Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Mugging Guards Makes It Easy…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 5, 2011

So really, it just takes making regular trips to the dungeon north of Lord British’s castle to the two treasure chambers and healing fountain on level 3… easily reached by having the cleric and the wizard cast spells to automatically go down a level — and back up again, when you are done. You get enough money to buy better equipment in Dawn, then enough to take your first trip to Ambrosia and buff up enough to kill groups of guards – often with a single spell. At that point, you can go from level 10 to level 25 (the max level that offers any hit point benefits) in less than an hour.  One more trip to Ambrosia with your ill-gotten gains, and it’s off to the end game.

Ah, yeah. The days when there were no consequences for being evil… nay, not just that, when the designers encouraged you to be evil.  Forsooth!

I’m kind of amazed at how quickly Ultima III can be played if you allow yourself to cheat with maps ‘n stuff. And to be evil. Sure, there’s more to the game – collecting all the marks, finding the exotic weapons and armor, etc. I remember it taking months when I was a kid… mapping out dungeon level after dungeon level, taking copious notes of things the NPCs say, worried that I could be missing a single clue. But apparently it can be won in only a few hours, playing (usually) about 15-20 minutes at a time.


Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



  • Xian said,

    It’s amazing that you can beat it that fast. I spent a very long time beating it, but then I really didn’t know what I was doing. Ultima III was my very first RPG, unless you want to count Gateway to Apshai. I missed a vital clue about the location of Ambrosia, so for a long time I was just wandering Sosaria, exploring every nook and cranny. I accidentally discovered Ambrosia by mistake, though I don’t want to give it away since there may be some first time players with the new GoG release. I think I ended up with over 1,000,000 moves when I completed it. At one time I had run my gold counter over and started again at zero.

    If you notice at the ending screenshot it says “Report Thy Feat!” so I did – I sent a letter to Origin reporting that I had completed the game and I got back a signed certificate of completion from Lord British. Sadly, I have lost it in the many moves I have made since then – I still have the floppies, books, and cloth map, but I can’t find the certificate anywhere.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Bummer. That’d be kind of a cool historical artifact for those who still have ’em.

    Yeah, I have no idea how long it took me on the C-64 back in the day. Months, I think. Time moves differently as a kid.

    In the book, “The Book of Ultima,” it talks about the tradition of playing through the final release candidate before shipping in the company. I think it was Ultima V where Richard Garriott was beaten by one of the testers, finishing the game in about fourteen hours.

  • EHamilton said,

    Time to completion is a good metric for figuring out the balance between “discovery” and “execution” in game design. If you play a game for the first time with no hints/guides, and then play it again with unlimited hints guides, the extra time on the first play-through was the time devoted to discovering mechanics, objectives, etc.

    I suspect that most early RPGs were about 60-90% devoted to discovery components. Games were “difficult” due to the lack of information, not to the skill required for acting on that information. Today, the ratio has inverted, since everyone is so willing to maximize information even during a first play-through. (And yeah, also, because real-time gameplay allows for more execution emphasis.) The default assumption of designers is that players will use some online FAQ or wiki, and so less time is invested in developing discovery-based mechanics. Or else designers spell out for the player exactly how how to use every item, and where to go to complete every quest.

    Which is kind of a shame. Discovering a new mechanic by trial and error is substantially more fun than having someone else explain it to you in advance. I remember the first time I discovered, by accident, what a “fire horn” could do when my bard used it in combat! Up to that point I had been assuming it was just a colorfully named instrument…

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I remember that same moment! It was one of those “holy crap!” moments. And it totally made the difference between dying on the city streets on the way to the shop, and getting third level (or so).

    But you bring up a concern of mine, too. I had a lot of testers take in excess of 30 hours playing through Frayed Knights. I haven’t done a speed-run myself recently, so I’m not sure how long it takes if you know where everything is and make a beeline for the end knowing exactly what everything does, where everything is, and what to do to accomplish every goal.

    For a while I was wondering if that didn’t make adventure games obsolete in the modern era. But while the mainstream games biz has completely abandoned the genre, it’s still going pretty strong indie-style. I know for me, it probably helps me get more fun from my money. I used to only play adventure games until I got brutally stuck and couldn’t solve the problem after a couple of days. And that was the end of it. Now I know there’s always a way out once I get close to the point of frustration. I take the hit to my pride, but get to keep on playing and having fun.

    That’s really a more welcome approach that eliminating that discovery / problem-solving aspect in games altogether.

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