In the end I managed another 1 1/2 hours last night when I really should have been doing something else. I’m definitely hooked. I’ve got three of the the remaining six stones and cleared those three dungeons out of gems while I was at it. I’m unsure if the stats carry through for all the characters or just me into Ultima 5. On the off chance they all carry over, I’m concentrating on maxing out the stats of all the main Ultima 5 party members  before I move onto everyone else. Katrina is basically useless so I’ll just let her be killed off.

The dungeons really are easy. I’m still ignoring my mystic weapons – maybe they will be useful in the abyss but I’m far better off with range weapons at the moment. On the eighth level of each dungeon are one or more altar rooms. When I have all the appropriate stones, I’ll need to use them on all 3 altars to get the 3 parts of a key I’ll need for the abyss. The altar rooms link 4 dungeons so you can also use them as a shortcut straight to level eight of those dungeons.

I’m still a party member short but I can’t get the last member until I’m level 8. I’ll have gained a lot of experience clearing out these 3 dungeons so I’ll pop back to see LB tonight and see if he will level me up. When I finally do get Jaana to join I assume she will only be level 2 so I’d like to get her some experience before I tackle the abyss.

I’ve not had loads of time over the weekend for Ultima 4 but I’ve managed to play a bit each day, with a decent session on Sunday. I’ve still probably spent as long on it now as I did finishing Ultima 3. I’ve made a reasonable amount of progress. I’m now a partial avatar in all eight virtues, I’ve got the black and white stones and have 6 of my 7 companions. I’ve come to the conclusion while playing this, that I’ve never finished this game before without cheating as I really don’t remember it taking this long. I’m definitely not going to cheat on any games for this blog  (apart from walkthroughs and savestates that is). 

I’ve spent a fair chunk of my time, raising all my virtues. I know the actions that contribute to this so its been easy enough to speed things up a bit. i.e. I know that paying the blind reagents seller the correct amount of money raises honesty & justice so I just buy 1 sulphurous ash at a time and pay my 2 gp getting a stats boost every time. There are similar actions for pretty much all the virtues so its not too hard to raise them. The world map really is huge though, travelling around takes some time.  

I’ve had chronic money shortages throughout the game – this is probably because I’ve formed my party before becoming an avatar. I’ve completely ignored buying armour and outfitted my party with bows. Range weapons seem to be the safest bet – you can kill most things before they even reach you. In fact the combat is surprisingly easy. Controlling 8 characters seems a bit too many – I usually struggle to get all of them involved in the fight. Once becoming a partial avatar in all 8 virtues, I got the mystic armour from empath abbey and my money problems were solved. This sells for 4500 each (you get 8). I outfitted the party with all the best weapons from bucaneers den, maxed out my reagents and went back and got more mystic armour.

One trick I’ve been using during my money shortages is to die deliberately. There are no penalties as such for dying in this game except your food and gold are both reset to 200. So if half your party is dead and you don’t fancy paying 300g each to heal them, you can head for the nearest town, spend all your gold on something or other (you keep all items), wait to starve and your party will all have full health again as well as free gold and food.

I’ve not done much dungeon delving. I’ve battled through Hythloth, however from the bottom up. The dungeons have gems in them that raise different stats depending on the dungeon. They also hurt when you take them. The stats are based on the virtues of the dungeon, so the Hytholth gems raise all 3 stats by 5 which is a pretty nice bonus. Because of this I played through the dungeon rather than skipping it (although I did use a few level up spells also). The gems killed half my party off but a brief starvation diet got them in shape again.

The dungeon levels seem to be a bit smaller if anything than Ultima 3. However, this time they all have predesigned rooms in them. These rooms are basically combat screens but more complex. Many contain tiles you have to step on to open walls, or traps so that when you go to take a treasure chest some monsters are released. Thought has clearly been put into each of the rooms. For instance, in deceit I found a corridor with tresure chests everywhere. At the far end was a room with a load of thieves sat round a campfire. The graphics are primitive so you have to use your imagination, but this sort of thing adds depth to the game. After 2 weeks of apple 2 graphics, this game is actually looking quite good. Its surprising how quickly you get used to old technology again and it stops being an issue.

At the end of Hythloth was the hot air balloon. You need this to get one of the stones which is next to an ankh in the middle of a mountain range. The baloon is at the mercy of the winds, so you have no control other than land and take off. Thankfully there is a spell to change wind direction which made the job easier.

2 of the spell reagents (nightshade and mandrake) are not available for purchase and have to be picked up from individual map squares when there are two new moons. Waiting around for the moons to change is a bit tedious. I collected about 30 of each this way which should be enough for now.

I’m unlikely to get more than 1/2 hour played tonight, but the next job is to go through all 6 dungeons and get the stones.

I’ve made a start on Ultima 4. I’ve played through it a few times before and know the game very well. Because of that and the fact its been blogged before, I’ll keep the posts on here short and just play through it as quick as I can. The last time was a couple of years back so I don’t remember everything at least.

So far, I’ve just been exploring a few of the towns, talking to everyone and attempting to gather runes, companions and raise my virtues. I’ve explored Britain, Jhelon, Paws & Trinsic. The mechanics of the game are very similar to Ultima 3. The major new addition is the conversation system. This takes simple one word input to allow some interaction with the people in towns. People don’t have a huge amount to say (except LB) but it still adds a lot to the game.

The game claims on the back of the box to be 16 times larger than Ultima 3. I’ve no idea how they are measuring this. If it takes me 16 times longer to play than Ultima 3, then I’ll be still be on this for the next month. More realistically, I’d expect to take 2-3 times longer than Ultima 3.

The DOS version which I’m playing gets EGA graphics this time round and looks a lot better for it. I did consider playing the master system version but then I remembered that you can import your character into ultima 5 and 6 if you play through on the one platform. This does mean that I have to play Ultima 5 instead of Lazarus as I originally intended, but I would feel I would be missing out a game if I played Lazarus which would bug me a bit if I’d played all of Origins games except one. I decided not to use any of the upgrade patches – I like the music in Ultima 4 but there isn’t that much of it, so you end up listening to it hundreds of times in a game this size. I’d rather supply my own soundtrack.

So far I’m a partial avatar in compassion and ready to advance in humility. I’ve gathered 3 companions and am up to Level 5. The way I remember this game, its not too hard getting all the virtues. The difficult bit was playing through the dungeons and getting the stones.

Even through I’ve barely started it, there is no doubt this game is a classic. The storyline is utterly unique, the scope of the game is epic, the world is enormous and the gameplay is rich and varied.