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I bought this long time ago.
Reviews seems to be still great, but i have to say this was a huge mistake. Im not sure if issues can be fixwd after years, so i want to ask you.

Is there any patch, port, anything to make this game playable for humans?

Reality is quite sad, maybe its funny classic RPG, BUT this game is pure nightmare if we´re talking about controls and its sensitivity. Stuff for nerds which are happy with extremely clunky mouse controls and game speed which looks like10 FPS at best?

I remember many 90s RPs with slow controls, but this is extreme patience trainer, not a game.
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Patejl: this game is pure nightmare if we´re talking about controls and its sensitivity. Stuff for nerds which are happy with extremely clunky mouse controls and game speed which looks like10 FPS at best?
what, specifically, would you change? what could be better with the controls?

i created an UltimaHacks project which is a patch that changes the controls a little, but perhaps not in the ways you're looking for:

https://github.com/JohnGlassmyer/UltimaHacks

do you have any specific ideas for how to make it better / faster / whatever?
Not sure what you're looking for, but there's also Exult; http://exult.sourceforge.net/download.php
What to change?
Mouse for movement combined with clunky movement and overal bad response turns any exploration of world into pain. Walking with arrows or WASD and interaction with SPACE etc. would be at least still better than this jerky dance of your hero behind the mouse cursor. Sadly, Exult port fixes only some smaller issues, but keep controls and response untouched.
Only thing that could be better without bigger changes are game fonts, those default are truly horrible, uneasy to read itself and absence of dialog archive / diary in game doesnt help at all.

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I completed bunch of 90s dungeons and all of them had more user friendly and faster controls than those damned late Ultimas. I like amout of details and features in U7, its very impressive for early 90s, but playing them is more a test of patience than fun with RPG videogame as we know today. For same reason I never finished Underworld Ultimas, despite i like them a lot. Im just not so big masochist to continue in game where every simple action takes too much time thans to controls.
Totaly different engines, but similar level of clunkyness and frustration, those are 90s Ultimas.

Paradoxly, ancient Ultima IV with need to remember lot of keyboard keys to play is still more comfortable to play than experience from U7. No music,minimal sounds,and no VGA in U4 sucks, but at least it works faster and more playable.

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Funny thing,
while I looked around to find something for more comfortable playing of older ultimas 4-6 I found page of guy working on Ultima 7 revisited, remake of U7 into real 3D engine which could solve all problems with jerky controls and movement. And I sudently saw my comment in there. I hope he will finish that one day. :-)

https://www.u7revisited.com/
It is completely playable by humans, as so many of us have and have enjoyed it. The old control system would be would be awful as the game exists, and while I enjoyed the old combat system more than 7's, 7 was better in just about every way (okay the backpack certainly had it's flaws as well). 5 is only one I would possibly consider better (I go back and forth on whether 5 or Black Gate is my favorite Ultima game).
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Patejl: I bought this long time ago.
Reviews seems to be still great, but i have to say this was a huge mistake. Im not sure if issues can be fixwd after years, so i want to ask you.

Is there any patch, port, anything to make this game playable for humans?

Reality is quite sad, maybe its funny classic RPG, BUT this game is pure nightmare if we´re talking about controls and its sensitivity. Stuff for nerds which are happy with extremely clunky mouse controls and game speed which looks like10 FPS at best?

I remember many 90s RPs with slow controls, but this is extreme patience trainer, not a game.
FYI, Ultima 7 is actually the best game in the series. Please don't expect games from before the era of 3-button mice to ever feel streamlined. Ultima 1-4 literately had every key mapped to a command, some of them redundant (like how K would be "Klimb", and D for "Descend" (eg climb down), where as in 5 it became one command, and then in 6 it was just "use". 7 basically is streamlined that it can be played 100% with the mouse by design.

A lot of games are based on Ultima (eg Final Fantasy,) for good or bad, and you are barking up the wrong tree if you want the out-of-the-box experience to have modern game controls. It's literately a 30 year old game designed for a PC. The SNES version is the "designed for a console" version, which cuts a lot of content.

Exult is a remade game engine for 7 which lets you redefine some of the controls, look into that if you really take issue with the game controls. Just be glad that people love this game enough to remake the game engine.

If you think 7 looks clunky, then you're going to hate pretty much every CRPG on GOG released before 2000 and most CRPG's games on the NES and SNES, as they all operate in the exact same manner of 2-3 frames per sprite and run at "like 10fps", and have a lot more menu hell to deal with.

Ultima 7's strongest selling point is that the game is full screen and the game world is absolutely open and seamless. Where as 1-6 had the "usable space" reduced so all the on screen UI stats could be shown. This was unheard of when other games of the era were still doing a lot more UI fidgeting because they were trying to be computerized D&D campaign games still, thus having to know D&D is more helpful in those games.

Ultima, at least 1 and 7 are easy to just play with no D&D knowledge, no previous game knowledge. Ultima 2 and 3 don't require knowing or caring about previous games in the series. 4-5-6 are the only ones that assume having played the previous game, since you can import the Ultima 4 player as the Avatar in Ultima 5 and 6. Ultima 7 doesn't have you import the character from 6 since 200 years have passed, and while all the references to previous games are there, you don't need to know the lore to finish the game, nor do you need to strictly adhere to the virtues established in 4, as you don't get punished directly by the game, rather by the "did anyone see you do that". Heck even the character creator of 1-6 isn't here, you are just dumped straight into the story.

Downsides to this game are largely due to game breaking bugs that trigger things on the map prematurely. For example, the magic carpet, can trigger doors in the dungeon if you fly over the mountains, making it impossible to finish the game without resorting to cheats. You can arrive prematurely at Minoc and the body you're supposed to investigate will be gone. You can still finish the game.

This is why games of this nature didn't drag your nose around with quest markers. You are supposed to find the clues yourself, not just go point A to point B and ignore everything in the middle. You are supposed to explore and talk to NPC's.
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Kisai: FYI, Ultima 7 is actually the best game in the series. Please don't expect games from before the era of 3-button mice to ever feel streamlined. Ultima 1-4 literately had every key mapped to a command, some of them redundant (like how K would be "Klimb", and D for "Descend" (eg climb down), where as in 5 it became one command, and then in 6 it was just "use". 7 basically is streamlined that it can be played 100% with the mouse by design.

A lot of games are based on Ultima (eg Final Fantasy,) for good or bad, and you are barking up the wrong tree if you want the out-of-the-box experience to have modern game controls. It's literately a 30 year old game designed for a PC. The SNES version is the "designed for a console" version, which cuts a lot of content.
I disagree. I found Ultima 7 to have lots of annoyances that really drag the game down (like having to manually feed your characters), and the switch to real-time combat ruined the combat system IMO.

Also, I find mouse use to be uncomfortable, so I prefer games that don't need it. This is especially true if playing on a laptop.

Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy (and SaGa, for that matter) started out with significant early Ultima influences, but then the games diverged, and this definitely happened before Ultima 6. (See, for example, the persistent world in Ultima 6/7 where every NPC can be interacted with using combat actions; compare this to DQ or FF where most town NPCs lost the ability to participate in combat at all, and where you only get simple text with the occasional prompt; also DQ and FF (especially FF) became more linear, while Ultima remained non-linear until the very last entry (to my understanding).)

Also worth noting that Ultima 7 SNES isn't really a different version of the game; it's an entirely different game. Many say it isn't as good, but the complaints I have abut Ultima 7 do not apply to the SNES game with that title. (Also, Ultima 7 SNES is still way better than Ultima 5 NES.)
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Kisai: Ultima 7's strongest selling point is that the game is full screen and the game world is absolutely open and seamless. Where as 1-6 had the "usable space" reduced so all the on screen UI stats could be shown. This was unheard of when other games of the era were still doing a lot more UI fidgeting because they were trying to be computerized D&D campaign games still, thus having to know D&D is more helpful in those games.
JRPGs had full-screen worlds all the way back to the original Dragon Quest, not showing any interface until the player actually opens the menu or gets into combat.
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Kisai: 4-5-6 are the only ones that assume having played the previous game, since you can import the Ultima 4 player as the Avatar in Ultima 5 and 6.
I'm of the opinion that 5 and 6 were designed and balanced with the assumption that you *don't* import your Ultima 4 character. Also, you don't need knowledge of the previous game to play the next game, though it does help some (like with mantras, for example); every bit of information, mantras included, can be found inside the game you're playing. Also, there's one NPC who gives you a clue for the previous game.

Also, Ultima 4 doesn't require any knowledge of Ultima 3; in fact, it doesn't really help, as those two games feel entirely disconnected.
Post edited March 29, 2025 by dtgreene
Wow. Some people just keep shitting on old games.
Ultima 7 was released in 1992, over three decades ago. Yes, it has issues, but it was an incredible feat for its time.
Open world; Serpent Isle is more linear, U7 is open to you from the start. You can go wherever you want. Likely the first open world game with details like:
NPCs with routines, jobs, schedules, creating the feel of a living world. Animals, weather effects, a ton of objects to be interacted with.

The spritework is absolutely gorgeous, even for today.

All that whining about food (not just here). Know which food is the best to eat (buy some mutton/beef for cheap at a market, or hunt some deer), press the food shortcut key a few times for every party member, problem solved for the entire day.
Deer are everywhere.

Combat isn't that interesting, but again, I'm not saying it doesn't have issues. I'd have loved to see it to be more interesting, but people need to keep in mind that old games were created in different times, with severe technical limitations. Heck, U7 even needed a separate boot disk to even run the game, grabbing as much memory as possible.

And even with all the hate, at least respect that many old and clunky games led to inspiration for games that you do know and love. Don't like the game? Refund it and move on, instead of complaining about an era you possibly weren't even born in. Sheesh.

Also, holy necro, Batman.
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Gotcha: Wow. Some people just keep shitting on old games.
Ultima 7 was released in 1992, over three decades ago. Yes, it has issues, but it was an incredible feat for its time.
Open world; Serpent Isle is more linear, U7 is open to you from the start. You can go wherever you want. Likely the first open world game with details like:
NPCs with routines, jobs, schedules, creating the feel of a living world. Animals, weather effects, a ton of objects to be interacted with.
Most of those features appeared earlier in the series. You see NPC routines and schedules as far back as Ultima 5 (first game in the series to have a day/night cycle) while Ultima 6 adds wild animals (not counting horses which date back to Ultima 3, or the various non-evil animal enemies in Ultima 4) and the living world feel, along with the large number of objects you can interact with. Only thing missing is weather effects, and I don't remember them being anything other than cosmetic (no gameplay or dialog effects).

My complaints about Ultima 7 are in comparison to earlier Ultima games, and therefore would have been applicable back in 1992.

(By the way, in terms of day/night cycles, Dragon Quest 3 actually beat Ultima 5 by a month; however, DQ3's implementation has only two versions of each town instead of every NPC having a continuous schedule.)
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Gotcha: All that whining about food (not just here). Know which food is the best to eat (buy some mutton/beef for cheap at a market, or hunt some deer), press the food shortcut key a few times for every party member, problem solved for the entire day.
Deer are everywhere.
Food shortcut doesn't exist in Ultima 7; it wasn't added until Serpent Isle. (And it wasn't needed in previous entries.)
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Gotcha: Combat isn't that interesting, but again, I'm not saying it doesn't have issues. I'd have loved to see it to be more interesting, but people need to keep in mind that old games were created in different times, with severe technical limitations. Heck, U7 even needed a separate boot disk to even run the game, grabbing as much memory as possible.
Combat was better in Ultima 6, a game that predates Ultima 7 and is even in the same series. (It's still not as good as in other games that focus on it a bit more like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and (perhaps) Pool of Radiance, but still better than in U7.)
Post edited March 30, 2025 by dtgreene
Who did what first doesn't interest me at all. I just find it really mind boggling how some people can keep complaining about something that's over 3 decades old, especially since it's a fact that this game was a mind boggling achievement back in the day.

Don't like some ancient game you bought on GOG? Tell GOG you want your money back, move on, and take your disrespect for gaming history with you.

Man, it's like complaining about a car from 1967 unable to compete with today's vehicles.
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Gotcha: Who did what first doesn't interest me at all. I just find it really mind boggling how some people can keep complaining about something that's over 3 decades old, especially since it's a fact that this game was a mind boggling achievement back in the day.

Don't like some ancient game you bought on GOG? Tell GOG you want your money back, move on, and take your disrespect for gaming history with you.

Man, it's like complaining about a car from 1967 unable to compete with today's vehicles.
Except that I'm not comparing Ultima 7 with today's games; I'm comparing it to games that came before.

To use your car analogy, it's like complaining about a car from 1967 being significantly inferior to one from 1965.
With regards to the car comparison, I was looking at kids these days who have no idea how absolutely game changing certain games were, back in the day.

You just like to complain about Ultima 7 with every chance you get. I've seen more of your posts and I don't get that. There are plenty of games I dislike; I don't hang around on those forums to shit on those games, because other people do like them, but to each their own.
I'd say Ultima VII is the best CRPG of all time. The mouse-driven controls were quite intuitive for its time. It's main issue is how it's designed to run at quite a low framerate.
I'd say that combat is the main issue. That said, I never played Ultima for the combat, so it didn't bother me much. It will always hold a special place in my heart for sure, but Baldur's Gate 1&2 ended up supplanting it as my favorite of all time.
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ncarty97: I'd say that combat is the main issue. That said, I never played Ultima for the combat, so it didn't bother me much. It will always hold a special place in my heart for sure, but Baldur's Gate 1&2 ended up supplanting it as my favorite of all time.
I consider combat to be important because it's the one aspect of the game, other than MP used for spellcasting, where the numbers actually matter, and I play RPGs for the numbers and other mechanics.

Non-combat mechanics just aren't crunchy enough in these games, and with combat being bad, the game falls flat, particularly when combined with the other annoyances I mentioned.

I ended up not liking Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, either. Give me turn-based combat or don't even pretend to be an RPG.