Hello, I just bought the Ultima bundle and I'm looking forward to play the series, as I've read that this is one of the finest RPGs ever made.

Unfortunately, my free time is limited, and that's why I wanted to ask you all about the storyline: should I start from the very beginning or there are some episodes / chapters / whatever that can be skipped?

The reason I'm asking this is because pretty much everyone says that Ultima VII is the game of the series. As I mentioned above, I don't have that much free time, and I wasn't sure if I could skip the earliest games or if I would be missing a lot of the story and plot.

Thanks for any advice!

PS: Sorry for my lousy English!

The storyline as such didn't really become coherent until Ultima 4, which was the beginning of the Avatar trilogy. The history of the world at that point included the first three, but the summary of their events provided in the game manuals from 4 onward covers them as well as the games themselves do (because there really was very little plot to them).

Depending on how tolerant you are of (potentially very) old graphics and interface styles, Ultima 4 is a reasonable entry point to the storyline. If you want something that looks and handles a little better, Ultima 6 is a reasonable choice. It's also perfectly valid to jump right in with Ultima 7. You'll miss the meaning of some references and might not feel the (intentionally) jarring shift in the tone of the world that occurs between 6 and 7.

A fair number of people have started with 6 or 7 and then played backwards through the series to get a better understanding of where some of the things they saw came from, and that works too.

In terms of understanding the Ultima 7s - Ultima 3 and Ultima 6 have the most relevance in terms of "ah ha" moments, but there are connections to all of the previous ones at some point. Those from 1-3 are (again) mostly dealt with by reading the later summaries and possibly by taking a look at the maps included with the older games.

Make sure to use the patches from the sticky thread. The Ultima games are *very* old, but they were always ahead of their time for their time period. That's not always a good thing though, because especially Ultima VI and VII lacked a lot of refinements in interface or controls. That's where the mods, patches and even source ports come into play, they make the games much more playable. Especially for Ultima VI I'd recommend to play using the Nuvie port with the new interface.

If one really wanted to save time, then U4 is the absolute latest starting point IMO. That is the genesis of the "Avatar" and provides much of the background for 5, 6, and 7. This includes NPC's as well.

However, there are references to 1, 2, 3 as you go farther into the series, so for that reason, I'd suggest playing those first three as well. Plus, you'll be able to see how far the series came in its evolution from the first game up to the last one, which is kind of cool in itself. Be prepared to invest time grinding for experience/items/gold, and unless you want to fill up notebooks with all the info you'll need, you may want to use a walkthrough.

If/when you play U3, IIRC, the GOG version has no music, but I think you can dig around the forum to find how to install it. Granted, the music can wear on a person after a while (just shut it off if that happens), but to me, Ultima music is a big part of those games, and indeed my own personal nostalgia, and being a young teen staying up with my buddy until 4-5 AM while grinding through Britannia, towns, dungeons, etc. "Okay, just one more thing and we'll quit".

Since your time is limited, I agree with others that Ultima IV is the best starting point. You can always go back and try the original trilogy later on if you want to, but you can pick up the salient points of their story pretty easily.

Ultima IV starts the series on an epic path that continues for a long time in the later games.

Thank you all for your replies, much appreciated.

I'll start on Ultima IV and see how it goes. If the game is really interesting I may go back to the first release. Time will tell.

Thank you guys!

well, you already started, but if you're not used to old rpgs I to IV can be somewhat archaic. Keep notes, as in, write down on paper everything. Try random words when talking to npcs (in IV this is crucial, start with name job rune mantra, etc). Print the manuals and keep them close as well.

And yeah, VII is probably the best game in the series, although the combat is weird...

The good news is that if you start with the first trilogy, you can actually blow through them pretty quick. if you set the CPU cycles at a reasonable level in dosbox, you eliminate pretty much all of the wait time from the original game (loading areas, calculating turns, etc.) and it really compacts down the games. I think I finished U1 in something like 2 hours the first time I played it. Even U4 only took me something like 12 hours, compared to an entire summer when I was a kid (granted I knew what I was doing this time!)