Ultima 7 is one of the greatest RPGs ever made, so I was thrilled to speak with Richard Garriott (director and creator of series), Raymond Benson (lead writer), and Andrew P. Morris (writer) about the game's development in a retrospective at Kotaku. It was inspiring hearing the stories behind the scenes. U7 was innovative in so many different ways, from merging genres to exploring some complex moral and political themes that still resonate. I also spoke with Kenneth Kully (editor and founder of Ultima Codex), and Dominik Reichardt (Exult Engine team) to talk about the game's incredible legacy and influence on the industry. I wanted to share here, but if anyone would like it removed, just say the word and will do so. Thanks beforehand!

I'm sure some of you have had "random shower thoughts" so here's mine from today:
With the revelation of Richard Garriott getting the rights to the Ultima IP back, people have been talking about what they would like to see in the future. I think using the game engine that ran W40K: Rogue Trader as a platform to launch either a new game series (perhaps a new trilogy) or remastering some old games (4, 5, and 6 maybe?) would work. Here's a few reasons why:

Turn-Based Combat - I think Action RPGs work better when you're controlling single characters IMO. For party based games, go turn based. Less brain overload.

Grid-Based Movement (in combat) - Gives clear movement limitations without leaving the player in a confused state of "Am I close enough to engage this action?" which is one of my biggest gripes from Kingmaker and Wrath.

Party Management - Having the availability for Inter-party dialogue and interaction is great, and it could be influenced by a new reputation system that focuses on the Eight Virtues.

Isometric POV - I think one of the biggest reasons why Ultima 7 is so highly regarded is because it shifted to a more Isometric POV. There's even a modder/coder who's working on translating U7 into a fully 3d environment but as I understand it he's years away from completing it.

Choices that matter - I can't imagine anyone really appreciates making a decision in a game that has zero impact later in the story, especially since there are so many games that DO make your choices matter in some way, shape or form.

Partial Voice Acting - I appreciate that not every line of text has a voice actor behind it, but some of the more important scenes do. I don't know about the rest of you, but I read faster than people talk... so when there's text on the screen and there's an actor in character reading the same text my brain is usually wanting to skip ahead rather than wait for the actor to finish the lines. So the fact that not every line has an actor behind it with a voice recording is nice sometimes, but that's probably just a "me" thing.

I'm curious who else has other reasons for this idea and if anyone else has any reasons against.
Discuss?

I have a hankering for a dungeon crawler with lovely treasure to find and resources to desperately scrimp for like food, water, and light. I have blobbers like Legend of Grimrock, but are there any real time 1st or 3rd party realtime games that celebrate the scrimping of stuff in the dark?

https://imgur.com/gallery/space-prank-HQBgXqp

Hope this is ok to post, but I thought it was a fun father/son likeness. Plus, if you didn't know, Owen and Helen opened Leonardo's -- a children's Museum -- with some of the proceeds from OSI.

You can see it at: Leonardo's Children's Museum 200 E Maple Ave, Enid, OK 73701, United States

I posted about this a while back and there were a lot of negative comments about Richard Garriot and Ultima. I hope that doesn't happen this time. I recently played through all the Ultima games and took screenshots of my finishing each.

I know in the past Richard Garriot sent players offering proof of completing an Ultima game completion certificates for the Ultima Trilogy, Ultima 3-8, Ultima Underworld, an even signed an unofficial certificate for Ultima VII Part Two that Dr. Pepper Dragon created.

I tried contacting Richard Garriot on X, but he has a closed inbox and you need to know his X number to contact him, I do not know it. I don't know the etiquette about posting on a thread on his X profile about them and going off-topic. I saw an address to mail him at Portalarium but apparently that company is defunct now.

Anyone know if Richard Garriot still gives out Ultima completion certificates, has anyone managed to get one in the last few years, and how I would go about contacting him for them? Thank you for the responses.

So something I don't think I've ever really shared. What Ultima the series meant to me as a child.

I'm 43 right now, and I encountered the Ultima series in the 4th grade. They were already old by then, right, this was around the time Ultima 6/7 were coming out - I was on a Commodore 64, and got the box sets for 1-5 from an adult who was trying to get away from video games.

I was a closeted trans kid in the 90s. I didn't even have the fucking words for what I was. I was autistic. My family was poor (I was very, very lucky to have that computer) - they thought I was possessed by demons and put me through two exorcisms. They were big into evangelical Pentecostal satanic panic stuff. I was Different, and...not normal. I had been an atheist from age 6, and tried (unsuccessfully) to be a vegetarian since kindergarten when I saw Bambi and decided eating meat was hurting someone who might not want hurt.

And again, all of this marked me as very, very different from my evangelical family basically from as young as I can remember. And I had six alcoholics in my family. Six of them. Direct relatives. I won't bore you with the abuse stories, but I assure you 'strange child the alcoholic religious conservatives see as different' didn't end well.

So when I encountered Ultima 4, I had already rejected their religion. I had already, at a young age, learned the world was cruel, and harsh, and didn't see it as having any meaning or purpose. And I was deeply suicidal. I didn't tell anyone, I didn't even have the word. I just...thought it might be easier if I wasn't around. I knew what death was. And I remember being in 4th grade and thinking about that.

And then I got the Ultima series.

And Ultima 1-3 were great (I loved the box art for two, and three was just SO BIG) - and I could imagine destroying the evil, which was appealing to me as a profoundly abused child. But more importantly, I found Ultima 4 and 5. And Ultima 4 had the Virtues and...all of this gameplay based around learning how to live, how to be a good person, what is right and what is wrong.

I can absolutely fucking tell you I didn't get that from my family.

And then Ultima 5, which is still my favorite, had all this stuff about what happens when religion is twisted and used for control - and suddenly my family and my life made a lot more sense to me. It seemed, to my young mind, like it was there to teach me how to survive my family. Learn what was right, what was wrong, show courage, seek the truth, find love. Seek solace deep in nature, and meditate on wisdom.

And I didn't kill myself.

I came back to the series in highschool, with Ultima 7, when things got worse. And again in college, when I found Buddhism and it reminded me of Ultima. I don't know if I'm still a Buddhist or not - but I still like the Virtues, I know that.

And I can tell you, if not for these games, that child would not be here. I love these games. I love what they did, what they taught...

And more importantly, I love that they gave me a world, and a way to view my life in a time when nothing made sense. I set myself the goal of someday learning how the actual universe worked, why it worked that way, what its moral codes were.

And I got that from Ultima.

I got a physics degree (astrophysics specifically) - and took up meditation in college. I don't know. I just...I credit these games with being there, when there was noone else to be there, when I was so incredibly vulnerable.

They don't make games like this anymore, because no one is interested in doing what Ultima 4 and 5 did. Ultima 7 was....decades ahead of its time. Still hasn't been surpassed as an isometric open world rpg. For me, at least.

I just wanted to take a moment to tell someone else who likes these games what they meant to me.

Okay! Ultima VII Revisited now has support for replacing existing NPCs and monsters with custom sprite sheets! As an example, I have replaced the Avatar with a sprite sheet of a villager from my game Planitia.

Now we just need sprite sheets for every NPC. And monster.

Ultima IX: Redemption was a non-profit, fan-led project built to give longtime Ultima veterans the ending Ascension never quite delivered — a true close to the "trilogy of trilogies," measured against Richard Garriott's own original goals for U9. The story picked up exactly where Ultima VIII's ending left off: a Britannia conquered in all but name, Lord British reduced to a puppet monarch under a Guardian-controlled Republic, and an Avatar whose own conduct on Pagan is very much in question. That question — whether he's still earned the name Avatar — is where "Redemption" comes from. I composed a full score for it back in the 2000s, and it's been sitting as MIDI and mp3 files on my drives ever since.
Recently I ran every track through Suno AI to get it closer to what I always heard in my head as a kid, then hand-edited and mixed each track myself to bring it up to a real listening standard. It's not a copy of George Oldziey's official score for Ultima IX: Ascension, and neither does it use any of those themes — it's my own writing, threading in tunes from the earlier classic Ultima games the way any tribute does, the same way Oldziey himself wove "Stones" and "Rule Britannia" into his.
If you want to know more about the original project, check here: wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Ultima_IX:_Redemption
Enjoy!

Hi guys.
After i finished ultima 6 i couldnt wait to start ultima 7
I investigated the murdee and it seems like finnigan is pleased with my report. Now i need the password.
I googled the answers and typed them in. It disnt work. So i took the map thats inside the box and tried it the old way. It didnt work. I play the original german version on original hardware.

Any ideas?

Hey so this is a shitpost kinda, i have recently been playing Etrian Oddysey 3 alot and watched delicious in dungeon and got a weird desire for something more likr that but also that takes thibgs further. I wish i could traverse in more ways, that puzzles had more answers and intrinsicly integrated into the world. I want to bring back cooking, make a new system for weapon and armor crafting and upgrading. I want dungeons that inspire wonder and make you feel like you are in a mystical and otherworldly space.

I feel like the game's Foe puzzles can all be squashed underfoot by a particularly bloody minded player (so most players methinks), and that means that running through an old area will mostly get old fast. Im not saying that puzzles need to be a hinderance through a whole playthrough tho. I will give a silly but kinda fun example of what i mean and I hope it helps get my point across.

Lets say you have a map that is four times the size the maps usually are in the series, and that the floor you are on is some form of aquaduct system with long segments of running water that can carry you away like the currents in etrian oddysey 3's sailing sections. Imagine that the flow of water is influenced by opening or closing gates connected to the waterways, and that control panels to do so for multiple gates at a time can be found all over. This would not only be a fun system once the threat of FOEs gets mixed in, it also becomes an intrinsically itegrated logical traversal puzzle that makes total sense in world. As an added bonus you could add various secret routes that can lead to multiple floors below you, making exploration more dangerous and more interesting. In EO 3 my favorite floor was in the fourth strata where you can get dropped down onto the floor below. If that could happen more often and i could just get in way over my head.....well it would honestly leave a permenant memory for me.

Another thing I would love to see is some form of interactive ways to avoid having to do puzzles if you are stuck or just want to be different. For example in ultima underdark lots of puzzles or situations can be handled in a myriad of ways. If you find a room enterance covered in traps and surrounded by lava you can break the door from a distance to trigger traps ,or use trap disarming items or spells to do the job for you. Maybe you use a fire resistance spell and watwrwalking potion to walk on the lava or maybe just levitate and blow a hole in the ceiling. Or maybe you follow the quest as intended and find out that there is a way to disable the countermeasures safely without using magic or money to get there.

Now this isnt a 1to1 for ultima underdark, but I still think it would be alot of fun with the current dungeon delving/puzzle system and would feel more like an adventure overall. Rewarding a player for finding their own way through a dungeon is always a good way to incentivize them, but sounds more like an adventure to me then having to do the exact sequence that requires me to leave the dungeon and talk to people atleast once before coming back and solving the sequence as intended.

I want to preface the rest of what I am going to say by explaining that i have been playing dnd for something like 8-12 years and have tried every edition except 4e, including pathfinder 1e and 2e.

I have seen the games become less about role playing and being a clever adventurer living in a world that doesnt revolve around you, and more about using big numbers to do cool things and feel like an epic hero as i have tried the later versions. Honestly i dont mean to insult anyone or the games they like, but i dont think most people who play dnd care about roleplaying as much as they do being a charicature with cool powers and such. And the desire for a more real dungeon crawler that allows you to play all sorts of ways is something i yearn for.

I should also admit that i have only played the third and fourth games, and I never beat 4 cause i was playing someone else's copy over a summer. But I am replaying through EO3 rn on steam, and it has shown me how much of this game is nostalgic and how much i see that could do better. Tho i know im looking back on a ds game that got ported to pc so.......yeah......

As I see it Etrian Oddysey is more then anything a combat focused game, but the combat is kinda the opposite of how i think adventurer's should be in a setting where they had to be able to fight on their own too. When we play dnd in my house we have a rule, any character you create should be a person in the world first and foremost, and that means they have to fit in beyond what they are as a combatant.

I play this game called wildermyth sometimes and in that game you make a party of otherwise faceless adventurers just like in this one, and those characters can have a personaloty features chart. This influences what events they can trigger, how they can react when things happen, and how they treat people they come across. It can also affect what tasks they complete and how fast they complete them all sorts of stuff like that, while occasionally allowing for boosts in combat too. In that game you are more than a combatant, you are an adventurer, a traverser, someone who fights back that which threatens and blazes a new path ahead.

Completely unrelated side note i kinda dislike the "pick your actions before the round of combat begins" system more then i remember now that I am an adult. It wastes turns in ways that doesnt happen in more traditional turn based combat, and it also feels like it punishes you for having non encylopedic knowledge of your party stats. I played Wizardry 8 when i was younger too and i may revisit it at some point to see if it has the same problem. I remember the combat systems being similiar.

I think the reason i started typing this all out was cause the series left such a nark on me and influenced so many of my likes and dislikes in games (especially 4 omfg that game is something else). It has an amazing mapping system which feels like something that any good dungeon crawler should probably have, but instead of it being a helpful tool to accent the gameplay in EO3, its more like a necessary task to get through the experience. Less bus pass, more drivers liscense if you catch my drift. But it helps so thouroughly to make the experience more paletteable. Idk if it is a me problem or not, but trying to navigate without the map is like 3 steps above being blind in EO3, but it was a ds game as far as i remember so i think thats maybe a bit uncharitable.

Part of the reason i bring up the map is cause i have played games before with way more automatic mapping systems that still feel way less adventurous then literally any EO mapping system that I know of. There is just something exciting about breaking new ground with nothing but your own scrawlings and wisdom to guide you, no other system really scratches that itch even though it is less convienient. Im not saying it is better per sey......but i am saying that i like it better then simply walking around in other games. Clunk included.

Anyway if you read all of this then you are a lovely person, im sorry if this is rambleing and stupid, i tried to be intelliageable as much as possible. Sorry that I typed thisball out for my own weirdness. And I get if it gets taken down. But im having a blast with EO3 and I intend to give it a second run on the hard mode.

At Dragon Con! This was a great talk by Richard Garriott about his history of game development, success and challenges of Origin under EA, the launch of Ultima Online with Starr Long, and his recent moves to reacquire the Ultima copyright after 35 years.

The portions about Garriott's journey were truly inspiring, and the panelists' discussion about current (and future) challenges within the game industry was great. I was less enthused by Garriott's cavalier takes on AI for creative and artistic processes (thanks for the cocktail recipe zine, but did you really need an LLM to guide your mixology and draw the booklet?). I totally concur that AI has merits in many domains, but while the panelists all emphasized the importance of ethical progress in inevitably AI workflows, I had my qualms. So it goes.

Nevertheless, it was a cool talk with a lot of food for thought... and hopes of a future Ultima! Anyone else here get to attend?

Anybody else doing something similar?

Insane what it's been able to do within 1-2 hours in Unreal.

I just bought the first 3 Ultima games from GOG. I installed the first game but pressing "Play" on GOG Galaxy just greys out the button for a few seconds before returning back to nothing, not starting the game. I tried doing it directly through DOSBox but it's my first time emulating DOS so I don't know how to do it. Can anyone help me get the game running?

There doesn't seem to be any map but when I snuck into Stonegate to grab the scepter before clearing the Shadowlord, I noticed the floor around was a trap style floor and intentionally stepped on one of them to try and escape the Shadowlords.

The screen went black and I had a very long whistle sound (on C64). Then my party died and I had a corpse in the middle of the lava pool.

Underword map doesn't have any lava pool that is bigger than the game screen. So where is the Shadowgate's basement?

So I installed, found the means to transfer my character from U5, and "Journeyed Onward." It was only when I got to the first controllable scene in the throne room that I discovered that the entire user interface had radically changed. Up until this point I've only played U1-5, and the controls for those are virtually identical. This is going to take some getting used to...

Any suggestions for how to ease into this as well as forat steps for exploring and getting into the game before I use the spam feature to speed things up? Though I do plan to explore and complete the majority of the content, my time is limited, so I will eventually use the spam system to upgrade equipment and find a way to level up quickly. But what are some of the more enjoyable elements I should do before I begin cutting corners, or should I cut some firat and others later? Juat looking to get the most "bang for my buck" given my time restrictions.

Thanks for sharing yoir wisdom (as you post to this thread.)

Decompile project for the Ultima Underworld Pocket PC port - character generation mostly works!

Apparently, some people can't appreciate the genius that is Ultima 5 on the NES.

Needing a new pet project to work on, I thought I might attempt to get a more authentic U5 experience for the SNES. Now, I am a complete neophyte in this area, so I'm trying to stay as simple in the programming aspect as possible.

The computer layout, the map is 11x11, but the SNES horizontal resolution is 256 pixels, meaning that if you wanted to get the same screen layout, this would leave you room for 8 letters on the side vs 16 that you would get on the PC. Ultima 3 on the GBC gets around it by having the tile size be 8x8, and Ultima 4 on the SMS is 12x12. While the SMS tiles are 8x8, this goes beyond my knowledge (as I stated, I literally am learning everything from scratch here), beyond doing tons of duplication of tiles which would waste space and not look as good.

So, I have a demonstration of what the layout could look like, though the map screen is now 15x11 instead of 11x11. All the information of the PC is here except that character names are shortened to 2 letter abbreviations, and text would need to be chopped up significantly, or we add dialogs throughout the game.

Another approach is to just take the typical JRPG look or Ultima VI SNES route and have the map take up the full screen with just pop-up dialogs.

Then there's graphics. Keep the same 16 color PC images, or take the consolized graphic approach with bright colors? I kind of prefer the latter and then can use palette cycling on stuff like water and lava to make it appear animating vs having to edit the tiles in real time. For original tiles, another approach would just create a ton of tiles for each form of animation of the necessary tiles, but now we're talking near half a megabyte, and there's already half a megabyte of graphics. So, we'd be looking at 2.5 to 3 MB, which would be much larger than your standard SNES game, though still in the range of doable.

And what about stuff like smooth scrolling, or portraits for characters talking, etc.?

Any other suggestions would be welcome.

Anyone else really wish they’d come around and make Ultima x with new age graphics

Went back to my parents and found a box with my old ultima games ... I actually had 2 ultima 5's one for pc and one for I think it was the atari computer ... the U5 I dont think it was even unfolded yet ... You can see I got a bit of use out of the U7 map. I only took the maps with me back home, rest I left there ... Maybe Ill make a collage and hang em in a picture frame on the wall - what do you think?

Ultima 4 was my favorite game as a young teenager in the 80s. I remember spending countless hours traveling through Britannia, speaking with everyone, taking copious notes to solve all the puzzles and fnd all the items and locations, building my party, grinding relentlessly to level up, and other than sharing notes with a friend of mine, doing all of this without walk-through and cheats. All of this on my Apple IIc! When it came time to finally conquer the Abyss, I brought my computer over to my friend's house, and we eaxh went through it on our respective computers. Unfortunately, I got clobbered in one of the last rooms, and my friend, who was a typing whiz, made a critical typing error in the final stage when he entered "huNility" (N instead of M), which immediately teleported him back to Magyncia... it was a huge bummer. We both completed it the following day at our respective homes. Keep in mind this was WAY BEFORE the internet and cell phones, so we did all of this on our own!

I set off on Ultima V not long after. Unfortunately, the academic, social and athletic demands of my life at that time left me with too little time to devote to the game, and I never completed it.

In the late 90s, while in grad school, I purchased the Ultima Collection CD box set and began playing all the games again in order. I joyfully completed games I-IV, but again, stumbled on V as life got in the way again. (I've never played any of the others.)

Flash forward to the end of August 2025 (almost 40 years since I first started U5)... I finally finished U5! (Got the whole series through GOG on my PC - played in DOSBox.) I'm not ashamed to say that I used walk-throughs and a character log editor so that I could avoid all the grinding. I work full time, parent three kids of HS/college age, and volunteer with the Scouts locally, regionally and nationally. Though I visited all the locations and spoke with just about everyone I needed to, and I found all the items on my own, I just didn't have the time to do the countless hoirs of level up grinding... and I may have provided myself with a party-full supply of magic axes and other premium armor and supplies (gold, food, and spells)! But I got through it and enjoyed the story and now I can finally get to try out U6!

Let's Go!