Let's Break: Ultima 9 - Ascension (Part 5)

[@CastChaos]

I'm honoured to be mentioned! The greatest joy in playing UIX nowadays is finding useful things for walkthrough makers, speedrunners and the like. It's fantastic anyway that you spent so much time with the Minoc scene. Since it's so long to watch through each time, making a glitch attempt be very frustrating when it fails right at the start. My brother was a perfect bridge builder. Not like me. When I contributed to our common bridge that was meant to lead out from the best sword technique dome to the surface, he needed to take down my part and continue from there... The area you show near the beginning, is, according to descriptions I read decades ago, the Isle of Fire. Since there's free ship travel and some points of the map accomodate to this, not being reachable on foot can not an acceptable excuse be for it to be that empty. It must be part of the incompleteness of the game. Even though those cliffs are so pretty, there really should have been something nice and useful. This way it's just the joy of exploration. I'm already curious what will your next video project be. However, I still haven't watched all your videos yet, so I still have material for me.

[@tapewolf]

Thanks, I'm not sure either yet! Oblivion might work quite well - a lot of the other classics like the Thief, Deus Ex and System Shock games are mostly commentary rather than unravelling the game. But I'm worried Oblivion will take too long - I have other projects besides the video series and these five episodes alone have tied me up for an entire quarter.

[@CastChaos]

@@tapewolf You listed some wonderful games. I, too, played some of them quite much. I understand that quality takes time. Uploading YT videos since some 2007, I noticed that while one can dish out even two videos a day, enforcing quality can take a week or much more. And then what you said, that videos are just one of the things. By all means, I will be here.

[@kylkim93]

Great way to get acquainted with the whole game. 😁 I remember playing this when I was 9 or 10, and also using overlapping scrolls to get across some of the narrower straits. Never knew this method could be further developed. Also, kudos on the call-back to Adventures of Barrel-head!

[@Rolan7196]

Blackthorn forlornly watching the mute show from the beach cliff might be my favorite, particularly when the pan-back revealed him. I was in tears. Thanks for adapting this to video!!

[@tapewolf]

Thanks. One of my friends remarked that it's the only version of the scene where nobody dies, because he can't shoot the gardeners from the beach. That version took forever to get down on video because the game tended to either crash or Blackthorn stayed rooted to the spot and couldn't follow me. The take actually starts with him walking rather than being shot because I didn't expect it to work and had to quickly hit Record to capture it. I was also a bit worried that focusing on variations of the Minoc scene for too long would drag things out a bit.

[@amyrlinn]

this series has been absolutely sick to discover. looking forward to whatever comes next!

[@mattshuey1]

U9 is a mess, but a wonderful hand crafted mess. This series was wonderful by the way, I subscribed after watching all 5 eps. The dray humor had me hooked, it was like watching a channel 4 documentary in all the best ways possible.

[@tapewolf]

Thanks. I'm taking a break this year (after all, it's been a 5-year run) but am hoping to do another one, or at least a similar series next year. One of the issues I have is that for the other games, e.g. System Shock, Deus Ex or the Elder Scrolls ones you just can't sequence-break them into little pieces like with SI, U9 or Lazarus. So I may need a different title than "Let's Break".

[@awesomedudeman97]

Really enjoyed this series! Good too se this game get some love… i think it was rather impressive for its time

[@mousebetr]

It's been so long since I baked hundreds if not thousands of breads in Ultima Online. Glad to see it was put to good use.

[@hannibalsolo4409]

Thank you for the series, it's the most I've enjoyed Ultima 9 since... since.. well.. I'll get back to you on that.

[@chrisschumacher8553]

4:10 You should've used the Jurassic Park theme here. :D

[@PraecorLoth970]

I missed the release of your videos, so I'm here late. Fantastic series. It emulated the feel of the anti-walkthrough very well. Also, I didn't see your comment about not being able to reproduce the inventory bug. I'm running the GOG version, which is 1.19f. Did you install any of the later 1.19 patches, like 1.19h? I just booted up the game. I think I'm at the Trinsic dungeon, where there's some hellhounds outside. I was able to reproduce the bug with this sequence of steps: 1. Approach some enemies 2. Press Q, open the backpack. 3. Press Q again to regain control 4. Walk around and enemies will ignore you. I think they aggroed me after I attacked a dog, but went calm after I backed up a bit. Another glitch you didn't use, which could perhaps have been useful, is the reagent non-consumption glitch. Basically, start the spell binding ritual as normal, but when you are asked to chant the words of power, put the reagents back in your inventory. The binding will be successful, but they won't be consumed.

[@tapewolf]

Thanks! I'll have to play around with that glitch just in case I'm doing it wrong. And yes, I seem to recall being able to snatch reagents away during the spell binding. But since we bound about two spells in the entire series, it hardly seemed worth it!

[@GothAlice]

The armageddon spell was so much simpler in Ultima Underworld. Only three runes! vas (great) kal (summoning [of]) corp (death) (Learned from a trans-dimensional wisp that just don't care and may be in it for the lulz.) Also, on the Avatar v. Guardian scale differences, it's promptly semi-stated that the Guardian is the Avatar. Or rather, they're linked, with the Guardian always the antagonist to our protagonist. In any given game, he's what he needs to be to be that antagonist. U8 Pagan was… interesting. (But it aligns with the fact that the Avatar, Lord British, and several other principal characters are actually people from our world visiting to enjoy an RPG adventure. It also goes some way to hand-wave the ludicrous evilness of characters like Blackthorn.) As was this as a segue into Ultima Online with its shards. Shards of fragmented reality. Fragmented by you using that Armageddon invocation here.

[@tohopes]

i mean someone could mod the game to have the Avatar wake up at the Fellowship hostel in Paws after he destroys himself with Armageddon. since when is death permanent.

[@caesaria]

is there any nuance with how gust needs to be aimed? I don't understand how you can build such an accurate line of bread. Great bridge building section, inspirational.

[@tapewolf]

Yeah, they do tend to go all over the place a bit, but you can get them reasonably accurate by aiming the gust so that it brushes against the bread rather than hitting it directly, so it does smaller movements. There's mention of this and a clip of it being shown in part 1 while assembling the bridge to Trinsic.