Re: "8 Classic Games You Haven't Played (but should)"

On Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:30:02 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Mike S <Mike_S@nowhere.com> wrote at 14:04 this Thursday (GMT):

On Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:17:45 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>

What's so special about Ultima IV as I had it on the Atari ST, never got
into it but I do still have the original box although I've lost that
cloth map, and I also now have it on GoG as a freebie.
>
Is it actually worth playing now just to see what it's all about?

>
There is no Ultimate Bad Guy(tm) to defeat in Ultima 4. You have to
become the Avatar by following the eight virtues. Some of them include
Honor, Sacrifice, Humility, Honesty and Justice. Fail at any of them
and you can't complete the game.
>
What I personally really enjoyed was exploring Britannia and its towns
and talking to all of the people. When you talk to them, you have to
pick up on 'keywords' and type them in to continue the conversation.
>
So If a character you talk to says 'This is Moonglow! The town of
honesty!. You then can type 'honesty' and the NPC will say more.
Ultima 5 takes this much further as conversations in that game are
more in-depth.
>
I like old games, especially RPGs,  so it is was definitely worth
playing for me.

>
>
That seems like a realyl creative way to "respond" to a NPC without
resorting to dialouge trees (not that they're neccesarily bad). I kinda
wish more games implemented something like that.

It used to be rather common in games. It does suffer from the fact
that you can often bypass entire portions of the quest if you know the
keywords ahead of time. For instance, in Ultima 5 there's an entire
miniquest to get a grappling hook (necessary to bypass the smaller
mountains in the game) that has you going back and forth across the
continent. But if you know ahead of time, you just run straight to the
guy who has it and say "grappling hook" and he gives it to you. ;-)

(Some games protected against this by raising quest flags that had to
be triggered first but that often caused other problems).

Plus, there's no personality to just shouting keywords at NPCs.
Ultima's "Avatar" protagonist was frequently lampooned as some goon
who shuffled into town and shouted "Name! Job! Bye!" (the three most
commonly used keywords) because for the vast number of NPCs, that's
all he'd say to them. Dialogue trees allowed the writers to insert
some identity into the characters.