Oh wow, I was looking up the Ultima 8 soundtrack to put it on in the background only to discover that you uploaded my old review. I've moved on from doing gaming content and I never did back my videos up, but I'm glad that you liked it enough to preserve it on your channel. Thanks.
Well being the first time the algorithm took me here (took a time actually, as I am a sucker for Ultima franchise), I'd like to thank you for your take on this game, that I got to play some 25 + years ago and since then always was fascinated by the 'magic' system it created. Also soundtrack and atmosphere are much, much more enjoyable than its predecessor. You've nailed everything I ever considered about this game, and also brought sweet memories from a gaming childhood by sharing your gameplay and stories. Thank you a lot!
Having worked on Ultima 8, I can say that it was a perfect example of what happens to a great product (Ultima) created by a small studio (Origin) when that small studio is acquired by a large studio (EA). The mandate became "More running and jumping and climbing" because "traditional RPG's don't have as much mass appeal". It also would've been better if Richard had been closely involved in the game, but I think he felt divorced from it to a degree following the EA buyout (personal conjecture).
Thanks for this perspective! I really liked U8, played it through until getting hopelessly stuck in an area I seem to recall was out on a cliff somewhere. It turned out this was near the end and was an issue fixed in the patch. In the pre-internet days though I never saw the patch until 2/3 years after. Got the patch and finally managed to complete it. Remember that **** door with the three gods too. "I banish you to the world of Pagan, no-one here knows of _thee_, Avatar! da-da-da-da----" This, the System Shocks, Baldur's Gate and Half Life were my favorite 90's games.
I love this game! It's great to see another person enjoying it instead of just slagging it. There's a ton of fun to be had here. I watched my dad play Ultima V when I was around 6 years old. When Ultima 8 came out it was my turn for a romp through fantasy land. I actually had a magazine w/ a walkthrough in it, so I could just keep plowing through the game having fun. Learning all the different magics was my favorite part. When I could finally summon demons to do all my dirty work for me I felt so insanely powerful. It was worth all of the time put in. I remember taking over a house and making a huge stock of explosive bottles/jugs. If I set one off in the chest of 50 explosives it would pretty much lock up my 486 for about 5 minutes while it processed all of the individual explosions. :D
*I first played this in high school and it was the first true complicated RPG game I had ever played. I loved it and still love it. I can still remember the troll that kept poor hags locked up in its lair, and the mace that made a thunder crack on a kill. Decades later I can still hum the music. Most modern games I forget them a week later. It's a masterpiece*
Pagan is actually my favorite from the whole series! The Complete VII is also quite amazing, VI is very nice, and I even really like Ascension provided some of the community fixes and updates are installed. Admittedly, even though I've been playing games since maybe 1979/1980, I never played U1-5, so I started with 6. So I'm a bit skewed toward the more modern ones. Still, Pagan's dark atmosphere grabbed me more than almost any other game (short of System Shock). Pagan is absolutely a masterpiece.
Try Ultima 5. The first in the series where the characters have depth. The story drags you in and there's a ton of atmosphere. I recommend playing the PC EGA version with MIDI patches or on a C128.
@@andynn6691 I will definitely check that out next time I'm in the Ultima mood. I've got the collection, so I already have this too. Pretty sure it includes the EGA version. This one always looked interesting to me, but U6 was the earliest one I played.
This was such a delight to watch. I remember this game coming out when I was in high school, and I experienced a lot of the same things you did back then. I really want to try and play it again sometime soon.
U8 was my first pc game when I was a kid. It set the standard for future games for me, just because U8 was my first approach with fantasy rpg, and I was disapponted by many (proably better) games to come later. I fell in love with this game even with all its issues. Add that I couldn't really understand english back then so all the game was played via trial and error. Also, didn't have internet. It was just me and a friend of mine trying everything we could to go ahead.
I adored this game, the opening traumatized me as a child, and the setting was unique. I also had to use a boot disc lol... good ol' days...Brilliant video essay, liked and subbed mate.
Thanks for the retrospective, David (original uploader). I immensely enjoyed the game back in the days. Apart from Link's Awakening for the Gameboy this was (like you) my first true RPG. Of coruse, it's a flawed masterpiece due to EA's ridiculous deadline. But the game's dark and ominous atmosphere is sheer overwhemling and unmatched to this. You have to put so much energy into the game to get to this point, but it's absolutely worth is. Which is something most of the games nowadays are lacking. They take you by the hand and don't trust you to do anything on your own. Back then I even had to program a boot disk to start it on a Win 98 system. A quite challenging endeavor for a eleven year old greenhorn. Neno Vugrinec's meta-tonal score was propably one of the many reasons for Pagan's beautifully eerie atmosphere and the coherently dense gameplay. Most of the earlier Ultima games had great music, too, but only Pagan and Ascension both had a unique musical score based on motifs for different locations, persons and events. I especially love the simplistic but never naive feeling of the background track for Tenebrae. I made some rearrangements of these tunes. You can check them on my channel. Anyway, all the best.
You can ABSOLUTELY un-alive Beren! It'll just take you wood, assorted debris, and many, many hours of gameplay to build him a nice stairway to the fountain near his house. Game becomes extra hilarious after he's in The Lurker's domain, you can be a criminal to your heart's content. Do what you will with this info.
Ultima 8 was a fine game. It was my first contact with the Ultima series when I was young. I remember waiting for the gem storelady to go take a walk at night only to steal all her stuff. I don't remember how I got her to leave while I was still in the shop but I did.
Many thanks for this review- It was my first Ultima game back in the day and one of the biggest I ever played. My brother and I spend countless hours in this game and in fact we managed to beat it on our own. But some bugs and plot stoppers and other things almost sopped us for good. There are so many memories tide to this game. Like that one time where I managed to finally get further in the story, a sacrifice is made and a sudden flash of lightning appears on the screen. At that exact moment our monitor died. It was so strange, we didn't even understand what had happened at the first place.
U8 was also my first RPG and it blew me away like the town sorcerer. And like the youtuber, I got stuck at the door behind the three god statues, and only finished the game more than a decade later.
I vaguely remember getting the Ultima VIII collector's edition at the store as a young kid... and then after my mom saw that firery pentagram on the box, made me return it for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago... ergh. Ohhh, I always wished I had kept that collector's enhanced CD package... I did eventually get a cheap version later, 90% certain it was still before the jump patch... Which made things verrrry tricky... But I'll never forget the night a friend came over and we stumbled upon the Slayer's dungeon. Pretty sure there was no escape, just had to head deeper and deeper into its abyss (already overwrote my save file). This was pretty early in the game still, and I was woefully unprepared, dying over and over with impossible jumps and situations (horray save scumming!). But after everyone had gone to sleep, in the dark, I kept fighting on, until finally obtaining that enchanted mace and escaping with my prize. To my younger self, that was an unforgettable little experience; that weapon served me well throughout my stumbling around the world of Pagan. ...Thinking back I believe I got stuck in the pyro section? Ended up buying a guidebook/novel for the game which actually was written as a story depicting what happened. Rather than just giving me the solutions, I re-read and better understood the story, and finally beat the game. (Still like any good Ultima I spent so much time just bumming around, exploring, doing things I shouldn't... like putting as many powder kegs in my backpack before igniting them all, committing a crime and then watch all hell break loose; my body parts spawning each time another keg went off, causing explosions, guards fighting demons, and who knows lol.) Simpler times...
This was my first Ultima game on PC. I remember pre-patch the horrible jumping mechanism, combined with moving platforms, and the save took FOREVER when writing to the hdd. But despite that, and no map or anything (I got the game in an EA bundle pack), I put many many hours into it.
Love this game and is one of few Ultima games I was able to complete without getting a corrupted save. The best part of the game was learning to cast magic with the different schools. Pure highlight of the series :D
The only Ultima game I played was Martian Dreams, but I couldn't beat it. I was stumped on the final part of activating the towers to melt the ice caps. I had done everything else up to that point, though, including growing new Martian bodies! It was seriously a lot of work, especially for the kid that I was at the time. The game came already installed on the computer my dad bought when I was a kid, so I didn't have any manuals, etc.
You didn't need to go as far as a golem... If you just block the door to the blacksmith when you visit during opening hours it won't be closed when you go back there later And yeah I finished it back in the day. Without a walkthrough.. We didn't have the internet back then. Solid game. I5t was actually myu introduction to the Ultima series
It's the Docks theme or the Cemetery theme for me! Even the Pit of Death theme still creeps into my brain once in a blue theme, and that tune unnerved the hell out of me! 😁 The Ultima 8 soundtrack was indeed impressive. Not bad for MIDI tunes, eh?
Makes me wonder how Ultima 8 would've been if Origin could've released The Lost Vale expansion for it. I would be curious to try it out if it had survived.
It's such a shame that Origin rushed out Ultima 8 with unpolished gameplay and systems, cut content, cut story arcs, cut everything and then cancelled expansion. Even in the state it came out in, there is so much atmosphere and character in the world and lore, you can feel the potential for true greatness, that was never realized. I almost wish it could be remade today with everything that should have been there in the first place.
Thanks for this m8. I had that exact CD when I was a teen. invested a whole bunch of hours in Brittania and Pagan. it was very fun. TThis brought up good memories.
I always liked Ultima 8 becaus of its atmosphere. 10:03 I remember finding all of the legendary weapons from the storys you could read in books, but sadly they did not have the effects as told in the books. It was always a disapointment when you tried these weapons on enemies that should die easily according to the legend.
You can totally kill Beren. He's not invincible, just has such high HP that he's *practically* invincible. To kill him, equip yourself with every fire bottle you can find. Then clip through the roof of a building so that you're standing on a wall, and chuck a fire bottle at a random passer-by. Beren will come after you but can't actually strike you--he'll just hit the wall, can't get to you while you're on top of it. Then just rain down fire bottles on him until he eventually dies! Now you can commence your reign of terror unchecked lol
When i was a kid i played U8 for a while but didn't get very far. Despite this i always found it very fascinating (still do). As you mentioned, what created most of the problems was most places looking samey: a map showing your character and the main POI would have improved the experience ten times. Another thing is the absence of any record of information such a journal: expecially for my bad english at the time i couldn't understand and remember anything. Finally that inventory should burn in the pits of hell:just make a list of items name coupled with their images. Already with these small things the experience would have been so much better...
I loved learning more about Pagan from playing it. Much of the interesting lore was in the books and stories... Not in doing quests for the Fellowship or hunting down tools to defeat the ShadowLords. I really enjoy playing this game every few years (or watching a fresh let's play on youtube/twitch, depending on my mood). Magic items where definitely welcomed, it's a low magic item world, and magic users are rare... each step on the way felt incredibly good. The high-priest of Stratos vanishes once you do away with Stratos proper, fitting since she was the source of his immortality. I seriously feel an alternate version of the game made in Exult would've felt really good to most ppl, but unfortunately the project was scrapped many years ago. And yeah Ultima9 is bad. I don't remember, but I don't even think the games mentions the world of Pagan, except when asking you to summon Pyros or Malchior, and even then it's not really by name. U9 was supposed to be so much more, I remember following the development for years and what we got is not even 10% of what was hinted at. Thanks for the awesome review; it's so rare to meet someone who actually gives U8 a fair score ! -- Enlightenment Dragon
Nice video 😄 I agree with you that Pagan is a nice game, one that I have played over and over again. The only thing I have to correct you is that Beren can be killed (without using cheats) 😊 and after you killed him, nobody will appear and start making you explode again when you start killing town people. But watching your video makes me want to play Pagan again.
Just a wee point of correction: While you don't need to eat or drink in Ultima 8, you can greatly benefit from doing so; if you eat regularly, your Hit Points replenish at a faster rate. I just thought I'd point that out. I was a big fan of U8 back in the day myself; even to this day, one of the tunes from U8's magnificent soundtrack may come creeping back into my mind at an idle moment (usually the Docks theme, the Cemetery theme, the Mountain King theme or the Pit of Death theme). The soundtrack was just that good! 😊
As for the lack of companions and the curses of shoddy AI, imagine an Ultima 8 remake which not only expanded the world of Pagan and brought the sound and graphics up to date but also came with servers for multiplay as well! Some variety in the avatars (so players can tell each other apart) would be great as well. (Yes, I'm familiar with Ultima Online because I played it for a few years. And all the gankers and griefers made it suck. So maybe just up to four players a server, eh?)
@@BloodyBay Could be kinda cool. Give it the old U5 Lazarus treatment or something more in-depth rebuilt from the ground up like Daggerfall Unity. I could probably remaster the music for U8, but it would take a lot of time, depending on the number and complexity of the tracks, not to mention establishing the end of the audio track so that it would loop seamlessly. At least Daggerfall's midi files had a predetermined pause built into the file. Remastering Daggerfall's music took me about 8 months, and I was dedicated enough that I had a lot of focus in that. I could easily see Daggerfall having taken me a year or more to remaster if it wasn't such a labor of love.
@@bytemixsound I've never heard of Daggerfall Unity, to be honest. I'd be on board with any Daggerfall remake, though! Daggerfall was good, solid fun back in its time. I'll have to Google around for that.
Absolutely love this game. I got it bundled with Wing Commander 2 + it’s special missions with a new computer my dad got. 486DX4/100 It was the first Ultima I played, and I’ve finished it too many times to remember. No hints, no guides. Although I did get stuck on the entrance to the Zealand expansion area that was never made… wasted so much time trying to open the doors there in that cave in the plateau Most proud of finding the hidden treasury in the catacombs and picking up all the magical armour, fire resistant shield and flame summoning sword. Thanks to some random jumping at a suspect area. Thanks for doing the video on it. 🎉 glad you liked it too. P.S this game helped teach me to read!
Indeed, we always used a specific autoexec.bat and config file for such games. When you talked about the stuff with the door and the spell, well... back then we played not 30h to finish the game but 200h trying everything to get it done and also force glitches to do things not supposed to happen. A classic challenge was to kill every character too.
Never played any Ultima games even though I'd like to (can't seem to get myself to learn how to play it/get through it), but this video was unexpectedly very enjoyable either way. Should have more views imho!
A game where the bad guy is the victor. Probably the most ballsy thing a game developer could ever do. Imagine the outrage if this were done today, with the internet being so prominent now.
Thank you so much! This was a beautiful and thoughtful tribute to my all time favourite as a child... Thank you for treating it with as much respect, despite it's flaws.
Regarding that Magma challenge around 18:20... there was a little trick to most of the dungeons and plattforming. There is a very tight ledge around the border of most pits in the game that you were able to walk on. So it was possible to walk around some of the most annoying areas. I'm pretty sure it was possible with that pit too. The difficult part was possibly getting around that spiky corner at 18:36, but given that the spell was (as you also said) rather short-lived that was one of the ways to get out alive I think. And don't tell me that wasn't the way it was meant to be played. The Avatar is totally about balancing out everything.... all the virtues, the underlying principles etc.... so balancing over a ledge is also totally within the normal Avatar way of solving problems ;-)
This is the last Ultima game I played before college (yes, I mostly stopped playing games in college, madness I know). So when I restarted like a happy clam with Ultima IX, I felt like i had been stuck in Pagan. I couldn't believe the series was basically scrapped. Turned me off rpgs until Bethesda's Oblivion and FO3
I love Ultima 8. I can understand why U8 was reviled because it was so different from U7 but I experienced them in reverse as a kid by playing/beating U8 before ever playing U7 (which I also love and is a much better game tbh) so I had no expectations for U8 and I appreciated it for the unique game that it was.
I loved the dark atmosphere and music of Ultima 8 (it somehow reminds me now in hindsight of Diablo which would be released a couple years later), but it was too different for me from the magic of 4 to 7.5. I missed many little things like NPCs that would eat in taverns, sleep at night, wake up in the morning... Ones that would bake bread, finding encounters off the beaten path like wandering into a dragon cave with bare naked cave dwellers who somehow managed to survive in there for generations, encountering pirates at sea. With U8, I found little interesting about wandering off the beaten path, and the extremely stiff controls (albeit already extremely stiff by 7) were more annoying than ever before to me. It's also a teeny thing but I really missed character portraits when talking to NPCs in U8. That gave them so much more life and personality than their sprites could offer. U8 had much more detailed character sprites, but they still looked somewhat generic and lacking in personality to me without the character portraits. I didn't feel nearly as connected or as immersed in the NPC interactions and probably in part because of that.
I never realized that dispel magic portal would get you through that door. When I played (which was some time in the 90's) I eventually managed to climb over the wall to get into the room. Don't ask me how, because I don't remember... I finished the game, but I did not get that door opened.
Coming after Ultima 7 certainly did this game no favor. Too bad it was released a year+ early. There's quite a lot of potential there, but aside from the nostalgia factor, big oof :p
I'd really love to see a remake of Ultima 7. I never played it, and when I tried to get into it... perhaps there was something wrong with my dosbox, but the controls were extremely janky. Also I have nothing against pixel graphics, but the perspective in Ultima 7 is very odd to look at
People were pissed because it went from a party based rpg to a platformer. It was a bad choice because there is not a lot of cross over in those players. In their defence cross over players was yet an unknown concept then.
The music ...my god, the music. I still remember it all. It sounded even better on an AWE32. Totally agree. It wasn't the same as the other Ultimas, but it was great in its own way. I love the darkness of pagan too.
This may have been pointed out already: casting spells isn’t the only way to increase intelligence. You can also increase intelligence by reading the in game books. You need to actually read them (or at least have them open long enough for a person to reasonably read them) for it to count though; you can’t just rapidly flip through all the pages. I found this a really cool and immersive touch.
I only played Ultima 1 (yes, the very first title) and Ultima 8; and I hated them both. What really annoyed me about the first part was the requirement for food and the dungeons, since the dungeons were confusing to navigate and I couldn't take my best weapon to them, the hovercraft (yes, there is a hover craft in the game, as well as a space rocket). What I hated about Ultima 8 is that your only chance of surviving was spells, since even near the end of the game, I was too weak to win against a bunch of simple enemies just using my weapon, unless I had some help (e.g. stone skin).
I played this as a teenager, and it was my first Ultima game, so I didn't have any preconceptions about what an Ultima game should be like" I liked it a lot, even though some of the mechanics like the platforming were frustrating.
Ultima 7 is still one of the most complex RPGs ever, surpassed only by Ultima online. Although it has horrendous combat system, so it is all about exploration, characters and world.
I never understood why some people complained so much about this game. I really liked it, despite sometimes being frustrated walking around. At a time when speech was rare in games, I really liked speech add on for gods, the Guardian and Kumash Gor.
Khumash Gor wasn't in the adventure for long (from you walking into his tomb to you killing his ghost or casting Grant Peace on him), but he made his brief appearance *_very_* memorable! "Come you seeking treasure? It is *_death_* you have found!" 😀
@@BloodyBay 😄 Yes that line of you coming to seek treasure and finding death will be forever in my mind.. and granting peace on a warrior? I felt back then (and still feel so now) that it would be more honourable to defeat his ghost in battle. 😉
Due to all the plot holes, the combat system was simplistic and at the same time sometimes confusing (if you fought multiple opponents) and sometimes it felt like you were playing a jump and run.
@@cehaem2 Funny enough, when I was playing this back in the day, I felt like I was playing a modern version of the ZX Spectrum hit, "Knight Lore". 😄 Yes I remember the plot holes too and was disappointed to find I was getting no vision in the catacombs. Despite sleeping time and time again.
at lower right of waterfall cave the red vial at and upside down vision get to stellos like that ask for healing!? 10:10 You dont have to steal dagger because at entrance to slayer quest per first book theres a dagger see 11:10
*Instant subscribe.* This is super warm and homely, and I love the personal experiences with the game blended into the overall story, like a SsethTzeentach video, but maximum cozy.
This isn't the guy who made the vid, that guy's gone doo lally and makes bizarre videos no one wants to see. This guy just preserved the nutcases' previous work.
My college roommate and I played this when it came out and finished it - pre jump nerf and all! It was very jarring going from Serpent Isle to this game, with no companions, etc. Frankly, this game was not bad, it just wasn't really an Ultima game. It didn't FEEL like an Ultima game. It could have been a great spin off series where you visit worlds conquered by the Guardian in order to fix his mess and recruit assistance to help defeat him.
I also liked this game overall quite a lot. And I tend to agree with both the general criticism and praise people have leveled towards it. Still haven't seen an RPG I've liked more than Ultima 7, though.
I finished this game back in the day, it was the first Ultima game I ever finished. Prior to that I played The Black Gate and just didn't 'get it' (I was a high school kid). This game made a lot of sense to me but overall the bugs were annoying back then. Honestly I liked the action-adventure elements MORE than the role playing elements. I had played RPGs from the C64 days and beyond and none of them really made sense as a 10 year old kid. I went back to play remasters and remakes the past few years (Bards Tale, Wasteland) but to me the whole party system and all that was just too much to dedicate for game play as an adult even with modern interfaces. I've watched a ton of Ultima I-IX videos and I don't really see myself actually sitting and playing any of them but Pagan, which for many was the most hated game of the series, but for me was my absolute favorite. One of my all time favorite games was Hack/Rogue and I think that to me Pagan was the "graphical roguelike" I had always wanted to find. Diablo would be the next game that really caught my attention, despite playing games like Might & Magic, and others that I just couldn't enjoy because it wasn't "Pagan".
i played these back in the day but right now that top down/isometric view is dizzying. EDIt- OK that was only at the beginning. It seemed better when you were playing 8.
What a great tribute to Ultima VIII. I think this is one of the few times in my life I've agreed 100% to someone talking about games. I remember when I first found the magical mace weapon hidden in the tomb. It was indeed satisfying. It's not like an RPG action where magic weapons are actually common and 99% of them become loot. If I were to complain about Ultima VIII, it would definitely be the unfinished state. I remember electing an empty house as "my house" and dumping everything that I though it would be useful later. Then, after moving between a few different areas and coming back to the house, it had been reset to its original state, wiping out all my items. :) It's still better than lots of games released in the past three decades, though! Anyway, great video. I would've added +10 thumbs up if possible.
My favourite game from my childhood. Actually.....joint first. Ultima 7: The Black Gate is the greatest group play RPG in human history. This was my fave solo RPG. Honourable mentions: Baldurs Gate 2 (Irenicus is the greatest antagonist ever.) Planescape Torment Eye of The Beholder 2 Dungeon Master Ultima Underworld 1&2 Wizardry 6/7/8 Neverwinter Nights Icewind Dale Daggerfall/Borrowing. 43 now. How time flies.
ultima 7 was my first, and it was the most enjoyable and immersive game id ever played. This was in the early 90s. Then I tried U8 thinking it would be an improvement in every way. It wasn't.
