Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

Guest poster Ocean shares his thoughts on another classic rpg:

This is a reallly old game, probably one of my first RPGs. It's Ultima V. Time to try it out!

Here you can pick to name your character and go through the character creation part.

Woah woah woah I'm sure it might be interesting but I have a world to save. Let's just create my character! I'm sure I'll have a bunch of stats to distribute, picking my classes and skills and all.

I guess I'll pick the 2nd option. So she asks a bunch of other questions, then I wonder when we'll get to the character creation part... until you realize this IS the character creation part! You pick a choice for each question depending on your morals (or if you know the game well enough, to go to the class you want), and at the end you get the class assigned to you. If you chose Honesty, I believe you'll be more a wizard class for example.

...it is an old game, you might have to forgive the graphics, even if the floor is hard to look at. Anyway, how this game controls is that pretty much every key in the keyboard has some purpose! You see the get/search commands there? You press G for get, and S for search, and then the direction. Just about all the keys are used! In fact, some keys are already in use so you get weird stuff like Klimb, X-it, Zstats and all.

Not the most elegant equip screens, but you can Ready your characters and equip any new weapons/armor you find. What I disliked though, is that as far as I know, you don't have the stats of the weapons/armor available to you. So you can't really tell how much damage or range a weapon has (short of trying it) or defense for armor.

Day/Night system. Basically, when it's night: Stuff closes, stronger enemies come out, and you can't see well at all. Torches are helpful for this purpose. You have a limited amount so you can't go crazy with them.

Time to fight! You move your characters up one space each. Faster characters can get another turn quicker. Then depending on your weapon, you can attack some spaces away. Melee weapons tend to have a range of 1, while ranged weapons tend to require arrows and have a range of 4-8 or so.

They're nice enough to leave items behind usually. I got a nice stack of items from this fight!

Run run run run run. Actually, by now there's really not much point. I'm poisoned so in a few steps I'll be down anyway, and I'm too far from town.

Anyway I'm revived and in Lord British's castle! Now to pilfer everyones stuff.

You find some Scale Mail, Ring Mails and stuff. The chain mail I had on was better, but I wouldn't have known because you don't know your equipments stats.

You can talk to people! You can usually ask them about their job, their name, and usually from their job they'll give you some descriptions to go off of. Basically using keywords to respond to people. Talk to some people about that you don't like Blackthorn, and they may trust you enough to go speak to a certain person. Some new dialogue options come up if you talk to a certain person about some topics. For example, if you join the Resistance, you can get a password that you can use for other Resistance members so they can open up to you. In this case, I'm just begging her for fooood.

Well I do!

Time to make some money.

You need food as well. I *think* food is just used when you're camping out in the middle of nowhere, but I could be wrong. I just take from any plates of food and harvest peoples crops. I'm not even sure if that's perfectly fine or if it's some kind of crime. Anyway, you can also buy foood from people, like wines, meats, cheeses and rations.

Something silly, but you can put a coin in the wells and wish for something. 99% of the time you won't get anything. But there is actually a bit of a cheat in the wells in 2 of the towns where you could wish for a horse... and get it.

I guess it's game over time for me again so I'll end it here!

There's also other things you can do in the game. There's shrines that if you know the virtue and keyword for it, you can be awarded a quest. I probably would not be able to without a walkthrough. This game doesn't take notes so you have to either remember it all or write it down. I'd say write it. If you're misbehaving, the guards can go after you. You can pay a bribe, try (and usually fail) to fight them, or go to jail. You have some keys, so you could try to break out, or sometimes wait for a guy to come along and sell you keys so you can break out. You can even hire a horse, get a boat and sail off, recruit some other characters, and things like that. It's a very big game with a lot to do.