Ultima VI Retrospective (Ad-free early access)
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Comments (16)
right in time for a relaxing evening. you beautiful beast
At the end of the vid you mentioned your second channel and livestreams. Any plans to livestream your playthroughs of future Ultimas, as you go through them yourself and collect footage? Or do you prefer to do review playthroughs solo, so as to get the orignal experience and avoid spoilers?
You're right on the money with that last sentence. I enjoy streaming as a way to decompress and play something I'm less "invested" in. I'm pretty fastidious in my note taking, so I'd frequently be dropping off stream to write something down. Plus there's something about a game that just hits different when you're experiencing it alone late at night with nothing but a cup of tea and the glow of your monitor keeping you company.
One totally pedantic nitpick, it's Disk Operating System, not Dedicated Operating System. :)
Oh man, thanks for pointing that out. I'm kind of kicking myself over it! Might re-record that line today.
Regarding navigation in ships (timestamp around 1:15:00) - did you miss the sextant? It tells you your longitude and latitude which can be referenced to the map to find your exact position, as long as you're not underground or in a building. See: https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Sextant (In U7 it shows you this precisely with a crosshair when you open the world map with a sextant available. But I believe in U6 it just gives co-ordinates which you have to cross-ref yourself with the cloth map.)
This is a fair point. I did find the sextant towards the tail-end of the story (in the same dungeon where you find the 2nd half of the silver tablet, I believe). I considered making mention of it, but I didn't feel like it was a convenient enough solution to some of the navigational issues I had. Kind of second-guessing that now, since you're right in that it does somewhat alleviate the absolute WORST parts of exploration.
Another great video. I wish you could have entered that contest to be in Ultima 7. Maybe in the fan projects you could appear XD.
I really can't wait for the Ultima 7 video, which was by far the favourite game of my childhood. You talked here about U6 being maybe the first true open-world game, but in my view that's U7, on account of it finally dispensing with putting the world in a viewport with a huge UI. And because the world is fully integrated, without a single loading screen (that I recall!) - including dungeons. And even transportation is fully rendered, like each character having their own seat on ships and the magic carpet :) I know it'll take you a while, both because of Ultima 6.5 games, and because U7 is likely another massive project. But I can wait, as U7 is going to be a hugely anticipated video for me. For years and years I've never understood why Ultima seems so forgotten on YouTube - there's a million retro channels, doing a million retrospectives and let's plays of series like Kings Quest and many others. Yet Ultima, which for my money was *the* gaming series of that period, seems largely forgotten these days - even U7, which I still regard as one of the best games of all time (though I admit that's rated by a 12-year-old me :) ). Thanks so much for finally doing them justice!
Ultima VII is my most anticipated game as well. I've really been surprised by how much I enjoyed the early games, and obviously some games like Underworld have me excited too, but I've wanted to do a deep dive into Ultima VII since I started the channel. I appreciate the kind words!
Amazing work! Love they're getting longer (at same or better quality) with each video. I played U6 back in the day but never completed it - can't remember why now but I guess I got distracted by other games. I remember how it exciting it was as an upgrade to U5, especially as I'd fairly recently got my first Soundblaster to go in my (well, my Dad's!) 386DX 33Mhz with VGA.
Now work won't be so dull tomarrow whoo
Happy to help. Watch the video at 0.5x speed to make it cover the entire 2nd half of your shift!
This will be my bedtime story tonight. Nice.
Second
YESSS LETS GOOOOO