Now Playing: Ultima V Lazarus

I distinctly remember playing Dungeon Siege multiplayer at the Legend offices and exclaiming “Oh my god, could you imagine an Ultima game with this engine? It would be so amazing!” The forest environments in DS looked very good, and the relative disappointment of Ultima IX was still weighing heavy at that time. And now, after almost 5 years, it is here: Lazarus, the complete port of Ultima V to the Dungeon Siege engine. The first of its kind that ever got finished. For that alone I give kudos to the team.

Before we go any further, you have to understand that Ultima V was my first ever Ultima game. I must have been 14 or 15 at the time, and was playing the Amiga version that I had bought(!) at Karstadt in Essen from my hard-earned allowance. My English wasn’t nearly as good as it is now and I didn’t understand everything perfectly, the graphics were bad even for that time, and Ultima VI was already out for the PC (showing me what the series promised for the future). Still, I was enchanted. Had the cloth map spread over the chair next to me to trace my progress through Britannia. Kept a journal of all the information I had gathered and kept a list of where every character in the game lived (you never know when you had to find somebody again). And played for days and months without end.

It is with this background that I reinstalled Dungeon Siege on the computer and added Lazarus. And it is with this nostalgia that I am giving Lazarus an extended try. Because quite frankly, if it wasn’t for all the memories and the knowledge what this mod could possibly be I would probably have dismissed it as Yet Another Mod(tm) and moved on. I mean, who has time to play all this stuff, anyway?

Ultima V Lazarus is definitely good, and I’ll upgrade that assessment to “Great” if I get sucked into playing for a fair amount of time. So far I’ve only managed to leave Iolo’s hut and make it to Britannia, and reactions have been mixed. The nostalgia and the atmosphere that goes along with it are still there. I love the music, I love visiting the old towns. All NPCs are there and have expanded conversation trees. The introduction with the Shadowlords is still evocative. But the graphics, which seemed so great when Dungeon Siege came out, look dated now. And I still can’t see the sky, which was a complaint in the original game. The new artwork created by the mod team is serviceable and never destroys the mood, but it doesn’t hold up to commercial games. It’s telling when I can spot the Poser model in the opening sequence as soon as it appears on screen.

Maybe it is because I have played this game several times before that I don’t quite get sucked into it anymore. Instead of exploring a new, exciting world I feel like I’m on vacation in some part of the country that I lived in years ago. It’s fun to revisit all the old places and memories, but it’s not the same as back then. I also notice that I lost a lot of patience since the first time I played games like these. I tire of the conversations rather quickly and just want to “see stuff and kill things”. I know that’s a terrible thing to say and kind of misses the whole point of playing an Ultima game. But what can I say, I’m older now and have less time for this stuff Of course I’ll still keep playing.

You can download Lazarus on the official Lazarus homepage. If you ever played an Ultima game in your life you should definitely give it a try. The music alone (which is available as a separate download) is worth the visit. So, once again, a big congrats to the team that made this possible as a hobby project. Let’s hope for more finished conversions in the future, especially the Ultima VI project.