Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire
Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire is the seventh game in the series (not the main series itself, but the whole Ultima saga) and the first of the two parts of the Worlds of Ultima saga. It was published and released in 1990 by Origin for the IBM PC. A Japanese port for the SNES followed in 1993.
Gameplay[edit]
Origin had spent so much money developing the engine for Ultima VI, they decided to reuse it for additional games. The basis for both Worlds of Ultima games made was that the Avatar's Orb of the Moons allows travel to other worlds and times, having fantastic adventures. This was the first Ultima game to have in-game cutscenes for several events, instead of just the opening and ending cut screen found in previous Ultima games. The Origin FX engine was utilized for this.
Additionally, conversations now took place in the big game window instead of the text window, overlaying the landscape for the conversation, thus allowing for much more text to be displayed and mostly removing the need to scroll answers.
The Story[edit]
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The Avatar is transported to the otherworldly Valley of Eodon, a large jungle-like world filled with various tribes (inspired partially from The Lost World), after an experiment of Dr. Rafkin with the Orb of the Moons goes wrong.
These tribes have been magically drawn from varying periods and locations in history, such as the aboriginal nations of Mesoamerica and tropical Africa, originally as labor for a species of intelligent reptiles called Sakkhra which once dominated there. The whole place is under attack from the ant-like Myrmidex, which were brought in to replace the humans for labor but got out of control. The main plot involves getting all thirteen tribes to join in an alliance against the Myrmidex. All but one tribe has its own demands before joining, ranging from defeating a t-rex to recovering their holy statue.
It turns out that this strange mixture of worlds was created by a huge corrupted moonstone, which has to be destroyed to prevent it collapsing due to instability. The valley of Eodon is actually on Earth, but the moonstone has made it inaccessible and unmappable. Dr. Rafkin first puts forth this hypothesis, which is later confirmed by a xorinite wisp.
Spoilers end here.
Development[edit]
The Savage Empire uses the same engine as Ultima VI.
Differences between platforms[edit]
Beside the primary PC port, there also exist ports for the Japanese PC-9801 and X68000. They do have a lower color palette (only 16 colors), but apart from the Japanese text are otherwise the same as the original. See also Computer ports of Savage Empire
The only console port was only released for the Super Famicom system in Japan. It is extremely rare to locate, even within Japan, and retails for a high price in Japanese used electronics stores. The game uses an engine similar to Ultima VII for the SNES. It has never been released in English and while ROM images are available there have been no successful attempts to translate the ROM to English. The game comes complete with a much abbreviated version of the PC manual and contains no map. For more details see SNES-port of Savage Empire.
Release[edit]
Included with the game[edit]
Included with the release of the game were these things:
- The book Ultimate Adventures Magazine.
- A paper map of Eodon.
- The Reference Guide.
- The "Getting Started" Guide.
Upgrades[edit]
There are no known fan upgrades for the game available.
The original version 1.6 did contain some bugs. Notably, Tristia’s dialogue is bugged so the Avatar cannot confess love for her and see the alternate ending. This was fixed in an obscure 2.1 version for an EA Compilation CD. In order to get the fix nowadays, Pix Ultima Patcher has to be used.
[edit]
- For bugs in this game, see The Savage Empire bugs.
- For easter eggs and real-life references in this game, see The Savage Empire Real-life references and easter eggs.
- For a complete walkthrough, see Savage Empire walkthrough.
- For a complete transcript, see Savage Empire transcript.
- For party members, see Party members in Savage Empire.
- For monster data, see Savage Empire monster data.
- For some quirks of Savage Empire, see Oddities in Savage Empire.
- For armour and weapons, see Primitive armour and Weapons in Savage Empire.
- For a map viewer, see Ultimatrix.
- For copy protection, see Savage Empire copy protection.
- For the cheating options in the game, see Cheating in Savage Empire.
- For how the character creation works, see Character creation.
- For details on the totemistic magic system, see Savage Empire magic.
Trivia[edit]
- Seggallion can be found in Eodon. He seems to do archeological digs and acts strange.
- The Three Stooges appear as members of the Disquiqui Tribe. Chafblum has a specific response if the player mentions the word "nyuk" to him.
- Many thought that the advertisement for the Wild Basin Expedition t-shirt starring Dr. Rafkin and Aiela was fake. However, the shirt actually was a real Origin product.
- The original cover art was discovered and is shown in the gallery below.
- Paul Meyer, one of the programmers, gave some anecdotes about the fact, that this was the first game to have a "thank you for playing" message at the end:
"This was the game that started the "Thank you for Playing" tradition at Origin. Part of that came from Texas culture - it just seemed right to thank people for playing the game - but the actual moment of genesis has a story behind it. If you remember the bad old world of DOS programming, you know that the OS was more or less incapable of stopping you from doing hokey things - or even bloody murder - at the machine level. Development environments of the day would try to help out. In particular, the environment used to program this game put a guard block at address zero in memory, so bad writes to null pointers would not damage anything and could be detected when the program exited. At one point in the development of the game, there was a bug that was causing just such a write. When a couple of weeks of work failed to find the bug, and one night while a little punchy from lost sleep, Steve was inspired to hack the error message. Instead of saying "Null pointer write detected" as you exited the game, it would say "Thank you for playing." Eventually the bug was actually found and fixed, but everybody decided that the message was so appropriate it should be there, so they added the message as normal code when the game exited. But whenever I see a "Thank you for playing " message, I remember that late-night half-mad hack, and grin."
Gallery[edit]
Back cover
Savage Empire advertisement
Original cover art
Concept sketch of the cover from Denis Loubet
External Links[edit]
- Ultima Aiera – Savage Empire resources
- The Notable Ultima – Worlds of Ultima
- Hacki’s Ultima Page – Savage Empire nitpicks
- The Other Codex – Savage Empire
| Savage Empire introduction cinematic |