Tag Archives: ultima VII

Ultima VII Odyssey: Post-Mortem.

In both senses of the word. After Cate’s timely death on the road I feel rather disconnected from Ultima VII. My initial wonder at the astonishing amount of detail present in the game has rapidly given way to an encroaching sense of ennui at the UI and the fact that that detail makes performing even simple tasks a chore.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: Stand And Deliver!

After consulting a walkthrough to find out just where the hell I should be looking for this storeroom, Cate eventually finds the entrance concealed behind a secret door activated by a hidden lever – a hidden lever in a game where pretty much everything can be interacted with in some way. I’ve heard that the designers of Ultima VII loved hiding secrets behind the curious isometric viewpoint they’ve chosen to portray the game, but I wasn’t expecting them to secrete plot-critical items (a spellbook) inside a hidden object puzzle. There is definitely something to be said for the last two decades of progress in this regard.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: The Revolution Starts Here.

Never have I been so disappointed on entering a building as I was when Cate went inside the National Branch. Rather than a bank filled with all sorts of stealable valuables, it turns out instead to be Scientology Central where the head of the Fellowship, Batlin, lives.

Talking to him is predictably boring, but Cate does get one useful bit of information: Elizabeth and Abraham, two cultists – can I call them cultists yet? – who deal with the organisation’s money and who were up to entirely unsuspicious activities in Trinsic the night before the murder, have passed through Britain en route to somewhere else called Minoc. Next stop Minoc then, I guess.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: Giddyup, Dobbin!

After being harangued by the Voice of God for taking the wrong exit out of Trinsic, I get Cate’s map of Britannia out to try and find out where she should be going. The map isn’t immediately helpful but, operating on the assumptions that the big built up area is Britain, that it’s reachable without having to get on a boat, and that Trinsic doesn’t appear to be in the middle of the desert, I conclude that she is currently somewhere to the south of Britain and that she should start heading northwards. This is a skill called orienteering long thought lost in this age of dynamic map markers and fast travel.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: Whodunnit?

For a game set in a pastoral medieval fantasy idyll Ultima VII sure doesn’t pull any punches. Cate the Avatar travels to Britannia from our world (long story, best not to think about how stupid it is) and immediately upon popping out of the dimensional portal is accosted by some guy called Iolo, who apparently knows her of old. Iolo is talking to a cringing, cap-wringing peasant about a gruesome murder that has taken place in the stables. Ha, “gruesome”. This is a 1992 game and everything is so clean and pleasant! What could possibly qualify as gruesome in a place like thi-

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Ultima VII Odyssey: The Wall.

This is the beginning of (hopefully) a series of posts that detail my experiences with an RPG I have often heard praised but never played: Ultima VII.

One of the hazards of playing older games is that you tend to run into paleolithic design elements that have, for better or worse, disappeared as games have become increasingly streamlined and user-friendly. To our modern gamer sensibilities, coddled as they are by elaborate in-game tutorials that hold our hands as they teach us to play the game — often infuriatingly integrated into the first half-hour of the campaign so that we are unable to avoid them — these design elements can often seem bizarre and unreasonable. We are no longer expected to Read The Manual; instead, a game should set the barrier to entry as low as it can in order to include as many people as possible. And if that results in the loss of some nuance and complexity from the overall design of the game, then so be it.

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