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I can now move each character about individually, use missile weapons (a highly recommended strategy that lets me take out many monsters before they can get close enough to damage me), and cast quite a variety of offensive and defensive spells. The new system does add some welcome interest to the old formula. Unlike with Wizardry, combat has never been the heart of Ultima‘s appeal, but that doesn’t mean you don’t spend a lot of time - maybe too much time - in Ultima III engaging in it. The earlier system would obviously be unworkable with a party of four. You can see that on the right above the old Ultima II system of flailing in place on the map screen is on the left. We’ll talk about why that is in just a little bit.Īnd when I run into a couple of wandering orcs for the first time I see another big addition: a separate strategic-combat screen that pops up when a fight begins.
This adds an extra dimension of realism, but proves to be a mixed blessing. When I enter a town for the first time another of Ultima III‘s additions to the old tile-graphics engine becomes clear: a line-of-sight algorithm now prevents me from seeing through walls. Instead the whole screen is now given over to a graphics display, with a character generator, once an exotic piece of technology but by 1983 commonplace, used to put words anywhere on the screen. It no longer uses the Apple II’s mixed display mode that displays text rather than graphics on the bottom four lines of the screen. The same old tile engine that dates back to Ultima I is still in place in both games, but Ultima III changes the screen layout considerably and makes everything a bit more attractive and ornate within the considerable limitations of the Apple II. On the left above is Ultima II, on the right Ultima III. Programming often really is a game of interchangeable parts. One of the fascinating aspects of playing through the Ultima games in order is seeing which pieces are reused from earlier games and which are replaced. With my party created, I’m dumped into Sosaria, right outside the town of Britain and the castle of Lord British in what has already become by Ultima III a time-honored tradition. Finding other adventurers in the game world itself and convincing them to join would become part of the experience of play and an important component of those games’ much richer plots.
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Later games would use the code Garriott first developed here to allow players to have more than one person in their parties, but would start them off with a single avatar. This is actually the only Ultima that works quite this way.
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In Ultima III I get to create and control a full party of four adventurers rather than a single avatar. Garriott would finally get more serious about making an Ultima mythos that makes some kind of sense with the next game, but for now… let’s just say I won’t be spending much more time discussing the plotting or the worldbuilding. This time I’m stuck back on Sosaria again. Also left unexplained, as it was in Ultima II, is why Mondain was on Garriott’s fantasy world of Sosaria and Minax was on our own Earth. I never hear anything about this ghost ship in the game itself. The only thing found was a word written in blood on the deck: EXODUS. Everyone had vanished, as if plucked by some evil force off the boat. A derelict merchant ship was recently towed into port. One possible clue as to the identity of thy nemesis has been discovered.
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Adams III did make a somewhat strained attempt to draw a connection to the expected implications of the word in the manual via a recasting of an old seafaring mystery: It’s simply a cool-sounding word that he takes as the name of his latest evil wizard, the love child of his two previous evil wizards, Mondain from Ultima I and Minax from Ultima II. He draws no connection to its meaning as an English noun or to the Bible.
Garriott was really proud of his game’s subtitle, Exodus, to the extent that in the game itself and most early advertising it’s actually more prominent than the Ultima name. Some spoilers do follow, although Ultima III is tricky enough that you may just welcome whatever little bit of guidance you glean from this post. Less legitimately, there are the usual abandonware sites and ROM collections where you can find the original Apple II version that I play here, but you’re on your own there. If you’re inspired to play Ultima III yourself, know that Good Old Games is selling it in a collection which also contains Ultima I and II. So I decided to try this approach, to balance my usual telling with quite a bit of showing.
Ultima iii docs apple ii how to#
There’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about in Ultima III, to the extent that I wasn’t quite sure how to wedge it all into a conventional review.
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