RPG Progress Report

[marurun]

If I had the time, sure. I want to play all sorts of stuff and no time to do it in these days.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Ok, cool, glad you guys are enjoying what I write as I explore.

Now for the big question: does my writing about these WRPGs/CRPGs make you want to play them?

100% yes.

[MrPopo]

You might be convincing me to post about my Ultima V playthrough I started if I continue with it.

[Ack]

Do it, robot.

[MrPopo]

Beep boop.

While I lack Ack's flare for the dramatic, I can at least give a bit of an overview of things. So, on Monday I started playing Ultima V, as the rest of what I can play right now consists of the Etrian Odyssey series, Project X Zone, and whatever runs on my Surface Pro 3. The second in the Age of Enlightenment trilogy, Ultima V picks up with you, the Avatar, being informed that trouble has come to Britannia; Lord British is lost to the Underworld and Lord Blackthorne has twisted the Eight Virtues into zealotry. As you step through the moongate you come upon your old companions, Iolo and Shamino, just as three menacing black figures shoot evil beams at Shamino. The power of your amulet drives them off, but you know a confrontation is inevitable. Your path is clear; you must find out what happened to Lord British and put things back to right. As it turns out, the world can't stay saved for ten minutes.

The first thing I was struck by was the massive increase in graphical fidelity. Ultima 4 was obviously tile based, so you had these nice square corners on your mountain ranges. Here they added a ton of half tiles, which might be half hill/half grass, as well as half water/half grass for shoreline. It makes the map much more natural looking, even though it's still tile based movement. The downside is it made my attempt to map it like I did for Ultima 4 folly (compounded with the change in world dimensions and an utter lack of any tools online that give coordinates for anything so I had no baseline for making my map). Fortunately, the map is mostly unchanged from the previous game in terms of locations and general layout. A few new towns have popped up, and one area turned into a desert, but for the most part I can just use my old map. It's nice to see that continuity.

So far all I did was build my party. They redid the class system so that everyone is either a fighter, bard, or mage, with mages having a bunch of spell points, bards having few, and fighters having none. They also reduced the party size to six, but they made combat better (you now get a targeting cursor, which means you can attack diagonally or at weird angles when using a ranged weapon), so I don't think losing the other two will be a problem. There's also more potential companions. So I kicked out Iolo and Shamino and built my lady squad with every single recruitable female; it was just enough for the party. Now the game starts in earnest; I gotta start finding my clues. I've already discovered that it behooves me to make note of who tells me to talk to someone else; with Blackthorn's agents around people have to be much more careful about who they reveal secrets to.

[pierrot]

The basic way it works is that every monster belongs to a family. If a monster of family A eats meat of family B then it will always generate a monster of family C. The specific monster in the family is determined by a formula that involves the rank of each monster involved, with then some logic for there not being a monster of that specific rank (which is fairly common). So you can get something awesome by exploiting that last fact.

This sounds remarkably similar to monster mixing in SMT, but a little less complicated.

[MrPopo]

I'd say it's reasonably close to Persona's fusion (whereas mainline tends to have a ton of small families), with the monster rank replacing the persona level. Also, you can get a high level monster while you can't get high level personas because of the restriction on fusing things above your level.

[Ack]

Excellent, Popo. Show me the ways of Ultima V. I only ever see folks talk about IV at this point, so it's nice to learn about the rest of the IV-VI trilogy.

[MrPopo]

I don't have much interesting for last night; we spent time trying to eradicate the bridge troll population but are so far unsuccessful. The plan is to keep at it until I can get Magic Axes and Magic Bows for the team.

[Ack]

How does combat work in the game? Are you hampered by virtues like in Ultima IV?