Ultima I

aka: Ultima I: The Beginning..., Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
Moby ID: 12111
Apple II Specs

Description official description

Ultima I is a remake of the classic RPG Ultima from 1981. You must travel to another world and save the land Sosaria from the evil wizard Mondain. The game features tile based top-down overworld graphics and first person perspective pseudo-3D dungeons.

The original Ultima was re-programmed using assembly language, with updated graphics, minor changes in towns' and people's names, and some different puzzles.

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Team Manager
Lead Programmer
Brilliant Programming Efforts
Product Management
Eloquent Writings Herein
Magnificent Illustrations within This Book
Outstanding Graphic and Design Work
Ultima and Lord British are Registered Trademarks of

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 64% (based on 8 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 73 ratings with 5 reviews)

A grand start to a series that has entertained millions.

The Good
For the time this was released, it encapsulates everything good about early RPG games. Exploration, character building, interrogating NPCs, dungeon crawling, a variety of weapons and armours to try, and even a bit of space exploration is all wrapped up in a game that originally came on a 360k diskette. The game can be conquered in a solid afternoon, but still there's enough randomness to it for repeated playing. Character building is quick enough to avoid getting bored, and challenging enough that you'll want to try and max out the character's attributes whenever you get the chance to do so.

The Bad
The story is a tad weak-it's boiled down to simply "build up your character and then kill the boss" but there is something enchanting about this type of tile based RPG that helps me overlook such a thing. I personally believe the addition of Space exploration and becoming a Space Ace is a bit of a bolt-on that the game simply doesn't need (and thankfully any Space references were dropped by the time Ultima 3 was released) Some will claim that the lack of music is a downside of the game, but I'm not a huge fan of music in RPG games anyway-entirely because of the length of time invested in an RPG, the music will end up being shut off anyway due to being too repetitive.

The Bottom Line
The top-down tile based RPG genre was a short-lived one. Grab this game and appreciate the depth of controls and wealth of landscapes to explore, then realize how incredibly early in the history of computer gaming this title was released.
Few other games, aside from purely text based adventures, provide anywhere near as many playable hours in such a small amount of storage space.

DOS · by jeff leyda (1842) · 2006

This game creaks with age but is still fun enough for a couple of hours.

The Good
This was Richard Garriott's first attempt at a commercial game and the start of the epic series of Ultima games. The game incorporates a slightly enhanced version of the Akalabeth 3D dungeons with allegedly the worlds first tile graphics to create the outside world and towns.

The world is quite a decent size for such an old game, with four lands to explore. Each land has several towns and a couple of castles. The kings in each castle give you quests to either kill a creature ala Akalabeth, or to find a particular signpost on the map. This means you usually know what you are trying to achieve throughout the game.

The game isn't in a typical fantasy setting and the technology gets more advanced as you progress. Later in the game there is a space combat section where you get to shoot down little tie fighters which adds a bit of variety.



The Bad
I'm not sure all the technology and space section fit into a fantasy rpg although it does give it an epic feel.

Like most RPG's of the time, you spend most of the game raising stats and money. Raising your experience points fighting doesn't raise your stats however. Instead when you visit signposts on a map, your experience in a particular area is raised. You have to visit a different signpost and come back to raise the same stat again, but this means you just travel back and forwards between pairs of posts and raise your stats in no time. This is a bit strange and not my idea of role-playing.

There is no plot to the game and the towns are little more than a series of shops. There is no one to talk to in these towns beyond the storekeepers.

The final battle with Mondain is a bit of an anti-climax. It takes place on a mostly black screen and ends up with you chasing Mondain all over the screen until he stops moving long enough for you to hit him.

The Bottom Line
This was a worthy role playing game for the time. I still enjoyed playing it in 2008, but would have gotten frustrated had it taken longer than a couple of hours to get through the whole thing.

DOS · by Pix (1172) · 2008

A Confusing Journey Through Space and Time

The Good
Ultima was the first Ultima game I played, even though that was admittedly in early 2007, some 25 years after its initial release. Since then I've also tried some of the newer incarnations, but this is the only one I actually bothered to finish from start till end. That doesn't mean its the best one of the series however. Perhaps merely that it's the shortest? Or perhaps it felt like an achievement.

The whole game took me only about one and a half day to finish.

The game actually features three types of environments, an over-world, cities and castles, and Dungeons. The dungeons are some kind of 3D mazes displayed in vector graphics which is actually rather interesting to got through. even if all the random encounters are exactly the same. The rest is top down 2D goodness.

Quests come in two types, visiting a signpost or killing a certain monster. Neither are particularly challenging. Visiting a signpost actually means exploring the land and looking at a signpost when you see one, which lacks any skill whatsoever. Killing a monster requires more thought from the player as you have to go in a dungeon and actually find such a monster and kill it. The dungeons can be quite the mazes, so you best keep a map on paper. (real paper, not ingame) And buy enough level up spells to get out of the dungeon quickly. Interestingly you get HP when you kill a monster, so usually I had more hit-points when I left the dungeon than when I went in. Weird. There is also no HP ceiling so you can acquire quasi-infinite HP (until the game crashes because it runs out of memory probably).

The Bad
The interface of Ultima is absolutely horrendous. The field of interface design apparently wasn't in existence back in the early eighties, so each action in the game has its own button on the keyboard. Meaning that there are few buttons on your keyboard that you will not use during the course of the game. Each action in the game is bound to the first letter of the action on the keyboard (such as A for attack, C for cast spell and O for open), which is supposed to make memorizing them easier. But in reality this just makes the controls harder, because they are scattered randomly over the keyboard. And it also means that some actions had to be given arbitrary names so not to use the same letter twice (boarding a horse? klimbing a rope?), which makes it still just as difficult to remember. Usually your action will have to be followed with a direction key, so that the game knows in what direction you want to perform this action. Needless to say it is all more complex than it should be.

Like any self-respecting fantasy hero you can also rescue princesses, there's one in every castle. And the jester has the key. So you kill the jester, but unfortunately there's only 50% chance that it is the right key. Boring? Yes Futile? Definitely!

The Bottom Line
My game started rather awkwardly and left me rather confused for the duration of the game. I thought that the game would be a fantasy game, but the first thing my Dwarven Fighter did was steal from Lord British treasury. Which made him the proud owner of a blaster rifle, a light sword and vacuum suit. I then started grinding loot until I could buy an Aircar and fulfilled my Luke Skywalker fantasies. Later came the space shuttle and fighting sequences with TIE-Fighters, which added to the confusion.

All in all Ultima is quite fun to play, but don't expect anything from it story-wise. Don't expect any challenge either, the game is ridiculously easy, even the final boss is dead before you know it. Just make sure you visited all the signposts and did your share of grinding for all the sci-fi gear. Only play it if you're really interested in seeing the roots of this series. Or wonder what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars somehow collided to form some kind of Geek Super World.

DOS · by vedder (70680) · 2008

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Apple IIgs Version. Edwin Drost (9295) Feb 11, 2017
Sharp X1 Edwin Drost (9295) Jan 30, 2017
Regaining your Health. Edwin Drost (9295) Jan 26, 2017
Health Donatello (466) Jan 28, 2013

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Ultima I appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Extras

Origin, like they did with many of the Ultima games, included a "trinket" in the box. In this case the trinket consisted of a small cloth bag with five metal coins.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Unicorn Lynx.

Apple IIgs added by Edwin Drost. PC-88, Sharp X1, PC-98 added by Terok Nor. MSX added by koffiepad. Windows added by eWarrior.

Additional contributors: MAT, Iguana, jlebel, FatherJack.

Game added February 15, 2004. Last modified February 13, 2024.