Ultima VII: The Black Gate Retrospective Review: One of the Greatest RPGs Ever?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ย. 2024
- A retrospective review of Ultima 7: The Black Gate. Released in 1992, I only played it for the first time recently and was blown away. This is a video review of my thoughts on what made it so incredible for me. The art on the thumbnail is by Denis Loubet and is an alternate cover for the game.
I'm very happy to see a new generation of players encountering the best game of all time.
The Fellowship theme is always amazing.
My favorite game of all time.
Awesome!
My favorite game too
Mine too. So good to have Exult on the iPad. It works so well with touch controls. This game was so far ahead of its time.
To me this game is the GOAT of RPGs, by far. And it's 30 years old. There are so many things to discover aside the main quest that you could never get bored. Everytime I watch a video about it today I even discover new things that I've never seen before. This is insane for a game that old, and it's so bad there still isn't a game that could compete to this nowadays. Sure many RPGs are good, like Baldur's Gate, but they aren't even close to the depth of Ultima 7.
Great stuff as always! I have no real experience with the Ultima series outside of Ultima Underworld, so it was great hearing more about the series from one of my favorite writers/critics.
Thank you so much! Really appreciate it!
A few other things I always talk about when mentioning U7 is the fact that A. you could pick up almost any object (something even a lot of games don't do nowadays), B. NPCs had believable day night cycles - would go to work, then go home and sleep etc, and C. the randomness of encounters and story you could experience felt like Skyrim before Skyrim.
Oblivion was the next game I played that was able to do exactly that. But U7 has a better story, I love that it's not just generic LOTR-like fantasy, it has a lot of meaning and personality, and humor, and poetry too.
Remember hack mover? THAT was fun in U7
oh yeah i have lots of stories of that@@indalcecio
I have memories of this game I find so difficult to believe that I looked for this video in order to see if they were simply magnified through the eyes of a child. No. It really was a huge world of a game with secrets everywhere....I have to know how many people developed this for how long. It's really fantastic.
I kind of love 4-7 as a quadrilogy! Each have consequences for the next game in really interesting ways.
They're Ultima, to be sure. All the other games are either not that good, or not that Ultima.
For me, the world of Ultima VII - The Black Gate has that strange and priceless quality of feeling both extremely "homely" (in the towns) and somewhat foreign and threatening (when adventuring) at the same time. The gameplay may be a little bit too easy, but I prefer The Black Gate's sunnier Britannia over the grimmer atmosphere of Serpent's Isle. Between all that townsfolk living their lives, having their passions and their little affairs, the "real" societal problems that they dealt with, and the variety of meaningful items, buildings, books, lore, history and so on, it really gave me the feeling that there was something to fight for, this was a world worth saving.
I played this game 28 years ago, and it still remains my favourite RPG game ever (next to might and magic). Still remember that I managed to find two bugs that allowed me to enter the sphere without needing a quest item, and also accessing the Isle of the Avatar via the magic carpet by finding a very specific perfect spot to land at. Ended up I was completely lost on what was happening to the whole story and had to backtrack to find how the main quest progressed. The free exploration was what made this game truly epic
Sometimes I just collected eggs and pumpkins for sale and slept on my bedroll in the forest.
@19:25 -- Indeed, most of these issues are fixed with Exult.
- Frame rates are very smooth (unless you put 500+ stacks of gold coins next to each other),
- You can feed your party with the "F" key,
- Exult allows you for higher resolution (but smaller characters/terrain sprites tho, so it can be hard finding a sweet spot). But it makes scanning around the carpet better,
- It also allows you to casually dump all your keys into a companion's pouch and you presse "K" to target a door and game will try all your keys automatically.
- There's a huge fix with memory as well. If you generate "Too much gold" (as if this is ever a thing) from winning in Buccaneer's Den, the game will self destroy to make room for those gold piles... Meaning chunks of buildings will start to vanish in the Dos version... scary and it CAN make the game unfinishable.
Weird that it didn't work out for you, but the DOS version still works like a charm.
Awesome review !
-- Enlightenment Dragon.
Thanks! I should get Exult working. I think it's cause my PC is an older one with an older version of windows. Thanks so much for watching. I can't wait to get into Serpent's Isle but I need to finish Planescape first!
Yes I've tried it and it's very good, also the main thing is that it makes Ultima 7 perfectly playable in every PC.
I dont think that Avatar chose to leave Britannia behind for 200 years, so it isn't really a moral failing. Remember: the central conceit of Ultima IV and later is that the player IS the main character. In the intro to 6 we learn that the Avatar is very excited to leave Earth behind and head through the Moongate. And of course, that perfectly described us players. Bored at home, just waiting for a new adventure in Britannia.
That's a really good point you make! And agreed, def not a moral failing. It just was a rough 200 years for the people of Britannia! Thanks for the comment Dupre of Trinsic!
Great catch. I never thought about it: yes, I identified with the Avatar, he coming from Earth and all that. But the metaphor of us - players - waiting for he next game to come out, escaped me. So true.
We played this in 1996 when me and my brother were very young, I was 6 he was 10 or something, and we had to boot the game via DOS and do this strange pre menu that we could enable / disable settings in order to get it to boot properly. Kinda like a safe mode boot,
Years later I work in IT and this directly links back to those early days.
Ultima 7 hits different to some
One of my favorite games of all time (actually comes up in an interview I did just recently) and this is a great breakdown of the game, world, and story! Side note: After beating the game me and my friend found tons of cheat codes (and even printed them out and made a small pamphlet of them!). One of the abilities we unlocked was the map editor - but in-game. So you could walk around the world and place objects (tiles, or even people) in your backpack!!!
That sounds amazing! Thanks for sharing!
@@TieryasXu yeah, I basically recreated portions of the map and made my own mini castle! wish I had the footage to show
I've always thought that the game's engine had some technical flaws. The short view distance hampered orientation. The party management (or lack thereof) made moving or acting in larger groups a real pain. The chaotic battle system made combat not very enjoyable, and led to a lot of reload... not because of death, but because of lost companions who had run off so far you couldn't ever find their bodies.
The system was highly innovative, and the ideas behind it were excellent. But as with most new things, they just hadn't been perfected.
But the game itself - the world building, the story, the writing, the atmosphere... it's still among my top five RPGs ever played... along with the rest of the tetraology of U4 to U7.
I would love to see this series being redone with a modern engine. Keep the style, keep the story... just make it more user-friendly for 2023.
to answer the title : yes
personally i started on Ultima V , so its probably my all time fav ; but 6/7/SI are absolutely up there as well ; imho there is no more significant/innovative CRPG series than the Ultima series ; even if other games like Planescape Torment and Baldurs Gate are legendary in their own aspects/regards [i think there is a fair argument that PT is the best CRPG story/plot] ; Origin Systems was just in a golden age of creativity and insightfulness when making these games , really pushing into uncharted territory for the medium , always trying to see what was possible , just amazing stuff
Great review. You missed some of the many fun Easter eggs.
Software pirate
Serpents Hold characters have a direct resemblance to a certain early 90s show about people trekking through space.
Thank you for watching! re: Serpents Hold, I'd wondered about that! That's very coo!
One of my all time favorite game with Serpent Isle. Still play the saga from time to time. Great review.
Easily one of the greatest RPGs of all time. Also (with 7.5) the last true Ultima game.
one of my favorite computer games of all time. i spent hundreds of hours with it and 7 part 2. I'm surprised it doesn't get more recognition.
Still need to play 2! I'm kind of saving it for myself as I think this is the last of the great Ultima games?
It’s for Super Nintendo
One of the all-time greats 👍
I was way too young when I played this as it came out and didn't get far. I picked it up again about 20 years later from GOG and running it with exult made it graphically bearable. There was some nostalgia involved but this is an interesting, complex game even by today's standards.
I played U7 quite a bit when I was about 13 to 15 I think, possibly younger. World felt so large and lively. Problem was the language. For non-native English speaker the amount to read was bit too overwhelming and the slang really didn't help and added to the pain quite a lot. I'm still so tempted to try Exult and U7 even after all these years.
That's really unfortunate, and I sympathize, but remember this game was made in English, and not every game can be translated into every language. I'm sure that must have been frustrating but it's not fair to blame the game for being in a different language
@@indalcecio you got it fully wrong. I'm not blaming the game at all. I was just stating that it was really hard to try to keep up with what was happening cause of long dialogues and not the easiest phrasing. One of the many things that contributed young me to study English harder 🙂
@@jothain I apologize, just as you say, I got it totally wrong. I'm very sorry and glad the game encouraged you to learn.
I remember getting this game with my creative labs cd rom / soundblaster bundle. I had the hardest time getting it to work with my dad, we got it running with a bootdisk but then we installed windows 95 and couldn't get it to work. I didn't know enough about computers then to really troubleshoot it, I managed to make it work without loading the mouse driver. It's such an amazing game when you think about the fact that it was released in 92. It's not perfect, you can ruin the game for yourself if you don't stick to the story but that's the freedom it offers. Combat is kind of meh but the world building and npc schedules just creates this wonderful living world, again for 1992 this was just unbelievable. It's still a game of its time, you have to keep a journal yourself, there's no quest marker or tracker, it requires a lot of attention to enjoy the game fully.
Thanks for remembering Poor Inamo ❤️
My favorite game of all time. I would put down some serious gofundme coin to let Richard Garriot have another shot at Ultima 8 and 9 without the EA boat anchor.
That's basically what he did, to make "shroud of the avatar" and it was....meh.
One thing worth considering is that Ultima 7 was a quantum leap at the time for PC gaming and was at the forefront of the open world RPG genre that was yet to come. The first time seeing the Guardian pop out of the screen and speak (!!!) to you in 1992 (depending on your PC's capabilities) was amazing, mind-blowing, and chilling at the same time. And if you don't know, you can stack crates and climb up on the roof of the smith's shop in Trinsic and go behind the chimney to warp to a secret area with all the OP gear in the game, though Lord British disapproves.
I'm always comparing games to Ultima 7 and I continue to look for games that gave me the same feeling.
Nice video. I have so many memories of just collecting random items into my wagon and driving around, not really playing the actual storyline.
I totally hear you! Breadmaking, reading books, just exploring and finding random things!
The general point of having someone achieve avatarhood of the virtues was never to rely on them to fix everything, but to give the people something to aspire to, not trap themselves in guilt over failing to live up to. Virtuous aspiration should not generate guilt like that; that's usually the fault of ambitions pursued without regard for consequence or humility.
Ultima VII underlines that by showing the problems that come from expecting Lord British and the Avatar to always be the ones to improve things in your life, you will turn to people like the Fellowship who cater to and exploit this kind of sidestepping of self-actualisation.
I don't think that argument works very well. The average peasant in Britannia can self actualize a lot and be virtuous, but that doesn't help against a drought, does not get merchants to stop hoarding food, does not stop their lords from doing nothing, and does not stop the fellowship from quartering them and nailing their gargoyle friend to the wall with a pitchfork.
Yes you should expect Lord British to improve the situation actually. That's why he's a lord, and commands soldiery, their justice system, and their laws :P
Self-actualization does nothing here. The fellowship didn't abuse a lack of that, it instead abused rulers pointing to "personal responsibility" in an excuse to sidestep their responsibilities and duties. Groups like the fellowship fill power vacuums, not personal responsibility vacuums.
@@fy8798 If the virtues that the Avatar champions do nothing outside of their own actions to prevent such evil, then whatever happened to the point of Ultima 4? If the virtues wouldn't guide Brittanians away from such things, then why would the person who personifies them be laden with such tasks? The Avatar was supposed to be an example to ASPIRE to, not a savior to rely on and feel betrayed by. Between 6 and 7 was a 200 year gap and no one else has achieved avatarhood. The Avatar IS an average person who managed to end up regularly hopping into another world. It's kind of telling. So, yeah, I think you just don't understand. That's okay, but if you want to continue, you need to proffer better rhetoric because you've not rebuffed a single thing I've said; you've mostly just said you disagree without actually demonstrating why I'm wrong, just why your opinion is different.
I always wanted this game back in the day. Had ultima 6 but not a computer powerful enough to play 7. I remember someone on the bus had the box for the game and i remember looking at pics of what it looked like and it was so much better than 6. Totally missed out om the gem.
Well there might not be modern games that do seamless transition between overworld and dungeon and back again without loading screens. But there's certainly a lot older games that do. Games such as Gothic, Gothic 2 and Gothic 3. But for isometric games there's Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity. Also the Sacred games; Sacred Gold and Sacred 2. And I just remembered that the Dungeon Siege games also feature a seamless world, and actually there's a good remake of Ultima V for Dungeon Siege :)
did you play Serpent Isle?
Not yet! I'll be getting to it soon!
@@TieryasXu it's better than black gate
@@caesaria maybe but it's not in britannia
They should make a movie series from Ultima 4 onwards
I would say it's not the avatar that failed the people. It's rulership. There are lords. What are they doing? Not very much, except being lords. What's Lord British doing about the land falling to such disrepair that the fellowship could fill the void? Not very much! What is he lord for, if he's not there to organize and address problems?
It's not the fault of the people when those that have power over them (controlling the soldiers, the swords, the law, the money even) do absolutely nothing.
Imagine if they remade this in a new engine with QOL.
Oh Ultima 7, what a work of fine art. And the Underworld series, too.
I loved V and VI the most.
I want to play as a virtuous hero but I can't since you can't make gold in this game unless you kill bandits and loot off them (which is still evil), you have no choice to steal (honestly more virtuous than killing bandits just to rob them)
Sacrifice the mayor at 15:12 , NPC sees the mayor blowing the F up and goes, "soo...when do we eat?"
lol
Probably the greatest Ultima ever. Unparalleled...
I remember going underground and gaining a GLASS SWORD, then moving people on and off it to kill them lol
Fantastic game! Pure magic. Thoughts of It bring back great memories. My PC constantly crashed trying to run it, but it was well worth the countless hours that I spent getting my PC to run it and then actually playing it. Fantastic story, graphics, sound, music, gameplay, design. I'm seriously tempted to play through it all over again. Bravo! 👍👏🙌🤜🤛👊🤌👌
the graphics are like designed to give you vertigo
Have you played Ultima 4? It's really old and graphics are pretty primitive but the virtue system and the philosophy behind blows your mind even there
I have and even did a video review of it on the channel (though the NES version!) Loved it!
Ultima VII, best game i've ever played along woth zak mckracken
everyone has their favourite. But surely this is the best rpg created so far. There is little in this game that was not made to the highest quality for the time. I have not encountered a more immersive, original, believable storyline.
Thank you for this video.
I think there was a NPC that was literally Red Pilled before there was Red Pill. This game really treats the NPCs like they're people. They would hastily defend their moral standing when you question the questionable details regarding their craft and the events that occurred around. It's like Garriott was reading the events in real life and social life and implementing it into the game. Though I would say Gothic still stands as the more "human" like NPCs still. The NPCs are a bit too colorful and artificial to me.
Not sure what Garriott is doing not making new sequels. If he can't use the Ultima IP or name he could easily just make up another one on the spot. I'm sure he would get a lot of support for that. Indie games supported by fans are all the rage nowadays. Garriott does explain that the moral system of Ultima is more relevant today than ever but why won't he make another game that is Ultima but without the related name and characters.
I would like Garriott to try and make another RPG where you don't start as a known avatar or anything, you just start as a nobody, a resident and person born in that world. And you slowly make your way up starting out with nothing but 5 gold and a knife in hand.
Mystery solving is interesting
I do want to play Ultima 4 but the graphics are way too outdated
conclusion 18:17
It is superb, but it is far from perfect. Combat is a travesty. The game makes it painfully obvious that The Fellowship is evil, already in the first town etc.
When the Avatar joins the Fellowship, they even did a great job of the reactions of the Companions to this. It's like "coming out" as a Christian to your non-christian friends. It make you doubt your choice, and you know everyone is going to look at you differently afterwards.
Ultima VII is the last GREAT Ultima. Or rather, the last Ultima...Serpent Isle was good, but not AS good as Ultima VII. Ultima VIII and IX are best forgotten.
You mention food, which Ultima VII was terrible at. The previous Ultimas did a better job of it...it's a challenge in the beginning, but as you progress food does not become much of an issue. Not so much in Ultima VII. But at least you can hunt in Ultima VII. There are worse games, like "Legend of Grimrock II" where even with extremely experienced characters you can starve to death for no reason at all (which is why I gave up on that game).
This choppy mess of a game? more like one of the worst games ever.
Might and Magic III and Ultima 7 are the best rpgs I ever played.
The fellowship is the new world order. Blackrock gate is cern.