Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

aka: Ultima V: Shukumei no Senshi
Moby ID: 808
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

The Avatar, the embodiment of the Eight Virtues and the hero of Britannia, is called back to deal with a grave threat. Lord British, the country's benevolent monarch, has disappeared, and a man named Blackthorn has usurped his throne. The tyrant rules the land by enforcing the virtues upon the will of the people, corrupting their meaning in the process. His fundamentalist visions led him to create a police state, where failure to adhere to the virtues is punishable by death. Behind Blackthorn are the three Shadowlords, anti-thesis to the three principles of Truth, Love, and Courage. The Avatar must understand their meaning and origins, find a way to defeat them, rescue Lord British, and restore the former ethical principles of Britannia.

Ultima V uses the basics of the Ultima IV engine, an overhead perspective for the map of Britannia and its towns, and a rosette-compass 3D view for the dungeons. The battle system also resembles that of the previous game, with separate battle screens and navigation of character icons in turn-based style. Many of the gameplay elements of the predecessor return, including the complex spell system (reagents must be bought in order to cast spells), recruitable party members, moongates that teleport the party between locations, various means of transportation (horses, ships, etc., with the notable addition of a magic carpet), and so on. Character creation based on morally ambiguous questions and basic leveling up system have been preserved as well. In comparison to the predecessor, the classes have been reduced to four.

Additional challenges include navigating characters through the Underworld, a vast underground area containing many hazards; random presence of Shadowlords in the cities, which influences the behavior of their inhabitants, making them run away, steal from, or attack the Avatar; inscriptions in a runic alphabet that must be deciphered by the player, and others.

The game has a noticeably more detailed world than any of its predecessors; the towns are much larger, with many unique buildings and objects represented graphically. Ultima V introduces physical interaction with the game world: many objects can be pushed or pulled, the main character can sit down on a chair (which is graphically shown), etc. It also incorporates a day/night cycle and schedules for non-playable characters: for example, it is impossible to shop at night because the shopkeepers are sleeping. Dialogues with NPCs have been enhanced, featuring more unique and detailed conversation topics.

Spellings

  • ウルティマV - Japanese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

28 People · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 85% (based on 17 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 120 ratings with 9 reviews)

Best of the Ultimas

The Good
This could very well be my all-time favorite RPG.

Warning, author is biased and probably nuts

Ultima IV was supposed to have been the last in the Ultima series (never fear, if it makes money, they'll keep doing it, that is, until they get so old that they can't walk and chew gum at the same time, let alone act--admittedly, they never could do that when young either--...what?!...oh, sorry, I was on a Star Trek trip).

Back to the normal programming

So after playing Ultima IV, which has a great plot, I thought, "This is it. This is the end of the world. It can't get any better than this. There is nothing better to look forward to in my generation anymore." Then, BAM!!! Lord British dishes out Ultima V like the good bro he his and we're off to la-la-land (i.e. Britannica) again.

As good as the Final Fantasy series is, I still like Ultima IV and V better. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's the icon based combat system, which I like better than the Final Fantasy combat system. Maybe because Ultima was the first to weave an interesting plot into an RPG (IV's plot is better than V). Or maybe it was because Ultima was the first RPG where you recruited other characters in the world to join your adventuring team. Except for the combat system, a good RPG game today has all the elements that Ultima V had. So in that sense, Ultima V is probably past it's prime. But when it first came out, it was so far above every other game in its genre that Jack couldn't even get up there with his bean stalk.



The Bad
Now that I've pumped it up so much, you will hate it when you go play it yourself. Oh, well. No sense clinging on to the past when the future is beckoning. Time to do that Final Fantasy thing one last "final" time!

The Bottom Line
Ultima V was the climax of the whole series (now up to 9). Play Ultima IV first for the plot. Then play V and savor it. If you can't make yourself stop, go ahead and play VI. But from VI to VII is a huge cliff drop. Don't go there, and don't come crying to me if you do!

DOS · by Yeah Right (50) · 2000

the best game of it's time - ever

The Good
this game is sooooo detailed. I liked the way you could type random things into communicate with other characters and sometimes you'd hit gold. I loved the hidden stuff - I'm that sort of person - in any rpg I head straight into the undergrowth looking for stuff and this game has plenty of non-plot related goings on for people who like that. did anyone else shiver when they found the jesters body in the cellars of lord british's castle - I still never found out what was going on... before I managed to get a copy on my pc I kept my atari st alive for the sole purpose of revisiting this game occasionally. I still haven't finished it.

The Bad
can't think of much - in retrospect the graphics are a tad clunky but it is old...

The Bottom Line
a many layered object that improves the more layers you investigate...

DOS · by sarah mccormick (1) · 2002

My favorite Ultima, and quite probably my favorite computer game of all time.

The Good
Storyline, total non-linear playability, music (sadly, not on the PC distribution), characters, and graphics (slightly more detailed than the Ultima IV tiles, but much better looking overall).

The Bad
Again, the lack of music on the PC version. Go get an Apple or Commodore emulator and play this game there to hear the great tunes!

The Bottom Line
Absolutely one of the finest games of all time. I even made a website for it!

DOS · by Mirrorshades2k (274) · 2000

[ View all 9 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Was this game really released for the PC8801? Lifeinsteps (1) Nov 2, 2022
Another different Front Cover and a question Edwin Drost (9295) Dec 11, 2017

Trivia

Atari 8-bit version

An early prototype Atari 8-bit version of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny was made, but never released. It can be found on the internet (there's even at least one video of it on YouTube), and offers nothing more than the game's main menu and credits screen.

Extras

Original boxes of Ultima V included a symbol stamped coin representing The Codex from within the plot and in some cases with a cloth map of the world.

FLIPFLOP

In the Apple II version of the game (and possibly others, though not the DOS version), yelling FLIPFLOP outdoors would cause each tile on the screen to invert itself, top to bottom. This is quite bizarre -- check the screenshots page to see it in action. Yelling it again will restore the tiles to their normal status.

Music

  • There is no music in PC version, but there exist a freeware patch that adds all the glorious music from C-128/Apple versions to play properly with the PC version as MIDI.
  • Contrary to popular belief, the Commodore 64 version did not have any music. The music was only available to those who had a Commodore 128 and started the game in Commodore 128 mode. Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny was one of very few games that gave particular attention to the Commodore 128.

References: Electronic Arts

  • ORIGIN founder Richard Garriott has always had a bit of a grudge against Trip Hawkins, co-founder of Electronic Arts, because he didn't like their treatment as an EA affiliated label. Not only did he name a mausoleum after him (Pirt Snikwah backwards) in his Britannia Manor (a house in Austin, Texas, designed and used for creepy real-life RPG's), but, more related, he also made him appear in Ultima V as shipwright Hawkins.
  • There has long been animosity between EA and Origin. Just dig through the Ultima V binaries. Ultima V had a list of swear words that, when used in conversation, would result in the response 'With language like that how didst thou become an Avatar?!'. In this swear word list in the binaries were the usual 4 letter words as well as 'Electronic Arts'.

References

  • Many of the people in Ultima 5 are constructed from other Origin employees or friends of Richard Garriot - one example is Christopher in West Britanny, modeled after Chris Roberts of Times of Lore and Wing Commander fame.
  • The name of captain Johne's ship is Ararat. According to the Bible, that is also the name of the mountain where Noah's ark landed after the flood. Quite an appropriate name for a ship that's run ashore.

Remake

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny has been remade by fans in 2005 using the Dungeon Siege engine. It is a highly ambitious attempt to reconstruct the original title, including an enhanced plot, and adds strategy elements and updates conversational mechanisms to resemble modern game dialog systems. It is free for download from the TeamLazarus homepage (See Links section).

Smith

In the stable near Iolo's Hut, you'll find Smith (a talking horse). If you talk with him, he'll give you a "very important clue" -- however, the clue is for Ultima IV. Apparently, the Ultima IV design team forgot to include the clue so they put it in Ultima V as a joke. This tradition has since carried on throughout subsequent Ultima games.

Awards

  • ACE
    • 1989/1 (issue #16): ACE Adventure Awards 1988 - "Game of the year" (editorial choice)
    • 1989/1 (issue #16): ACE Adventure Awards 1988 - "Best RPG-influenced game of the year" (editorial choice)
    • February 1991 (issue #41) - Included in the list Greatest Games of all Time, section Role-Playing Games (editorial staff choice)
  • Amiga Power
    • May 1991 (Issue #00) - #18 in the "All Time Top 100 Amiga Games"* Computer Gaming World
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #14 Most Memorable Game Villain (Pirt Snikwah)
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #42 Top Game of All Time
  • ST Format
    • January 1990 (issue #06) - Included in the list 50 Games of the Year

Information also contributed by Eisentel, jlebel, Mattias Kreku, Mirrorshades2k, rstevenson, Sciere, SimonG and Timo Takalo

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Related Sites +

  • Exodus Project
    Here you can find various upgrades to Ultima games, including an Ultima V patch that adds MIDI music to the DOS version.
  • TeamLazarus Homepage
    including the download links for Ultima V: Lazarus.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 808
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by George Shannon.

PC-88 added by Trypticon. Commodore 128 added by Rola. Apple II added by KnockStump. Sharp X68000, FM Towns added by Terok Nor. PC-98 added by Unicorn Lynx. Atari ST added by Belboz. Amiga, Commodore 64 added by Jeanne. Windows added by eWarrior.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, SGruber, Patrick Bregger, Jo ST, RetroArchives.fr, Kayburt.

Game added January 28, 2000. Last modified March 27, 2024.