Welcome to the thread for Ultima enjoyers. Please sound off! Maybe tell us what you love about them, or which are your favorites?
Personally my favorites are Ultima 6 because it has the best combat, Ultima 7 because it’s the best overall and, acknowledging my very poor taste in this controversial pick, Ultima 8 because the atmosphere is peak.
Ultima is a huge gaming blind spot for me. I’m very aware of the games and respect their importance to the growth of the RPG genre…but I’ve never played one for a single moment.
Someday. 
4 and 5 are my favourite Ultima games. What I love about these two in particular is how they reward going one from another and both exploring the virtues as a journey of self-improvement and then how those same virtues can be warped into tyranny.
yeah, 4 and 5 are definitely the best in regards to the virtues. i feel like the series got a bit virtue navel gazey after 6
a good place to start, if you ever feel the urge to, is Ultima 7 with Exult which modernizes the experience and adds a bunch of quality of life stuff.
My only experience with Ultima comes from the really thorough Majulaar retrospective video series. I missed these games when they were new and a lot of them are hard to go back to.
I did spend a bit of time with the PS1 port of Ultima Underworld when the fan translation patch came out a few years ago. I’d love to spend more time on it, and really just spend more time playing through the older entries in the series.
I don’t remember if I played any of the offline games but burned way too many hours in Ultima Online while on dial-up fighting people on ISDN. The culture around the comic strips made of games was great too, probably mostly lost now, and stuff remaining may not have aged well.
I was reading PC Gamer when Lord British was killed in front of dozens of players during the Ultima Online beta. Fascinating story, I recommend looking it up.
What would one recommend to a modern player who wants to experience a game in the series today? Is there a particular game or source port that makes a good entry point these days?
Exult for Ultima 7 is probably the best place to start, although Nuvie in ScummVM is a good way to experience Ultima 6 which has more……… comprehensible combat
I have a huge amount of respect for Ultima for singlehandedly changing the face of the industry in many ways, it’s hard to think of anybody who had a greater impact on RPG’s than Gariott.
But I just can’t get into these games! I was spoiled by the 2000’s RPG wave 
I’d suffer through them for the plot, but it’s this ‘navel gazey’ thing I find offputting.
That said, I have a very fond memory of streaming one of them and (at the behest of the chat) stealing a bunch of babies and posting them in a field. Free range babies!
Richard Garriott made people fight kids often enough that I feel like he would approve
Yeah, I’ve been going through these videos recently and they’ve really made me respect Ultima as a series. Incredibly groundbreaking stuff that I’m really glad exists but also I know I wouldn’t have the patience to get through today, I’m just too used to console rpgs I’m afraid.
That said, just the idea for Ultima 4 is amazing, the idea of having a game purely be about self-improvement and enlightenment is such a wild idea, and this was back in the 80’s.
Definitely a series worth picking up on GOG (they’re currently, and regularly, on sale). 1–3 have early CRPG inaccessibility, but everything from U4 onwards has a lot to like. Even U9, which is an incoherent mess constrained by the need to include expensive prerendered cutscenes written for a discarded version of the story, has some good moments. And the Underworlds are the hugely influential origin (no pun intended) for the immersive sim genre.
4 is the only one I ever finished, though.
oh hi it’s nice to see you here!
also finishing isn’t the point of ultima >_> just like elder scrolls
Brittania, where Lord British doesn’t finish.
At least, I’ve never seen any of his kids.
At least, I’ve never seen any of his kids.
Nell will never tell.
I realized I have Ultima 2 and Ultima 4 and I’ve never played them, any major recommendations for the series?
Ultima 2 is generally considered pretty bad compared to the others, so 4 is a much better starting point and it holds up well. There’s an Ultima 4 patch that makes it better but I don’t know that much about it.
If you’re okay with spoilers, you could watch Majuular’s Ultima 4 retrospective video first.
The U4 patch can be found here. Also, I’ve never played it, but some recommend the Sega Master System version, which apparently has the most quality of life improvements, over the computer versions.
Thanks y’all, I’ll give 4 a look since I’ve been dying to play something a little different.