Review on Ultima 7: The Black Gate
The Ultima Series has been one of the most famous Role-Playing Game series of all time. Even today, the MMORPG spin-off of the RPG, Ultima Online, is still going strong, competing with highly fancy graphics of current MMORPG. The Ultima series actually started its decline from its Ultima VIII: The Pagan which was a disappointment compared to its earlier Ultima VII game which was well received.
Ultima VII: The Black Gate was highly popular and a sequel was made using the same game engine called Ultima VII: The Serpent Isle. For both Ultima VII game, add-on pack was developed, Forge of Virtue for the The Black Gate and Silver Seed for the Serpent Isle.
Game Requirement:
386, Intel486 or better computer with a mouse
More than 2 Mb ram
25 Mb of harddisk space
DOS operating system
Introduction
The story starts with you being the Avatar that is drawn to a red Moongate that appeared in your own backyard and you find that you are back in Britannian town of Trinsic. The first thing you see as soon as you stepped out of the Moongate is your old friend Iolo talking to Mayor Finnagan about a murder in a stable and the story proceeds on, leading onwards to a plot to destroy the whole world. You will need to discover the truth behind the murder and save Britannia once again from your old enemies. Of course you won’t be alone in your fight against evil, all your old companions from the previous series will be there to help you out when you find them and ask them for their help. It really tickles you when you find facts in the game that correlates to earlier series that you have played. The rich history and lifestyle of the world is well-formed and thought out as the game builds upon the content of earlier games with each game giving the world more life and more refinement. There is even a special runic form of writing in the world of Britannia
Gameplay
You control the character Avatar with mainly mouse thou all commands are also possible to be performed from the keyboard. You just have to remember that the left button is associated with the hand and the right mouse button with the legs. You left click to look at things, double left click to use/attack/talk depending on the context of the things being clicked on. To move things just left click and drag. As for the right click, you would move 1 step in the direction the mouse pointer is. To find a path to the location, you just double right click on the area. If you want to continuously move in a direction, just right click and hold in the direction u want to move. As game control goes, it is very simple and easy to remember so there isn’t much of a learning curve involved in playing the game. You can just jump straight in and start playing and learn the game through the gameplay itself.
As for combat wise, it is more complicated because you are now dealing with a party of people and not just a single player. You have 2 options: leave it to the computer to control those NPC companions or to manually control them. Personally I usually leave it to the computer after setting some presets to the behaviour of the NPCs.
And what
is an RPG without character development? In this game, the Avatar has 3 main
attributes: Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity. There are also 4 other
secondary attributes which are Magic, Combat, Hits and Mana. Base magic skill
is derived from Intelligence and Combat which determines how likely the
character is to hit with normal weapons in combat is associated with dexterity.
Maximum mana is determined by Magic and Hits is determined by Strength, when
Hits is reduced to zero, the character falls unconscious. Experience is gain by
doing quest or killing monsters and when a required amount of experience point
is earned, a character’s level increases. Training points are accrued with
experience and to increase strength, dexterity, intelligence, magic or combat,
you would need to find a trainer with the expertise to train you in that area.
In this way, it is way more immersive than to just click and increase the
attributes like current RPG games do.
Ultima VII is a game that is more concerned with immersion in the world the game is placed in than in those various new RPGs which only seems to place much importance in levelling even to the stage where people invented a new term to describe the boring processing of levelling which is “Grind”.
The game designer placed much thought into the game, making the world alive. Almost every object in the game can be moved or acted upon. You never know what use they may actually end up with. For example you can actually find a well and use a bucket on it and draw up a bucket of water and actually drinks the water, or you can also use the water to mix with flour to make dough which can then be placed in a fireplace to make bread that can be eaten to reduce hunger or sold for money. I have actually spend many enjoyable hours doing nothing more than just baking bread, watching the bread turn brown in the oven is so much fun that I forgot to proceed with the story and end up making lots of money from sales of bread. The attention to detail is what really makes the game stand out.
The
inventory system is also quite unique in that it differs from the slots like
inventory of the newer RPGs like Diablo or Neverwinter Nights. Instead, it uses
a bag like system, where you open a bag pack and can look inside it and all the
items are as you put in. It can be quite messy but it gives a quaint touch of
realism to a game where you actually have to rumble around in the bag to find
the thing you want.
This game also has quite an amount of “Easter eggs”. In case you are wondering what are “Easter eggs”, they are funny or cute stuff that are totally unrelated to the story but added just for the fun of it by the programmers. One that I have discovered is that you can actually kill Lord British in the game by waiting for him to walk under a plaque at a certain time of the day and double clicking the plaque which falls and kills him making the game unable to be completed but you would discover that he is in fact having an affair with a maid in the castle from a letter on his dead body, so make sure you save the game before trying that.
Graphics and Sound
This game belongs to the DOS era where most games are run from the DOS prompt and so you can’t really compare the graphics than to the graphics available from recent games. In those times, the best display resolution is only VGA, meaning you can only have 320 by 240 with 256 colours. However if you compare it to the games of those times, it is considered to be among the better ones, incorporating both a weather system and a night/day cycle that is highly uncommon in those days.
The game engine implementation also features a revolutionary 32-bit memory manager that runs on a 16-bit system. The game engine uses an isometric view to feature the world which is very suitable for the party system involved as it enable the player to better manage all the characters in the game.
The game is also able play music from sound blaster and the music changes from peaceful to a more fast pace once when you are in danger or under attack. Of course it can’t compare to the surround sound system offered by current games, however it does add to the atmosphere of the game.
Conclusion
If you are ever in need of the good old feeling of exploration and trial and error of the old style RPG where secrets and hidden lore are to be found everywhere, Ultima VII would be a good game to play. Currently to play the game on a current windows system, you would need either a dos emulator or a remake of the engine provided you still have the original data files.
For a remake of the engine:
or a DOS emulator