The Old School PC RPG Megathread: Gaming with rose-colored goggles

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Pierzak: Oct 30, 2010

fritz posted:

How big is Critical Role compared to Adventure Zone? I only know the latter.

Apparently real big in terms of how many new people it drew to D&D.

# ? Jan 8, 2021 19:33

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# ? Jun 11, 2024 21:37

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

I have never heard of Adventure Zone whereas I wish I had never heard of Critical Role, so I suspect that is indicative of their comparative popularity.

# ? Jan 8, 2021 21:54

Genpei Turtle: Jul 20, 2007

JustJeff88 posted:

I am curious about this game, Genpei, as it looks remarkable given its age. Are you playing it on original hardware or emulation, and is it available in other languages besides Japanese?

Neither actually. It's part of a Project EGG collection of PC-9801 games ported to Windows (really just a skinned emulator though). I don't think it's available any more, especially since Project EGG turned themselves into a subscription service. And I don't know if it's in any other language other than Japanese--I doubt it.

# ? Jan 8, 2021 23:21

JustJeff88: Jan 15, 2008; I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE

THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

of SA-Mart forever

Genpei Turtle posted:

Neither actually. It's part of a Project EGG collection of PC-9801 games ported to Windows (really just a skinned emulator though). I don't think it's available any more, especially since Project EGG turned themselves into a subscription service. And I don't know if it's in any other language other than Japanese--I doubt it.

Fair enough - thanks.

# ? Jan 8, 2021 23:29

Deptfordx: Dec 23, 2013

Pierzak posted:

Apparently real big in terms of how many new people it drew to D&D.

A friend of mine's son stood no chance because he grew up surrounded by roleplaying stuff and his dads nerd friends, but all of his friends in his peer group wanted to try it* because of Critical Role.

*Naturally he had to DM, welcome to the life kid.

# ? Jan 9, 2021 22:17

Boldor: Sep 4, 2004; King of the Yeeks

More adventures in assembly deep-diving -- the last thing in Phantasie I haven't yet considered is most things dungeon-specific.

This is what determines what monster is fought when a random encounter occurs in a dungeon. I've added comments to make this more approachable.

The IBM version always has you fight lower-level monsters in a random dungeon encounter. IBM Phantasie III and Apple ][ Phantasie I/II/II do not work this way. Was this deliberate, or a bug? (It's much easier than I expected to figure out which changes were deliberate, and which were accidental.)

code:

// Dungeon random encounters never begin with surprise -- set variables for that
// Come to think of it, this is odd: non-random encounters can
// The outdoors works backwards: random encounters can be surprises, non-random encounters should never be
// Curious game design, but I don't plan to "fix" that
765a c7 06 9e        MOV        word ptr [0x649e],0x1
     64 01 00
7660 c7 06 a0        MOV        word ptr [0x64a0],0x1
     64 01 00
// Now determine which monster appears randomly; first, pick a random integer from 0 to 2
// This function picks a random integer from 0 to 99
7666 e8 ce 42        CALL       FUN_b937
// ... then divide by 33.  That has a 1% chance of yielding 3.  SSI has off-by-one errors like this all the time.  Oops.
7669 b9 21 00        MOV        CX,0x21
766c 99              CWD
766d f7 f9           IDIV       CX
// param_1 is the dungeon opcode (which is 8-17, and determines which group of 3 monsters can be randomly fought)
766f 03 46 04        ADD        AX,word ptr [BP + param_1]
// Directly add monster tier (0-5), each of which contains 12 monsters
// There is no way this is right; everywhere else, this is multplied by 12, both on Apple ][ and IBM
7672 03 06 f0 64     ADD        AX,word ptr [0x64f0]
// Subtract 7 (it's faster to do this on the 16-bit IBM PC by adding 65529, if you don't care about DX)
7676 05 f9 ff        ADD        AX,0xfff9
// Save result at global variable for "monster ID to fight in combat, plus 1"
// The total will always be between 1 and 18, so random combats are always with low-level monsters
// 1-18 only covers tier 0 and half of tier 1
7679 a3 e6 64        MOV        [0x64e6],AX
// The following is special-casing that doesn't exist on Apple ][
// Is the party in dungeon #6 (the castle of JR Trolkin)?
767c a1 ec 64        MOV        AX,[0x64ec]
767f 3d 06 00        CMP        AX,0x6
7682 75 0e           JNZ        LAB_7692
// If so, a random encounter is with a TROLKIN (#33) 49% of the time
// Yes, 49%, not 50%.  SSI has off-by-one errors like this all the time.  Oops.
7684 e8 b0 42        CALL       FUN_b937
7687 3d 32 00        CMP        AX,0x32
768a 7e 06           JLE        LAB_7692
768c c7 06 e6        MOV        word ptr [0x64e6],0x22
     64 22 00
// Return 11 from function (that means "look at 0x64e6; if 0, do nothing; otherwise, subtract 1, then start combat with that monster")
7692 b8 0b 00        MOV        AX,0xb
7695 eb bf           JMP        LAB_7656

So confronting lots of low-level creatures in a dungeon is also clearly a bug. It's also going to have significant gameplay effects to fix, but I know that works fine on Apple ][.

Well, that can be fixed. It'll take 7 extra bytes to add the multiplication, but I can optimize the above for space. And I might as well fix the other two minor bugs while I'm at it. :v:

# ? Jan 10, 2021 01:13

inscrutable horse: May 20, 2010; Parsing sage, rotating time

By the way, Boldor, did you ever settle on how to roll for stats? I'm neither a mathemagician, nor do I have any experience with Phantasie, but if low stats are too much of a problem, couldn't you just go for a 2d6+6? Much higher floor, yet keeping the same ceiling (if 18 is supposed to be the ceiling.)

# ? Jan 10, 2021 12:58

Boldor: Sep 4, 2004; King of the Yeeks

inscrutable horse posted:

By the way, Boldor, did you ever settle on how to roll for stats? I'm neither a mathemagician, nor do I have any experience with Phantasie, but if low stats are too much of a problem, couldn't you just go for a 2d6+6? Much higher floor, yet keeping the same ceiling (if 18 is supposed to be the ceiling.)

I haven't decided. I want to do the Apple ][ method, but it requires floating-point arithmetic (exponentiation to 0.6), which is doable but tough working with closed-source 1980s code.

It's easy to do an integral square root ("exponentiation" to 0.5). It might work out well to do 4d6 drop lowest with such less-loaded dice, I'll have to check the math on that.

I'm a little hesitant to make a hard floor using something like 2d6+6, if nothing else just so other people have a little chance to play the game with truly abysmal characters. :v:

These starting stats are before any modifiers for race and class get applied.

# ? Jan 10, 2021 20:04

Boldor: Sep 4, 2004; King of the Yeeks

Boldor posted:

I haven't decided. I want to do the Apple ][ method, but it requires floating-point arithmetic (exponentiation to 0.6), which is doable but tough working with closed-source 1980s code.

It's easy to do an integral square root ("exponentiation" to 0.5). It might work out well to do 4d6 drop lowest with such less-loaded dice, I'll have to check the math on that.

Except duh, 0.5 is more loaded, oops. :doh:

Actually, that's still probably best. It's simple, and achieves the aim of making it hard to roll both catastrophically-low and stupidly-high stats.

# ? Jan 10, 2021 22:03

RoboChrist 9000: Dec 14, 2006; Mater Dolorosa

So almost done with Arx Fatalis and I love it. Other than Thief and - obviously - Ultima Underworld, what are some similar games? I know Prey, but I prefer fantasy. I just find something so oddly comfy and nostalgic about being in a huge underground fantasy dungeon.

Also on that note, went ahead and got Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 on GOG. I seem to recall that there's like modern engine stuff and things you can use to make playing them less jank and crusty? Or am I just insane and thinking of soething else?

# ? Jan 10, 2021 22:45

chaosapiant: Oct 10, 2012; White Line Fever

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

So almost done with Arx Fatalis and I love it. Other than Thief and - obviously - Ultima Underworld, what are some similar games? I know Prey, but I prefer fantasy. I just find something so oddly comfy and nostalgic about being in a huge underground fantasy dungeon.

Also on that note, went ahead and got Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 on GOG. I seem to recall that there's like modern engine stuff and things you can use to make playing them less jank and crusty? Or am I just insane and thinking of soething else?

You might like the Might and Magic game that Arkane did. I can�t remember the name but it�s got great combat and usage of physics to be almost a sort of immersive sim type experience.

I�m not aware of any modern ports/upgrades for the Ultima Underworld game, but I�d sure love if that was true. I�d love to play those games one day, but the controls are bananas.

# ? Jan 10, 2021 23:54

RoboChrist 9000: Dec 14, 2006; Mater Dolorosa

chaosapiant posted:

You might like the Might and Magic game that Arkane did. I can�t remember the name but it�s got great combat and usage of physics to be almost a sort of immersive sim type experience.

I�m not aware of any modern ports/upgrades for the Ultima Underworld game, but I�d sure love if that was true. I�d love to play those games one day, but the controls are bananas.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Forgot about it, but yeah, played and loved it back when.
I thought there was like some Unity remake or something of UU. But like Arx Libertatis and Open X-Com and stuff it requried the original datafiles or something. I must have been dreaming.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:02

Boldor: Sep 4, 2004; King of the Yeeks

Okay, let me actually work out the statistics for rolling starting 3-18 stats.

I cannot write anything that would add any UI elements (like point value assignment, or roll-then-assign), as it'd actually be less work to just rewrite the entire game from scratch in a modern OS with that added.

I'm just going to do a Monte Carlo simulation on everything (100,000,000 rolls each), so the following isn't precise.

3d6 goes back decades, of course.
4d6 Drop Lowest also goes back a long way.
2d6 + 6 was proposed by inscrutable horse. It certainly works better than the current IBM implementation!
Apple ][ is how it actually works on Apple ][ Phantasie. It's 3d6, but each d6 is loaded by generating a random floating point number 0 <= x < 1, raising to the power of 0.6, adding 1, then casting to integer. (This is the kind of thing I wish CRPGs would do more of.) This is within reach, but it'll be rough ... so even though it's what I'd prefer to do, I don't think I'll go to that length of trouble.
IBM is how it actually works on IBM Phantasie. It's 1d18 + 2, capped at 18. Does this look dumb, or what?
IBM, proposed is similar to Apple ][, except I replace 0.6 with 0.5, and make a couple other tweaks to make it work without any floating-point operations.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:08

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

You could have probably gotten there a lot quicker if you had just calculated the standard deviation assuming that any combination of die faces has the same probability to occur and then inferred the rest to be a Gauss curve. It's always a Gauss curve.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:23

Hank Morgan: Jun 17, 2007; Light Along the Inverse Curve.

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Forgot about it, but yeah, played and loved it back when.
I thought there was like some Unity remake or something of UU. But like Arx Libertatis and Open X-Com and stuff it requried the original datafiles or something. I must have been dreaming.

There is. I made it myself. UW1 works okay but UW2 is patchy so I'd still recommend playing the originals in Dosbox from GOG. Just rebind the controls in the DOSBox keymapper to swap S and X, use the keyboard weapon swing commands and it plays just fine. There are mods for brightening the colour palette out there and apparently there is a mouse look mod as well that I've never tried.

Port if you are interested: https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldExporter/releases

Hank Morgan fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Jan 11, 2021

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:27

RoboChrist 9000: Dec 14, 2006; Mater Dolorosa

Hank Morgan posted:

There is. I made it myself. UW1 works okay but UW2 is patchy so I'd still recommend playing the originals in Dosbox from GOG. Just rebind the controls in the DOSBox keymapper to swap S and X, use the keyboard weapon swing commands and it plays just fine.

Port : https://github.com/hankmorgan/UnderworldExporter/releases

Thank you! For making that, and for helping reveal I'm not insane.
Well, not insane about this one thing.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:29

Thuryl: Mar 14, 2007; My postillion has been struck by lightning.

Boldor posted:

Okay, let me actually work out the statistics for rolling starting 3-18 stats.

Looking at that chart, 4d6 drop lowest actually looks like it ends up being closest to the Apple II numbers; the chance of very low rolls is slightly higher (well, a lot higher in relative terms, but still low in absolute terms), but the chance of medium and high rolls is about right.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:35

Boldor: Sep 4, 2004; King of the Yeeks

Cardiovorax posted:

You could have probably gotten there a lot quicker if you had just calculated the standard deviation assuming that any combination of die faces has the same probability to occur and then inferred the rest to be a Gauss curve. It's always a Gauss curve.

That'd probably actually be more work. Though yeah, that approach would be better if I wanted precise deduced numbers, rather than what a lot of mathematicians are trained to think of as inductive garbage. :v:

Thuryl posted:

Looking at that chart, 4d6 drop lowest actually looks like it ends up being closest to the Apple II numbers; the chance of very low rolls is slightly higher (well, a lot higher in relative terms, but still low in absolute terms), but the chance of medium and high rolls is about right.

Yeah, now that I am actually looking at this on the screen side-by-side, and hearing others' comments, you are probably right.

(which is why it's good to actually do the exercise and write it out for others ... rubber duck programming in action here :v:

)

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:45

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Boldor posted:

That'd probably actually be more work. Though yeah, that approach would be better if I wanted precise deduced numbers, rather than what a lot of mathematicians are trained to think of as inductive garbage. :v

I've maybe gotten a bit too used to thinking of 30 minutes of brute-forcing probability distributions in an Excel spreadsheet as a major timesaver over how long that kind of work would otherwise have taken me. :v:

But yeah, I haven't done any real programming in years and now that I'm thinking back to how something like this would've taken me all of five minutes to write up as a quick and dirty Perl script, that's probably way more work than it would actually be worth for you.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 00:59

inscrutable horse: May 20, 2010; Parsing sage, rotating time

Why on earth is the IBM solution 1d18+2, but capped at 18? Since a computer can roll dice of arbitrary faces, why not just go with 1d16+2, if the 3-18 spread is so important? They must have been on some primo drugs back then :psyduck:

BTW, I ran across this tool while looking for alternative rolling methods: http://rumkin.com/reference/dnd/diestats.php

# ? Jan 11, 2021 01:05

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

inscrutable horse posted:

Why on earth is the IBM solution 1d18+2, but capped at 18? Since a computer can roll dice of arbitrary faces, why not just go with 1d16+2, if the 3-18 spread is so important? They must have been on some primo drugs back then

A lot of early programming languages didn't really natively allow you generate a random number in an arbitrary range of values. You'd call for rand(x) and it would give you a random value between 0 and x, and then you'd have to make that work out to what you actually wanted it to be. 1d16+2 would also actually give you lower values more often overall. 1d18+2 capped to 18 has an extra 2 out 18 likehoods of giving you the highest legal value you can get for that roll, so you'd basically be three times as likely to roll an 18 on that as you'd otherwise be. Maybe they just wanted to give a little advantage to the player there.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 01:18

FuzzySlippers: Feb 6, 2009

That's the usual I think. Most recent (last couple decades) CRPGs give some kind of advantage to players on dice rolls, but I dunno about that far back.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 02:09

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Been playing some Arx Libertatis this evening because it kept getting mentioned and the engine issues are what kept me from ever really playing it even though I've owned the game on GOG for years. Man, I had completely forgotten how hilariously dumb the whole intro dungeon is. :allears:

"Thank you strange naked person for releasing me from this prison. Oh, you have lost your memory? Alright, I'll just call you... Noname McNotfromhere, yeah, that's pretty good. Like it? I knew you would. Everyone loves Foreign Words, makes you sound all sophisticated and poo poo."

I should've just killed that guy and asked the goblin for help instead.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 02:26

Cardiovorax: Jun 5, 2011; I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

quote is not edit

# ? Jan 11, 2021 02:27

Boldor: Sep 4, 2004; King of the Yeeks

inscrutable horse posted:

Why on earth is the IBM solution 1d18+2, but capped at 18? Since a computer can roll dice of arbitrary faces, why not just go with 1d16+2, if the 3-18 spread is so important? They must have been on some primo drugs back then

BTW, I ran across this tool while looking for alternative rolling methods: http://rumkin.com/reference/dnd/diestats.php

That's a very good question -- I don't know. It's clearly a deliberate change, and also just as clearly not so hot an idea. ("What was SSI thinking" is a fairly common thought of mine. :v:

)

In related news, I got into how the underlying IBM RNG actually operates. SSI wrote the below (it's not part of the compiler library). The original C probably looked like:

code:

// Returns a random integer from 0 to 32767
uint16_t randomInt() {
    static uint32_t state = 100001; // not prime, and internal state always starts with this (seeding is done by calling this a bunch of times)
    state *= 125; // not prime
    state -= state / 2796203 * 2796203; // this magic number is close to 2 ^ 23 / 3, and is also a large prime number

    // Return the most significant ~15 bits of state (the "& 32767" is not actually needed)
    return (uint16_t) (state * 3 >> 8 & 32767);
}

which now of course means I'm going to get sidetracked analyzing how well this actually works. :v:

(It's probably better than the original Final Fantasy. That RNG is well-analyzed, and notoriously bad and exploitable.)

Back to rolling stats ... we're on a computer, we can easily roll virtual dice we have no good way of rolling without a computer.

Rolling one strongly-loaded d6 and three normal d6s, then dropping the lowest, isn't difficult for me to change to. Let me try that (the last column "IBM, v3" below, everything else is the same as above):

Okay, that works pretty well. (Tweak, tweak.)

# ? Jan 11, 2021 07:53

Boldor: Sep 4, 2004; King of the Yeeks

Okay, let's see how sound this RNG is at its base. I expect it to work acceptably, but by 20th century standards. (There are two bugs I've identified with RNG seeding, but those are separate issues.)

For both dice and cards, you will often see more extreme results on computers compared to real dice or cards.

For dice, a halfway decent modern computer RNG shouldn't be so flawed, but those weren't even invented until well into the 1990s. This port dates to 1987, so the expected result is that I'm more likely to roll very low or very high on 3d6 than I should.

First of all, how many states does this RNG have? It looks like it should have exactly 2796202 states, and reproducing it on a modern system, it really does. (The original Final Fantasy RNG has 256 states returning 8-bit integers, from a simple table that has some duplicates and some missing.)

So if I roll 3d6 exactly 2796202 times (3 and 2796202 are relatively prime, so no fewer), I'll get precise numbers on probabilities. The actual numbers I get:

Either 3 or 18 has a ~0.470% chance of being rolled on 3d6. The chance with real d6s is ~0.463%.
Either 10 or 11 has a ~12.433% chance of being rolled on 3d6. The chance with real d6s is 12.5% (exactly).

So yes, the extremes are more likely than they should be, but not by a whole lot. I'd expect to see stronger biases if I were to roll more dice. ("roll 10d6 for that fireball").

If you're wondering about cards ... that is dominated by a completely separate reason: humans do not shuffle cards properly. You need to riffle-shuffle a deck about 7 times for proper randomization (proven in the early 1990s by Persi Diaconis). Humans usually don't do more than 3 or 4; that skews probabilities away from extremes.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 11:00

Pierzak: Oct 30, 2010

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

So almost done with Arx Fatalis and I love it. Other than Thief and - obviously - Ultima Underworld, what are some similar games? I know Prey, but I prefer fantasy. I just find something so oddly comfy and nostalgic about being in a huge underground fantasy dungeon.

IIRC Dishonored was made by the same guys who made Arx. I haven't played 2 but the first one is a blast and pretty Thiefy.

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

Also on that note, went ahead and got Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 on GOG. I seem to recall that there's like modern engine stuff and things you can use to make playing them less jank and crusty? Or am I just insane and thinking of something else?

That would be some fan remake in a different engine, I forgot what it was called or where to find it.

# ? Jan 11, 2021 11:01

Pierzak: Oct 30, 2010

I finally beat Ultima 8. So satisfying to end a game that's been sitting in my backlog for over 2 decades. And while I have a soft spot for this game because I love the desolate mood and it was the first Ultima I played, I now understand why quite a few people consider it a sub-par entry in the series. It does feel too short and barely finished at times.

One question: when entering the Sorcerer enclave, I get knocked out and talk to Beren the town sorcerer who's warning me not to annoy the local badasses. It very much seems like I'm only hearing the last part of a longer conversation. Is it a known bug, did I gently caress up something in the game flow, or what?

Pierzak fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Jan 21, 2021

# ? Jan 21, 2021 10:27

Chev: Jul 19, 2010; Switchblade Switcharoo

Yeah, there's a number of parts of the game that were never implemented, basically going from the moment Vividos sends you on a pilgrimage to the moment you enter the enclave, with Hydros somewhere in the middle. So in this specific case freeing Hydros was meant to start a questline where, directed by Devon, you'd have to go to the sorcerers for help to keep Hydros in check and so start with Beren, the only readily accessible one, who'd then open the passage to the enclave. In the final game freeing Hydros just cools down some lava but they didn't correct the dialogue to address that. At least for Serpent Isle they'd sort of managed to write around the cuts but for Pagan they just didn't get to it.

Also missing: an undead invasion of Tenebrae, likely caused by the avatar expediting the necromancer succession process by assassinating Vividos (because the idea would be the Avatar angered or freed all of the titans), but instead in the final game they just assume you're gonna go get Lithos' heart because you're a kleptomaniac and the pilgrimage just leads to the Zealan temple for no reason and Devon just has Hydros' tear in a box. And as a modern gamer you probably played the already patched version, with at least a sign indicating where Moriens' birthplace is supposed to be (and also reworking the jump controls and disabling the moving and disappearing platforms).

Chev fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 21, 2021

# ? Jan 21, 2021 21:02

Gynovore: Jun 17, 2009; Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

Pierzak posted:

I finally beat Ultima 8. So satisfying to end a game that's been sitting in my backlog for over 2 decades.

Would it be worth trying today? I've played every Ultima except 8 because I heard it was terribad.

# ? Jan 21, 2021 21:18

Chev: Jul 19, 2010; Switchblade Switcharoo

Eeeeh

I like the setting and the soundtrack, and the idea of the weirdo magic systems. But in practice everything's got problems. It's not well written, it's not well implemented (even though the most horrible stuff has been patched and the horrid performance should be remedied somewhat by 26 years of technological evolution), you spend most of your time in grey caves or grey ruins, the magic system is too dependent on your easily cluttered inventory and exceptionally fiddly. It's interesting to try for a bit to see just how much of what the previous games did right was sacrificed just so they'd get a bigger character with enough animations to do stilted Prince of Persia movement in the framework an isometric RPG, or any other idea that was completely misguided although you can see how each of them would fit in the general context of how the immersive sim genre came to be conceived. Also in the big picture a powerful motivating factor back then would have been that you get to see the lead-up to the final game in the saga except, well, the actual U9 didn't start where U8 ended.

Chev fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jan 21, 2021

# ? Jan 21, 2021 22:46

JustJeff88: Jan 15, 2008; I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE

THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

of SA-Mart forever

I was about to type that there is/was a comprehensive fan patch for it that made it more palatable, but I think that I was thinking of Might & Magic 9.

# ? Jan 21, 2021 23:37

Catgirl Al Capone: Dec 15, 2007

I think there was an official patch that made the jumping less of a hassle among other changes but no fan patches that I can recall

# ? Jan 21, 2021 23:52

Chev: Jul 19, 2010; Switchblade Switcharoo

Yeah, I mentioned the patch in my previous posts. It's probably actually harder to find the unpatched version of U8 these days. You've gotta understand, though, that it merely makes the most terrible aspects of the game a bit less terrible, with the patch notes literally saying stuff like "that place you were told to go to as part of the main plotline now exists" or "the game can no longer be broken by stealing that hard to access key item that you'll eventually need the only time the plot makes you go next to it".

(It also included a letter from Lord British to fans that's very funny in hindsight, saying they'd learned all the right things from feedback on U8, and U9 would be a return to form)

Chev fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Jan 22, 2021

# ? Jan 22, 2021 00:01

Pierzak: Oct 30, 2010

Chev posted:

and the idea of the weirdo magic systems

Having tried them all, my new headcanon is that sorcerers are irritable assholes specifically because they're forced to deal with their bullshit magic system.

And yeah, as much as some of the patch was kinda stuffed in easy-mode (keyrings absolutely loving everywhere), the precise jumping controls (also keyboard shortcuts, did the unpatched version have them?) make up for it. I remember playing the original version and the rock-hopping was terrible.

Gynovore posted:

Would it be worth trying today? I've played every Ultima except 8 because I heard it was terribad.

You're already posting in the old RPG thread. U8 is janky and it's a bad Ultima but it's enjoyable and if you can stomach dealing with ancient interface of the first Ultimas you can deal with this one.

...wait, every Ultima? Including U9? If so, you have no excuse not to try U8.

# ? Jan 22, 2021 01:09

Pierzak: Oct 30, 2010

JustJeff88 posted:

I was about to type that there is/was a comprehensive fan patch for it that made it more palatable, but I think that I was thinking of Might & Magic 9.

I'd really want to play U8 with a patch restoring and filling planned content that was cut or never made it.

# ? Jan 22, 2021 01:11

The Joe Man: Apr 7, 2007; Flirting With Apathetic Waitresses Since 1984

Pierzak posted:

...wait, every Ultima? Including U9? If so, you have no excuse not to try U8.

U9 was bearable with the huge fan/story patch but just barely. Reminds me heavily of King's Quest 8 (which was literally unfinishable for me past a consistent hard crash spot early on).

# ? Jan 22, 2021 01:44

Gynovore: Jun 17, 2009; Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

Ultima 9 was pretty bad when it came out. I played a patched version a few years after release on a system with a Glide video card, so I was able to avoid the technical issues. Still, the plot was linear, the combat very boring, balance was way off (the best spell in the game was the lvl 0 spell "Rock", because you could cast it as fast as you could mash the key, out-damaging everything else) and the environmental puzzles wore out their welcome about a third of the way through. If patched Ultima 8 is worse, forget it.

# ? Jan 22, 2021 02:06

Dr. Quarex: Apr 18, 2003; I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

I still think Ultima IX is underappreciated for the things it got totally right, like the awesome (mostly) open world and a fantastic ending cinematic for the series (even if not everyone agrees on that part).

Now, for as much as I am definitely an Ultima IX apologist, it also remains the only game I ever had to get someone else's save to finish because I had broken the main quest about 20 hours before my current saves and had no way back, so yeah, no real way to defend it as it was at launch. And once I saw how much better-written the dialogue and world text was in the huge fan patch, I was like "oh, I guess they did kind of half-rear end the story, huh."

But drat if it was not an engrossing earlyish 3D fantasy world despite all its other flaws.

# ? Jan 22, 2021 02:50

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# ? Jun 11, 2024 21:37

Gynovore: Jun 17, 2009; Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

Ultima XI was a milestone in at least two ways; the first fully 3D RPG, and the first fully voiced RPG. Except in both cases, Lord British tripped and fell getting off the short bus.

There had been plenty of 3D RPGs before, like Betrayal at Krondor and Ultima Underworld I and 2. However, these games weren't true 3D; the actors were fudged using 2D sprites. Ultima 9 was the first to have the entire world be done in honest-to-gosh 3D rendering. At the time, video cards were not standard issue in new PCs. Back in the mid 90's, 3DFX was buying seventeen pages of ads in every gaming magazine, claiming that their line of DooDoo cards using the Glide API would be ubiquitous soon. Origin fell for it hook, line and sinker, because Ultima IX was 100% optimized for Glide. Those fortunate enough to own a DooDoo card got decent performance, but for those with a non-Glide card it ran slowly and crashily, and for the many who had no card and had to use software rendering it ran slower than a constipated turtle flowing uphill in January. I may have mixed some metaphors there but you get the idea.

As for the voice acting, the main characters were decent, although the Avatar sounds a bit like a high school fullback who fell off the back of a pickup truck a few dozen times. However, the voice acting for the minor characters made you gouge your eardrums out with a rusty nail. I would post a Youtube link to the prostitute in Minoc, but then you would all have no eardrums.

And as for the writing, the main quest is well written, with a compelling villain and sub-villain. But, again, the writing for the minor NPCs was horrible. Like, the "gypsies" in Minoc, who are under a curse, and quest you with getting... wait for it... a "blackrock crystal ball". It couldn't be more stereotyped if they tried.

In short, Ultima IX swung for the fences, but tripped and dropped the ball halfway to the end zone. Oops, mixing metaphors again.

# ? Jan 22, 2021 04:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > The Old School PC RPG Megathread: Gaming with rose-colored goggles

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