Spotted on the Ultima Codex:

Ever Wondered What “Ultima 7: The Black Gate” Would Look Like As a 1980s Dark Fantasy Film?

AI art generation technologies — DALL-E, Midjourney, and others — have been growing in popularity and capability, especially over the last year or so. What is more, whereas early iterations of these technologies required considerable amounts of GPU and computing power, their modern incarnations can run on more modest hardware; browser-based solutions are also readily available.

So it should come as no surprise that someone has taken it upon themselves to put together a series of still images imagining what different scenes and characters from Ultima 7: The Black Gate would look like had the game been brought to life as a dark fantasy film in the mid-1980s. This, granted, was years prior to the game itself being released, but fantasy films from that era did have a certain aesthetic to them.

The results are pretty impressive. Most of the characters and scenes are instantly recognizable (though if you’re at all confused, you can find a complete, timestamped index on the video’s YouTube page), and some of the renderings are particularly spot-on.

The CRPG Addict looks back at Ultima VII Part I: The Black Gate:

Summary:
  
The Avatar returns to Britannia in this seventh entry. He's been gone 200 years by the Britannian calendar, and while some things are the same (Lord British still rules; most of the old companions are still around), the world has advanced in technology to roughly Victorian-era levels. Lord British's rule has become apathetic: the Britannian Tax Council oppresses the populace; the caste system is stronger than ever; something is disrupting the use of magic and driving magic-users insane; and a philosophical/ religious organization with sinister undertones is converting the people away from the traditional virtues of the Avatar. The Avatar is thrust into this mess in the context of a serial murder investigation that takes him from one crime scene to another.
       
Ultima VII is a seminal entry in not only the Ultima series but games in general. It pioneered the open-world, sandbox environment, and it popularized the idea of the "unobtrusive interface," in which the entire screen is the game window, and interfaces for character sheets, inventory, and other game elements pop up as needed, pausing the action behind them. The game otherwise features most of the elements that people like about Ultima, including an engaging plot that moves the player across the map, finding clues in documents and NPC conversations in towns, castles, and dungeons. However, it falters in elements specific to RPGs, including character development and combat, and a somewhat inflexible narrative makes it difficult to fully appreciate the open-world design.

As a writer, I like to do the talking myself, but occasionally another writer says something so perfectly that I can't possibly improve upon it. This is the case with a portion of Jimmy Maher's excellent article on Ultima VII, published in February 2019. Maher argues that "classic games" that everyone remembers fondly come in basically two types. The first is those that do everything right, like Ultima Underworld. As for the second:     

The other archetypal classic game is much rarer: the game whose designers have made a lot of really problematic choices, to the point that certain parts of it may be flat-out broken, but which nevertheless charms and delights due to some ineffable spirit that overshadows everything else. Ultima VII is the finest example of this type that I can think of. Its list of trouble spots is longer than that of many genuinely bad games, and yet its special qualities are so special that I can only recommend that you play it.

[...]

To celebrate Ultima VIIs 28th anniversary the latest version of Exult (1.6) has been released.

17 April 2020

Exult 1.6 has been released to celebrate Ultima VII's 28th birthday!

Almost ten years after the version 1.4.9rc1, 16 years after the last stable version (v1.2) and 28 years after the official release of Ultima VII - The Black Gate (16 April 1992), we are finally ready to release a new version. With many developers busy with their real life and most having moved on, it took us this long. We have been busy squashing more of the inexplicable crashes but these changes will force us to stop supporting some ancient operating systems.
That's why we decided to release one last version of Exult, Exult Studio and Exult's tools for the old OS' before moving on with development. For really old Windows operating systems (95/98/ME/NT/2000) we prepared a legacy download.
So please grab the new version available on our download page.
The source tarball and the Debian package will be uploaded at a later date.
Please play with it and tell us of any problem you encounter using the forum or bug tracker.

A brief list of the most important changes in Exult since v1.4.9rc1:

• Shortcut bar with important shortcuts right on top of the screen (thanks Litchie)
• Switch to SDL2 - important for up to date OS'
• NxBR and HQ3x/HQ4x scalers
• Option to drop stacks of items without confirmation
• Some more combat options to make charmed combat more difficult
• Schedules got a work-over and are more closer to the original but not yet perfect
• NPCs using beds are sleeping better now
• Paperdoll support of wearing diapers
• Portable option for Windows
• Separate settings for fullscreen and windowed mode possible
• HighDPI mode available on macOS
• Better pathfinding when the party boards a barge
• Fixed most inexplicable crashes
• Serpent Isle Beta version works
• Cleaned up the code in many places and fixed many compiler warnings
• Tons of bugfixes

But we do have known issues:

• Some crashes due to some cached-out objects, we are working on this in another branch which will be the main snapshot after this release
• Antimagic rain caused by the cube generator is not dissipating as fast as it should
• Exult does not show the "you have beaten Ultima VII in n days" message
• Exult does not return to the game menu after beating the game (instead it quits)
• The BG intro does not have the proper sound effects
• Fire Elementals cannot walk across lava
• Some schedules need more detailed love
• Several bugs that need more in-depth looking at but no plot-stopping bugs
• When you disable "Gumps pause game", certain events might only happen after you close all gumps

 

The Digital Antiquarian checked out Ultima VII:

Ultima VII

From the time that Richard and Robert Garriott first founded Origin Systems in order to publish Ultima III, the completion of one Ultima game was followed almost immediately by the beginning of work on the next. Ultima VI in early 1990 was no exception; there was time only for a wrap party and a couple of weeks of decompression before work started on Ultima VII. The latter project continued even as separate teams made the two rather delightful Worlds of Ultima spinoffs using the old Ultima VI engine, and even as another Origin game called Wing Commander sold far more copies than any previous Ultima, spawning an extremely lucrative new franchise that for the first time ever made Origin into something other than The House That Ultima Built.

But whatever the source, money was always welcome. The new rival for the affections of Origin’s fans and investors gave Richard Garriott more of it to play with than ever before, and his ambitions for his latest Ultima were elevated to match. One of the series’s core ethos had always been that of continual technological improvement. Garriott had long considered it a point of pride to never use the same engine twice (a position he had budged from only reluctantly when he allowed the Worlds of Ultima spinoffs to be made). Thus it came as no surprise that he wanted to push things forward yet again with Ultima VII. Even in light of the series’s tradition, however, this was soon shaping up to be an unusually ambitious installment — indeed, by far the most ambitious technological leap that the series had made to date.

As I noted in my article on that game, the Ultima VI engine was, at least when seen retrospectively, a not entirely comfortable halfway point between the old “alphabet soup” keyboard-based interface of the first five games and a new approach which fully embraced the mouse and other modern computing affordances. Traces of the old were still to be found scattered everywhere amidst the new, and using the interface effectively meant constantly switching between keyboard-centric and mouse-centric paradigms for different tasks. Ultima VII would end such equivocation, shedding all traces of the interfaces of yore.

[...]

Thanks henriquejr!

The jet black cover to Ultima VII was memorable, and it made an impact. But there was almost another cover, and it's been revealed.

It's hard to believe that it has been nearly 25 years since I first laid eyes on the jet black cover of Ultima VII: The Black Gate, but perhaps the odd cover somehow helped to cement the RPG's significant place in video game history. Or maybe not, and it would have been even more successful had it sported the cover that was originally intended (Patreon contributors only) by artist Denis Loubet. We'll never know, but it's certainly cool to check out the cover that was proposed rather than the one that Origin ended up shipping the game with:

This is my cover to Ultima 7:The Black Gate from an alternate timeline where Origin Systems decided to go with an illustrative cover rather than a flat black, high-concept, box.

Here we have the Avatar with his companions, standing in a river of blood as the Guardian pulls the strings of the Fellowship in the background. The blood, of course, represents the gruesome murders which the Avatar and his party must investigate. This is all in a grim and somber color palette to highlight the melancholy nature of the plot. The Avatar's downcast eyes search for clues to end the bloody doings of Batlin and his zealots. (Sorry about the spoiler!)

As you can see, I've got The Avatar in front, Iolo with a crossbow on the right, Dupre on the left, with Jaana just behind him. You will also notice that the Guardian has ears. This is because when I did the animation of the Guardian poking his head through the screen and talking to the player, he didn't poke his head all the way through the screen. He simply did not push his face through far enough to reveal his ears. A happy "coincidence" of this rationale is that I did not have to model the Guardian's ears in 3D with the crappy tools I had available at the time. You'll notice the Guardian's face in that animation is made up of very simple shapes that overlap; This was by design. I knew I couldn't do a realistic face at that time, so I went for simple and cartoony.

The lead designer of Ultima 5: Lazarus and Mass Effect: Andromeda Ian Frazier asks this on the Ultima Dragons Facebook page:

Ok, one more question and then I promise I'll shut up for a while. :)

How much interest, if any, would you have in a remake of Ultima VII (both parts together as a single whole, with Forge of Virtue included but perhaps not Silver Seed), using the latest and greatest tech and significant overhauling of both combat and general usability? World sim features like day/night, weather, and NPC schedules would still exist but would be much more robust. New narrative content and polish added, but no significant deviation in the story itself.

Essentially I'm saying "Lazarus for U7, but with much higher production values."

The Extra Credits Youtube channel uploaded a new eight minute video retrospective of Ultima VII: The Black Gate. Some of you may enjoy it so give it a watch.

James Recommends Ultima VII, a groundbreaking game that set the bar for open world, exploration rich CRPGs. It remains a classic to this day, revered as one of the best RPGs ever made with over 200 hours of gameplay in a immersive medieval fantasy world. While the graphics and UI systems have grown clunky with age, the powerful narrative with famous characters like the Guardian make it well worth playing today.

This is a cool one..a project to map Ultima VII using Google's mapping services...

GOG has released a "Complete Edition" of Ultima VII, with Ultima 7: The Black Gate, Ultima 7: Forge of Virtue, Ultima 7 Part Two: Serpent Isle, Ultima 7 Part Two: The Silver Seed bundled for $5.99.

Thanks, Charles!

Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Adam Smith writes about the game that made him a "gamer" - Ultima VII:

More than anything, Ultima VII was the game that first made me realise I preferred worlds that moved around me rather than worlds that I simply moved through. The way that worlds come alive for me can be in the history-changing sweep of a grand strategy game or something as simple as the addition of day-night cycles. It can be an attempt to simulate an ecosystem or something as simple as enemies actually dropping the equipment I can see they were carrying seconds before they crumpled to the ground. It all adds to the sense of existing in a world, which adds to my enjoyment of creating narrative in that world. And Ultima VII was one of the places that form of creativity first sparked for me.

Ultima Aiera has another bunch of design documents courtesy of former Origin programmer Bil Randolph, this time for Ultima VII:

Specifically, the documents — all of which appear to be internal documents from Origin Systems — discuss the conversation syntax of the game and its technical implementation, the object design of the game, the in-house map editor that Origin developers used to construct the Ultima 7 game world, and much more! The most interesting detail about all of these documents, however, is that they are in fact focused on a very early version of the game, which is different in several ways from what was finally shipped.

Exult for Ultima VII was updated last week - time for another trip through one of the best games ever made:

Exult 1.4.9rc1 has been released!
It took us over six years, but with DNF seemingly getting ready to be released after all, we had to do something. To prepare for a full release, we have created a first Release Candidate, available on our download page. Please play with it and tell us of any problem you encounter using the forum or bug tracker.

If you have followed the news this list is likely already familiar to you, but we did a lot with Exult in the years since 1.2:

• Compatible with the stricter permissions of Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Rewrite of the Graphics system to allow switching to full screen on modern systems
• Better integration into Mac OS X with default location for the supported games
• Smooth scrolling (disabled by default, though)
• Aspect correction is now supported
• More data from the original has been decoded and thus improved gameplay and combat
• In-game Notebook with support for automatic notes (notes created by usecode)
• Integrated Pentagram's audio system which means support for real Roland MT-32 device, Roland MT-32 emulation and FluidSynth
• Removed dependency of the audio system on SDL_Mixer
• New shapes for the paperdolls
• Tons of bugfixes

There have been many changes to Exult Studio and our support for mods as well:

• Multi-map support for new games
• Moved hard-coded information to datafiles
• Increased limits on resource sizes (shapes, frames, etc)
• Greatly improved compiler tools to ease new game development

Crispy Gamer writes in to say the second part of their Richard Garriott interview is up, continuing the conversation about Ultima:

Crispy Gamer: I know you’ve talked about it in the past in other interviews, but if you could, would you do another Ultima game?

Garriott: Absolutely, no doubt about it.

Crispy Gamer: So where would you start? Would you want to create a brand-new story with new characters?

Garriott: Well, I’d probably include a number of the key companions, but I probably would star in what I call a brave new world — in the sense that I would build new cities, and new storylines around the same characters.

Crispy Gamer: I know you probably have a design document lying somewhere around your house…

Garriott: While there’s been plenty of discussion on the subject for years, with myself and my team, frankly there’s nothing written — just a lot of thoughtful talk amongst many of us who were involved in the Ultima property who would love to continue to be involved with it. It’s hard to say what the future holds with that.

...and there's a sort of third-part bonus section:

Crispy Gamer: So what are you doing with your time now? Are you taking some time off or planning something exciting?

Garriott: I'm extremely embroiled in the privatization of space travel. Technically I am now a Space Adventures employee. My job title is Astronaut, and I'm now helping them work with other companies that are out building rockets to take people to space -- and that's everyone, from people you know well, like John Carmack of id Software -- who's got a company called Armadillo Aerospace -- and Elon Musk of PayPal fame, who's got a company called SpaceX, etc. I'm a big believer in both the importance and viability of taking people into space and lots of other people in our industry seem to be getting into this these days as well. While by no means is my time in gaming done, I'm spending time on this while it's fresh to me.

First part of RG interview up at Crispy with lots of Ultima talk.

Frankly, Ultima I, II and III weren’t related to each other at all, in the sense that their stories weren’t connected. Ultima IV, V and VI were only related to each other in that I kind of realized that the series was going to go on for awhile, so I tried to pick up where I left off with each game.

Ultima VII (for me, the most important moment for the series since Ultima IV) was the first time I really sat down and said, “OK, what am I really trying to accomplish with this game?” I was trying to do things like set up stories and characters that would survive for more than one product. I had seen how people were reading into the philosophy I had put together with Ultima IV, V and VI, and so I was trying to — what you describe as “tearing down” — open it up, and say there are lots of other forms of thought that are either just as good or positive, or that might also seem good or positive but are actually quite dark. So I was trying to drive what I call alternatives.

Ultima IV, Ultima VII and Ultima Online are my favorites. And for me, the reason why VII that was true for was because it was a game where I most completely realized the virtual world I was trying to create. In other words, the depth of interaction and responsiveness of the world it played in.

Corvus Elrod's blog has a piece on sub-optimal paths (what I'll call "taking the scenic route"), using U7 as a prime example.  Here's an excerpt:

A great, perhaps even the greatest, example of a game that effectively uses sub-optimal paths for narrative purposes is Ultima VII: The Black Gate (U7). Amusingly, U7 also provides a ridiculously optimal route via a cheat room that was inserted into the game in order to give one of the studio’s speed run competitors an unfair advantage. The cheat room provides the player with all the items needed to complete the game and direct teleporter access to the final confrontation. I highly recommend playing through U7 twice–the first time by using the cheat room and finishing the game in easily under 20 minutes. The second time by following and completing every single possible sub-quest in the game. If you have the time and are so inclined, play through a third time following only the central plot. You can then make up your own mind which makes for a better gameplay experience–the optimal path(s), or the sub-optimal path.