How do you feel about the Ultima Underworld games?

>>3722490
A little queasy to be honest.

>>3722490
Impressive dungeon crawlers that revitalized a genre of dungeon master and wizardry clones.

UW1: The single most groundbreaking game. Years ahead of its time
UW2: A refined and polished version of 1.

>>3722490
I'm old enough to have played these when they came out. This shit was MINDBLOWING back in the day. You cannot even imagine what it was like. I don't think there's even an equivalent in modern gaming.

>>3723039
I never had a PC growing up, but a few years ago my friend told me about the game and I played through 2 then 1 from GOG and they were still pretty mindblowing to me.
Combat actually was actually no worse than Skyrim or any other modern game. Casting spells was difficult though.

I also remember spending about 3 hours learning lizard-man language for a pointless side quest that I thought was needed to progress. At the end you get some food items or something. Other than that a perfect game.

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>>3722741
This. The game is shockingly good when held up against square-by-square first person dungeon crawlers that competed against it and I had no fucking clue from the magazine stills I'd seen until I bought pic related along with some other Classics re-releases on clearance for like $2 a pop after my employee discount in 1997 and they still held up against console games (and ran on my 486DX2/66 toaster)

>>3723323
You need to free Urgo to get a hint on how to find the Wine of Compassion.

>>3723039
>I don't think there's even an equivalent in modern gaming.
lol don't you think that's going a bit far? I mean there's no single dungeon as grand in any Bethesda game but as far as creating large, persistent, involving fantasy worlds I do think they managed to beat it. In fact, the only contemporary game it could be compared to would be Daggerfall and UU stomps it on immersion (Daggerfall was more focused on scope).

I've actually only just recently got a PC that could run Skyrim+Mods acceptably and this makes me wonder if there's any user created content that intricacy on par with UU

>>3722490
Outside of the GBA tier resolution, these are great.

Source port or high res mod fucking when?

>>3723346
I didn't play the games until recently. But I don't think anything in modern Bethesda games was as impactful to me as learning about Praecor Loth's story in UU2.

The game had a really great story through a variety of locations, as well as an awesome soundtrack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7rTyVR7gpY#t=11m33s
Killorn Keep is one of my all time favorite pieces of game music. The location and story behind it make it more memorable as well.

>>3723665
You have to actively take interest in the Elder Scrolls stories to feel their full depth by finding and reading documents like diaries and correspondences there's a lot of optional text while UU gives you exactly as much context as it thinks you ought to have so the experience is more balanced but less open. Both are good though and should really only be compared/contrasted not necessarily competed. I expect UU outsold Daggerfall and I'd put good money on UU+UU2 outselling Arena+Daggerfall

>>3723346
If you played them back in the day it was practically mind warping to see shit like that in a video game. Any dungeon crawler now people just see as expected. There's nothing blowing people's minds like that anymore.

>>3722490
Played the first game a few months ago and was surprised how well it holds up. Really looking forward to playing the second one soon.

>>3724583
I agree with the first part. Like I said I didn't have the computer to play games like that at release but they still compared favorably to games like Shadow Tower at the height of the 5th gen years after their release. I don't agree that there aren't mindblowing games being released though there are multiple indie PC games released every single day with new and innovative mechanics or solid combos of existing mechanics that haven't been seen before. It's just a matter of finding the golden and the made-for-you amongst all the piles of lazy, buggy, unpolished and social justicey titles.

>>3724684
Chests and doors that you can bash open/destroy is kind of unique. Still kind of blown away at that.

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Origin was a great company. Their slogan was We Create Worlds and they meant it. I love pretty much all things Ultima.

That said, I'm kind of meh on Underworld. It's definitely some kind of achievement, but it didn't feel like Britannia to me, and the part at the start with the goofy plot and then immediately kicking you out of one of the best settings ever - fucking Britannia! - was not my thing. They had Ultima tropes down there, but it never felt like the same underworld you visited in the previous games. They shifted from reagents to runes, which was weird, and in general the lore wasn't consistent with the rest of the world.

It had the usual thoughtful touches, though, that were Origin signatures: weapons broke, you needed food, even the conversations you had with people was interesting and in depth: the goblins, those lost warriors, etc. It *did* feel like a dark and scary place (those Lurkers in the water). It just wasn't a place I wanted to be in in the first place.

If it had just been first-person Ultima, in an underworld that connected to other parts of Britannia, I'd probably be playing it right now. They innovated a ton but sometimes people really just want square peg/square hole. Or ankh peg/ankh-hole

>put it in the ankh-hole sounds a little weird tho

>>3724669
Remember that the second part is a lot more connected to the Ultima story whereas 1 was shoehorned in.
You can play it without prior knowledge but you get the most of it if you play it after Ultima 4-7.

>>3724750
well UU wasn't even an ultima game at first

>>3724750
>shifted from reagents to runes, which was weird, and in general the lore wasn't consistent with the rest of the world.
The spells weren't that different from the formulas used in Ultima 5 onward.

Remember that the game was developed by Blue Sky Productions, later known as Looking Glass Software. The decision to turn it into an Ultima game was done late in development so a lot of elements didn't really fit.
The most obvious should be the existence of dwarves and lizardman and lack of gargoyles.

>>3722490
It was miles ahead of the more canon Ultima games. Looking Glass was so Koolaid.

>>3724935
>>shifted from reagents to runes, which was weird, and in general the lore wasn't consistent with the rest of the world.The spells weren't that different from the formulas used in Ultima 5 onward.

Runes were a lot easier to handle logistically than a big bag of reagents.Wished they kept it as an alternative magic system for latter games in the regular Ultima series and UO.

>>3725036
The problem with runes was that you could only have one spell at hand and needed the mouse to prepare a new one. It would have been better to quickly type in a new one instead.

Ultima 6 had already changed the magic system so that you no longer needed to mix reagents in advance.
9 had the most practical implementation. You needed reagents to learn the spell and after that you could drag the spell onto your belt and cast it whenever you wanted.

>>3723039
>>3723346
Arx Fatalis is modern Ultima Underworld.

>>3725081
But it wasn't a quantum leap compared what had been done before.

>>3725081
>>3725090
It was also French and therefore a fake. (Also they couldn't get the Ultima license form EA jews.)

I really hated their version of Level 8 with all the stupid jumping puzzles. And even when I could cast Levitate, the spell actually just makes you float at the same level instead of letting you move up and down. There is no Fly or Jump spell. Fucking stupid frogs.

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Ultima Underworld is a game that caused many to start playing Dungeons and Dragons and the like.
D&D was (and is) just about the only place you were likely to find a dungeon such as the one in Underworld.

It might be worth a look if you're interested. Speciffically old Dungeons and Dragons, though, they don't really make vast, detailed 'mega dungeons' any more. Now they fret about story and narrative and being cinematic just like the modern video game industry does. Bah!

Wish someone did a translation of the Japanese only playstation port of Ultima Underworld, replaces the sprites with 3rd models and a completely redone cd soundtrack.

https://youtu.be/EESQ4-GRQZI

>>3722490
I really liked the first System Shock, so I decided to give the UU games a try since they ran on the same engine, and I ended up quitting after the first few hours

>>3726985
I didn't like the way it controlled. It would have worked better as a DualAnalog game.
I could offer some help with a translation though. I know Japanese and Underworld fairly well.

>>3727172
I hear ps1 romhacking is a pain in the ass though, and it would probably end up being a pretty large project.

>>3726985
Yikes those 3d models. Even for a PS1 that looks real bad..

>>3727794
The framerate is nice though.
Compare the stuttering in Tomb Raider.