A Look Back At Ultima VII

The guys over at RPGDot let us know that they’ve written up a review of what is my personal all-time favorite Ultima game, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and its expansion, Ultima VII: Serpent Isle. With the fan-created Exult engine, this classic is now able to work on modern day PCs… and after reading through their review, I think I might just fire it up again. Here’s a bit of what they had to say:

I just replayed this first few moments using Exult, the fan project, that let’s the Ultima 7 games run under Windows 32bit systems and you can even raise the graphics resolution to 800×600, which gives you a lot more overview in the gaming window. The atmosphere of both Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle is simply great, the stories are great, the immersiveness is unlevelled until today. You can manipulate almost every single object, use it, take it, sell it. You can bake your bread or forge your sword. You can turn on and off lanterns, there’s a sign in almost every road of a city with its location name on it! You can attend a theatre performance. You can eat, drink, smoke, play instruments and so on! In short: you can do almost everything. A lot of modern games can do some of these things too, but no other game, not even any other Ultima offered a such complete world with all these features.