - nice to have the entire thing in one place!
This version kinda evaporates the ominous undercurrent bubbling just beneath the surface in the original. On the other hand, it sounds much richer. A great listen. Also 3:26 - 3:37: could Beck's Lonesome tears outro have been influenced by Nenad Vugrinec?
God that was hard. Finishing this game in 1996 was a like a lifetime achievement. I have promise 100$ to my kid and his friends to the first one who finish it. No one as dare to try yet.
Music was much better than the game itself. Not a big fan of those stupid water pads. Remember dying 200x times trying to hop between all kinds of Super Mario like hopping floating tiles, water, and lava pads before I beat the game back in 90s.
oh geez, i played this in the original retail 3.5" floppy version. no fixes and patches. using the current patches that's a cakewalk. having to try to guess how far you need to jump, and try precise positioning on a timer with that weird control scheme was REALLY hard. but manageable. And there are so many things in games today that I find MUCH more aggravating - like forced competitive multiplacer stuff, or DLC to finish the story of the original game...
Its a shame this game will be remembered as the "Beginning of the End" for the Ultima series. They should have spun this off as a new IP since it was so radically different from the previous Ultima titles. But then it couldn't seem to decide if it was an all new game either, since it had some of Ultima's previous 'feature's like "rummaging through the yard sale in your backpack". They should have went full-bore action game like Diablo.
I just got an inspiration: Why don't we form a FB private group of Ultima fans who can do Ultima 8 and 9 game-program-alterations to make them into good games, using all the ideas Richard Garriott originally intended for them, making them how they were meant to be, without EA interference? Same for the end of Serpent Isle and Silver Seed, each an Ultima 7 part 2, as I hear they ended prematurely? A problem is that while I beat The Black Gate, back in the day when it was still somewhat new (around 1993, IIRC), I never made it that far in Serpent Isle before I stopped playing (forget why), and played nothing of U8 and 9, just seen playthroughs here on youtube. Also, I know nothing about doing game alterations programming like this myself (just worked with mugen a little in the past), but could still come up with some plans on how to go about doing all this, offer game-change ideas along the way, and do my best to get through U7 pts. 1-2, U8 and U9 so I can offer even more ideas to help, if needed. Anyone with me?
There are fan projects out there already. Unfortunately, making this kinda stuff happen doesn't take ideas or even necessarily game dev skills, just a whole lot of hard work, which is never easy to manage when people have lives and jobs and all.
@@RodConvoy1987 I actually dunno what's all out there now. I think Pentagram's an effort to create an open source version of the engine (sort of like the one for Ultima 7), and there are a few other recreations like a NWN module and stuff, but I haven't checked on them in at least a couple years so you'd be doing yourself more justice researching it yourself.
OK soundtrack, don't remember much of it really, terrible game for the most part, and I love Ultima. EA ruined the Ultima franchise, adding side scrolling jumping in dungeons and dumbing down the game to get a greater fan base? That never works because you destroy the core base that actually buys the games. F off EA
I'd really like to see fans do remakes of this and U9, make them better games, and stay true to what Richard Garriot had in mind.Surely their level of video game makeup can be hacked by fans now. The games both came out around 20 years ago.
Yeah, same here. U8 was my first RPG so I have giant rose tinted glasses on. The fact it didn't hold your hand was amazing. I was 9-10 years old, and so discovering new things and using logic like taking bags, and using them to sort items. And figuring out the use of keyrings. I eventually used a walkthrough, but just reading through that and learning about the magic got me even more excited to play it. I especially appreciated that some magic wasn't infinite, and it took a LOT to prepare just one spell. It captivated me.
