Ultima VII

Part One: The Black Gate

engine
In Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992), two centuries have passed since the Gargoyle threat was solved and the Avatar is suddenly whisked into Britannia by a red moongate.

As the game starts, The Guardian, an evil creature, taunts the Avatar, telling him that Britannia "has entered into a new age of enlightenment", and that he will eventually rule Britannia. The Avatar arrives to Britannia via a red moongate, and as he arrives to Trinsic, he's asked to solve a ritualistic murder that occurred the night before. He also learns that "The Fellowship", a new religious philosophy led by a man called Batlin, has been formed.

The Fellowship is most likely inspired by Scientology and similar personal improvement groups and faiths; the game can be said to satirize psycho babble.

This game introduced a major change; turn-based gameplay was abandoned for real-time gameplay, and the whole screen was now devoted to the map, with anything else being overlayed whenever the need arises. This way, larger, much more detailed, and no longer visibly tile-based graphics were possible. Also, the game was the first in the series that was entirely mouse-driven; in theory it could be played without ever touching the keyboard.

In Ultima VII, the virtue system was not enforced as strictly as it was in Ultima IV. Instead, the game simulated a society that sticks to some of the virtues: the NPCs — either the party members or the people of Britannia — reacted to killings of innocents and stealing whenever they got aware of it. Also the combat system was changed due to the change to real-time gameplay. The new AI system allowed the player to choose general tactics for party members. The AI was not perfect, but it saved the player the need to micromanage up to eight different characters in battle.

The Black Gate was released in English, German and French.

Forge of Virtue expansion

Forge of Virtue was an expansion pack that adds a quest to Ultima VII in which the Avatar must pass a series of tests to revalidate himself in the three principles of Truth, Love, and Courage, and destroy the last remnants of Exodus. The player is rewarded with a powerful weapon, the Blackrock Sword, also known as the Black Sword or the Shade Blade. The Avatar also gains maximum strength, intelligence, and dexterity in the course of the tests, and Lord British grants the player double strength on top of that.

In later releases of Ultima VII this add-on was always included.

Part Two: Serpent Isle

Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle was released in 1993. While the Avatar destroys the Black Moongate that the Guardian was coming through, Batlin flees to Serpent Isle. The Warriors of Destiny pursue the rogue fanatic and find a strange land that has many very different customs than Britannia: a large, icy island, only lately recolonized by men, with many remains of an ancient culture where serpents played a central role.

This is the first game in the series to take place outside Britannia as it has been known since Ultima IV. It is also more linear than the earlier parts — unlike the earlier games where the order in which sub-quests were completed was of little concern; the new approach makes it possible to give the game a more carefully plotted storyline, while at the same time somewhat limiting the players choice.

Since most of the game's code was recycled from The Black Gate, it was decided not to call it Ultima VIII; Richard Garriott had stated in interviews around 1988 that no two Ultimas shared the same source code, unlike the then-competing The Bard's Tale series, and he probably felt bound by this statement.

The Silver Seed expansion

The Silver Seed expansion adds the Silver Seed story arc to the game, in which the party visits a subterranean keep in the ancient civilization of Serpent Isle (probably at some time in the past, but this is not known for sure). Powerful magic items, including a keyring, a ring of unlimited reagents, and a strength increasing belt can be found in this area and in nearby dungeons. In later releases of the game, the expansion pack was always included.

Technical issues

Both parts of Ultima VII used a non-standard MS-DOS memory management extension, called Voodoo Memory Manager. This was not a typical "DOS extender"; while DOS extenders typically provide protected mode features, Voodoo merely provided flat memory model for real mode. This setup was quite quirky; a very non-standard MS-DOS extended memory setup was needed to play the game.

Later, when MS-DOS started to fall into disuse, Voodoo started to become somewhat of a stress test for MS-DOS compatibility. Notably, Windows 95 and later have severe problems cooperating with the games. Modern Windows releases are completely incompatible with the game.

Some fans of the game have worked on improving the situation. Currently, there are several ways of playing the game:

• Patches exist to play the game in Windows 9x series.
• The game is playable in emulators such as DOSBox.
• Exult is a complete, free reimplementation of the original Ultima VII game engine under which the games can be played on modern computers and various operating systems. While the experience isn't completely authentic, it is close enough, and this combined to additional new features make Exult by far the most preferred method of playing the game today.
  

  Super Nintendo version

This version was largely different from original. The game was largely real-time action, more similar to The Legend of Zelda series. The party was missing too. Also, the story was largely changed due to Nintendo of America's censorship policies at the time: for example, instead of gory murders, the Avatar right away starts to investigate kidnappings.

This version was generally not considered as good as the PC version.

Fan projects and remakes

The most notable fan project around Ultima VII has undoubtedly been the Exult runtime engine, which can be used to play the game and also includes tools to modify the game.

Exult's wide array of tools have enabled fans to take the game somewhat apart. Most notably, there have been fan translation projects: Serpent Isle has been completely translated to French, and Spanish translation of Black Gate is underway.

There have been a few projects to make Ultima VII fan remakes in other game engines, but so far these projects have not been particularly fruitful.

External links

• Bootstrike's U7 pages
• A Fistful of Ultima VII and Cosmic Balancing Act - Doug the Eagle Dragon's anti-walkthroughs and humorous findings
• Serpent Isle in French
• Spanish Ultima VII translation can be found from this site; so far only a weblog with progress reports and betas, no static page as such.