Ultima VII: The Black Gate Retrospective | Masterfully Executed 

That is awesome. Origin was really proud of the series back then. Also wonder if he's the real life counterpart of the "human" Knight Simon in Serpent Isle like a lot of the other characters in the series.

What a different time we lived in. Slower paced it seemed. Better for it.

I was worse than you were I would call the hotline back to back and needless to say I ended up progressing however when that phone bill arrived I was always in deep shit😂

That reminds me on another note I eventually ended up getting the guidebook. I still have the gem in my closet I even have the ultima collection. Damn I miss playing this game they should def do a remaster and bring it to current consoles. If they did that my life would be complete and I can finally die a happy person.

Same here, minus the part of sending letters! I played this game FOR YEARS and it never lost his charm. It was a great experience, i also learnt a lot of english language vocabulary just clicking on items! It formed my taste in games for sure :)

Definitely pushed the envelope back then. Even after going back to the previous Ultima games. The jump from VI - VII was huge.

And every NPC had their own schedule every day, something that most games even today dont have.

This was probably the series that influenced the elder scrolls and the diablo series.

I still feel it holds up. Especially with the Exult engine.

@@VoidbrandYes, Exult is a blessing for reliving Ultima 7 and part 2.

It is worth playing through, to be sure. But do yourself a favor and read the manuals first, or even better, playing Ultima VI before hand. For maximum enjoyment of U7 you should understand Britannia, its history and its religion before you play.

​@@Will-xk4nmpeople leaving these type of comments are why people dont get into older games, asking them too do too much

@@stephenmccabe1489 That's fine. If you don't read the manual then you won't understand the game, then you will play it and tell people it sucks. So I would rather discourage players by telling them to make a tiny effort than encourage them to play with no effort at all and hate the game. Anyone who thinks reading is too much effort should not be playing Ultima at all.

I'm glad you're enjoying the vids, thanks. I like Spoony's Ultima videos, but I've also always liked channels just talking about their opinions on their favorite series without the latter stuff you mentioned.

@@Voidbrand Yup, loving them! Rooting for you to be the next gaming RU-vidr that makes it to 100k. Spoony's Ultima retrospective is amazing and I love it, but it's more comedy than informative. Your videos are more informative than comedy and are a perfect contrast.

Well, to be fair a lot of the "pseudo intellectual analysis" you mention was done for comedic effect. Spoony is from a bygone age of "angry reviewers"; this a more straightforward 'essay' on the game, and I'm really enjoying all these intelligent people coming out and reviewing old CRPG games and Dungeon Crawlers.

Picture my 8yo self trying to translate the instructions on the english Origin Collections manual in order to properly setup a bootdisk to play U7 on my father's 486 😂 only to get SCARED by The Guardian EVERY TIME

hahaha nice@@_krbrs_

Cheers.

Also, just to show just how much I enjoyed U7 - I have the cloth map (yes, the game came with a pysical map printed on cloth) framed and displayed in my study. One of the best game mementos ever.

Going from Sega games to a game like Ultima VII was something else for me back then. Though I do still love the Genesis even today despite that. Didn't know games could even do stuff like what Ultima VII did.

I unfortunately lost my cloth map... The only Ultima thing that survived multiple moves were the virtue tarot cards from the Ultima IX big box, which I've done the same as your cloth map, framed forever. Despite the game the cards are rather nice.

Agreed. I'm looking to check out that mod sometime, saw some gameplay videos of it some months back.

I read it all, thanks for the support. 💀 The sandbox nature of VII is something I mostly messed with too, just wandering around and doing funny stuff like fishing and hoarding loot in a cave somewhere. There was a long lull in my life where I wasn't able to play it again since computers moved on from DOS. Didn't get back to it until Exult worked at keeping the game alive.

Thanks for the comment. It's still my favorite (Ultima) game to this day, never played anything like it back then.

Thanks, appreciate the comment. 💀 Love this game a lot.

30/30! That's a strong Spark. I wish more games did mark/recall like Ultima VII and Morrowind. It felt like you had to earn "fast travel", and it's more immersive overall. Other than that I rarely even use the magic carpet in VII anymore as I feel it takes away from the exploration if you can just bypass mountains and oceans and such.

Thanks. Still my favorite CRPG of all time. I think I realized Stonegate was there when I replayed it a year or two ago. The devs really hid it pretty well.

You're welcome. Actually had a few CRT users reach out about the aspect ratio so I'm glad to hear it.

Appreciate the comment, thanks.

Happy you're enjoying them. Thank you. 💀

That's surprising to hear, thanks. Always good to have more Ultima videos out there.

That's cool to hear. Had a few commenters mention they learned english playing Ultima games back then.

Peak Ultima is correct, even Garriott would agree. Very immersive games. I can still hear the waves of the ocean whenever the Avatar is near the shores.

I never knew anyone who played this back then. Needless to say I didn't get very far into it without a guide later on.

Thanks a bunch. 🙏

Appreciate it, thanks. 💀 Most players dislike the combat, but I'm not bothered by it. I think I'm entertained by the companions' taunts and how chaotic it looks. Then I get to loot bodies. Anyways, it's always a good time for another Ultima VII playthrough.

Thankfully we got Exult to keep VII alive. I would really love to see a remake for 8 and 9 though.

I played this on a Packard Bell too. Those are good memories. 💀

Nice. Spoony's Ultima videos is how I got exposed to the earlier games (at that time I haven't played the ones prior to VII yet) Ultima VII is still my favorite to this day. I also wish someone would make an "Ultima 7-like" with all the interactivity of The Black Gate/Serpent Isle with + the questing, especially on the indie side. It's either phenomenally tough to create or just hasn't been done yet.

@@Voidbrand Mechanically it isn't hard with modern engines and what not, but making a big unique indie game is almost impossible due to the time needed for unique asset/world bulding. Also 99% of the current people involved in vg writing should never be allowed near a text processor (and this applies to the indie and AAA scenes).

"Nobody will EVER need more than 640kB base mem" xD

I've seen that mod you mentioned. Too bad it never took off. With Exult someone (Total Immortal on RU-vid) is working on Ultima VI in the Exult engine which I'm really interested in.

I remember my dad spending countless hours trying to get everything perfect for it to run. We updated to windows 95 and then I assume it overwrote the mouse driver or something and I couldn't get it to run with both the audio and mouse at the same time even when booting to dos

Yes, Mark & Recall is used to fast travel. And it requires reagents, a certain level+ to cast, and virtue stones. It is completely immersive, and takes effort to earn. Which adds to the immersion that I mentioned not long after that timestamp. I'm talking about fast travel like in Skyrim, where you click on a map to go to a point.

@@Voidbrand - I'm not sure when fast travel was implemented. But plenty of RPGs I played in the mid 90s didn't have it.

I would've liked that if they went in that direction.

I don't have the box to IX anymore, though I still have my virtue tarot cards. I haven't played IX since it came out so that's going to be interesting to go through again.

It's still excellent to this day. Also I can see how the old English text would be challenging back then. And their choice of text doesn't help for a lot of people. 💀

A holy warrior. Basically a knight that can use white magic. Pretty common class in fantasy RPGs.

"I'm not entirely sure."

@@dungeonchill Always thought the class fits the Avatar the best before he became the Avatar. Or can just refer to him as a Fighter/Mage/Bard afterwards. Then again he's basically all the classes at once.

​@@dungeonchill"what's a paladin?" Is an old meme. A guy called Spoony made a ultima retrospective back in the day and in Ultima 9 "what's a paladin?" was a line he made infamous.

yeah, Avatar not knowing what a paladin is is a meme

Da Spoony One.

Definitely a highpoint of the game for me.

I remember trying every spell while dueling him as a kid, then that happened.

@@Voidbrand He had it coming.

It's from the Exult options.

It's small but you have to consider the hardware limitations of the time. The game released on 8 floppy disks, and was tough to get working right even when it was working right. If CDs became standard when the game released, we'd likely have a pretty large world to explore, but despite the compact size there was a lot to do. For the gold bars, they only become available from the key from Selina after dealing with those greedy Pikemen near the Sleeping Bull, so you really shouldn't be exchanging them anywhere in the first place once you get them. As far as everything creative has inspirations, I already mentioned that in the video. 🤦‍♂ In fact, you missed my point because I said it's "too on the nose" in this game that it "kind of" takes me out of the experience. There's no subtlety to it. And get out of here with your preaching. 😐 I'm sharing my thoughts and feelings of games I played as a kid through my videos, through the lens of an adult. Not to mention the fact that this is a RU-vid video. It's meant to have analyzations in it. We naturally get more critical as we get older, especially for stuff we care about. If you don't like what I said, fine, but don't shut me down and tell me what I can or can't share in my videos. Go make your own or watch someone else.

@@Voidbrand Personally I think they made the move to single mode rather than having a split between overworld and town level too soon considering the constraints of the technology of the time. Yes they packed the world they had, but it was too small and busy compared to earlier games IMO. Not for you, and that is fair. I started on his earlier games when they were initially coming out. Seeing if you could actually run the new Ultima game was a huge deal, LOL Too on the nose and lack of subtlety is pretty standard for Garriott. He liked to have players in on jokes, references, and inspirations. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. You seem very hurt by seeing his joke/message, and I have experienced similar things when I started to revisit things from my childhood... We see it with adult eyes as pretty much beating a dead horse, but we didn't see them at all before. So the effect is jarring. You might want to nominate some things as too special for this, there is no shame in wanting to preserve somethings in innocence. What you choose, if anything, to preserve is entirely up to you. Where the line is between "too on the nose" and way too vague is hard to tell. The amount of people who fail to grasp the meaning in some popular media has me more sympathetic to creators being more blunt. (Heck, I turn off satirical shows these days because even though they are patently absurd, there are people who won't get it and conspiracy theories get spawned... I had to debunk one of them years ago, and it was very sad for the guy who'd fallen for it.) I am not telling you what you can or can't share. I am trying to respond to what you presented and through that boost your algorithmic spread. Have a good day

@@kericmason Busy is how an open-world game should be. Compare The Black Gate to something like Skyrim. Still a good game but missing something Ultima VII had despite how small it is. Too many open world games (not Skyrim) focus more on the openness and sights versus the things The Black Gate offered. They made the move too soon because Origin had a need to innovate on every entry, they had to make great strides over previous Ultima games. I think I mentioned some of this in my video which you don't seem to be understanding. And you didn't hurt my feelings. You're annoying me by making a lot of judgements and preaching about someone you don't know even know from a 30 minute video. I usually ignore comments like these but I've been having a bad week so you get my attention. And I don't get how you thought I "seemed hurt" by the story bits. You're the only weirdo on here who thinks so. I read this entire video off a script with the most driest, monotone, robotic voice that has ever been seen on RU-vid. I'm not even going to touch the rest of your post with the way you're moving goalposts and doubling down. You can have the last word to help the algorithm. Don't forget to like and subscribe.

He's a strong little dude.

That stinks, it's a great game! I'd love to see a remake of it. But yeah, EA. Seeing the Shroud of the Avatar development off and on over the years since announcement was something else. What a shame. I wish he would've gone back to his roots and made a single player spiritual successor instead, but at least Exult keeps this game alive.

also, having only some characters be immortal, survive a game-breaking spell, and so reveal their hearts to you since it's all been fucked anyway, is GENIUS. thank you for featuring that detail

Because the kingdom most of the games take place in is called Britannia.

lead by the Lord British

Well everyone said it but, this piece plays in the city of Britain, capital of Britannia, all ruled by a man named Lord British. Sounds weird when I read that back to myself but there you go.

I hunt deer. There's a deer just outside to the south of Trinsic near/past some wolves. If you kill it, loot the meat, then move away and come back, it respawns. I fill up a bag or two and it lasts me awhile until I get some gold later on.

@@Voidbrand thanks for the tip!

Same perspective yeah. Good game.

Who?

Electronic Arts. Today better known as EA Games. Change the logo and hope people don't remember how many good gaming companies they bought out and destroyed.@@everythingpony