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Ultima VI: The False Prophet |
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Ultima VI: The False Prophet
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| Developer(s) | Origin Systems |
| Publisher(s) | Origin Systems |
| Designer(s) | Richard Garriott and Warren Spector |
| Engine | Ultima VI Engine |
| Platform(s) | DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, FM Towns, SNES, PC-9801, X68000 |
| Release date(s) | 1990 1993 (SNES) |
| Genre(s) | RPG |
| Mode(s) | Single Player |
| Rating(s) | Unrated |
| Media | 5.25" or 3.5" floppy disks CD-ROM (DOS/Towns) cartridge (SNES) |
| Input methods | Keyboard and Mouse |
Ultima VI: The False Prophet, released by Origin Systems in 1990, is the sixth part in the computer role-playing game series of Ultima. It was the last in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy.
Some years after Lord British has returned to power, the Avatar is captured and tied on a sacrificial altar, about to be sacrificed by red demon-like creatures, the gargoyles. The Warriors of Destiny suddenly appear, save the Avatar and collect the sacred text the gargoyle priest was holding. In Castle Britannia, the Avatar learns that the shrines of Virtue were captured by the gargoyles and he embarks on a quest to rescue Britannia from the invaders.
This game ended the use of multiple scales; in earlier games a town, castle, or dungeon would be represented as a single symbol on the world map, which then expanded into a full sub-map when entering the structure. In Ultima VI, the whole game uses a single scale, with towns and other places seamlessly integrated into the main map; dungeons are now also viewed from the same perspective as the rest of the game, rather than the first-person perspective used by Ultima I-V. The game kept the basic tile system and screen layout of the three preceding parts, but altered the look into a much more colourful pseudo-isometric view, to take full advantage of the newly-released VGA graphics cards for PCs.
Non-player characters had their portraits shown when talked to, something that would not have been feasible on the classic 8-bit Apple II. It was originally planned that Ultima VI was to continue on with the Apple II series, and through the much more capable 16-bit Apple IIGS, where its advanced graphics, music and mouse interface would been more than suitable to handle the task. In the end a decision to cancel was made due to the declining market size of the Apple II platform, and marked the first time a chapter in the Ultima series was not available for the Apple II (the platform it originated on). It was one of the first major PC games directly targeted to PC systems equipped with VGA graphics and a mouse, when the big "gaming computer" was still the Commodore Amiga. The game supported sound cards for music as well, which were not yet common when it was released. Other sound effects, such as the clashing of swords, magical zaps, or explosions, were still played through the PC speaker. The Amiga version was itself ported from the PC and due to a lack of reprogramming it was very slow. The only 8-bit computer system to which the game was ported was the Commodore 64 due the fact that it still had a very sizable market share. The C64 version lacks many features of the PC version though, not just in aesthetics (no portraits), but also in gameplay (no horses, no working gems, reduced NPC dialogs, simplified quests etc.); it is generally considered much worse than the earlier C64 Ultimas.
The Ultima VI engine was also used for the Worlds of Ultima spin-off series.
A port of the game for FM Towns platform was made primarily for Japanese market.1 This CD-ROM-based version included full speech in both English and Japanese. What is interesting about this version is that the voice acting was recorded at Origin, mostly by the people the characters were based on (with Richard Garriott as Lord British, Greg Dykes as Dupre, etc.), though not all personnel could be reached at the time of recording, so some substitutes were used.
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An ingame cheat for Ultima VI can be accessed in the PC version by having your avatar talk to Iolo with the following phrases:
Spam <enter> Spam <enter> Spam <enter> Humbug <enter>
Ignore any remarks from him. After the four phrases have been mentioned, a menu will pop up when you can access all the different items in the game. (The same "Spam, Spam, Spam, Humbug" string causes an easter egg in the computer game Unreal.). In the C64 version, speak to yourself instead and say the following to get to a similar menu:
I <return> WANT <return> CHEAT <return>
You can see the end-game sequence by executing the end-of-game executable with four command line parameters:
c:\> end.exe v 1 2 3<enter>
The first parameter is used to select the graphics mode. Either VGA, EGA, CGA or Hercules. (v,e,c,h) The other three tell the application how long you took to finish the game in years, months and days respectively. So this would print 1 year, 2 months and 3 days.
The original release of the game had a bug which allowed non-portable objects to be pushed into a bag. Cannons, traps, and even NPCs could be pushed into bags and then taken along with the party. These and other issues were fixed in the 4.5 patch.
The DOS version of Ultima VI is a pure 16-bit real mode DOS program that does not use any specialized, Windows-incompatible DOS extenders or memory management methods, nor any non-standard methods of accessing the hardware; therefore it runs fairly well from the command prompt of all 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows. However, Ultima VI was targeted at ca. 10 MHz 80286 computers, and will not play its PC speaker sounds correctly on any system significantly faster than that. Also, the animations will be too fast and the player character will move much too fast when the mouse is used for movement. As with most DOS games, sound-card based sound is generally not supported under Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista. 64-bit Windows does not support running any DOS games directly, and Ultima VI is no exception.
However, the DOS version of Ultima VI runs reliably, with all intended features present, in a DOSBox environment with the speed set to about 3000 cycles. Using the "normal" emulation core of DOSBox is recommended for better PC speaker sound emulation.
An engine remake project called Nuvie,2 similar to the goals of xu4, Exult3 and Pentagram, is in the works. Not much of the game functionality is implemented yet.
At one time, the for-pay online gaming service Gametap had added Ultima VI to its library of games; it ran more or less correctly on the platform. Due to licensing issues, however, it was removed on December 11, 2007.4
There is a current project to recreate Ultima VI using Dungeon Siege engine.5 Another remake project uses the Exult engine, using graphics from Ultima VII. Ultima 6 Online is an MMO version of Ultima VI.6
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