Simple floors and ceilings have been added to all dungeons (any more comples graphics would have made navigation ever so slightly slower, for no real gain). When stepping on a trap in a dungeon, the character with the best chances (depending on profession and dexterity) will try to disarm it instead of the party leader. They are also visible from a tile away, instead of only being visible when you step on them. Chests use larger sprites in the dungeon pseudo-3D view. Each dungeon now has its own unique colours, fitting its 'theme' (for example the Cave of Fire is red). A bug that caused loot chests to spawn randomly on the map after fighting townspeople has been fixed. Unlike in the computer versions, they are not hostile (although the party can attack them). Wild horses have re-appeared in Ambrosia. Yew is now once again populated by Druids, while Jesters and Scoundrels live in Gray, much like in the computer versions. All character metasprites, including NPCs and monsters can now use two palettes for their 'sub-sprites'. Some maps have also been altered so that merchants who tent to walk away from their counters won't be able to do that anymore. In Castle British, the Oracle who kept walking on lava is now stationary. Some maps that had redundant shops have also been altered (for example, Montor West had two bartenders next to each other). Battle maps have been modified to include more variety. Each location can now use slightly different colours. The party can try to use them at their own advantage to avoid enemy encounters. Rocks have been added (sparsely) around Sosaria and Ambrosia. Maps can use additional tiles and have been slightly altered to better use the new graphics. This can be used as a workaround for when a chest spawned on top of a town entrance, forcing the player to open it (at the risk of triggering a trap) if they wanted to enter the town. As a result of that, the code used to generate loot chests has been completely rewritten, as well as the routines that draw new tiles when moving around the map. Most maps are now compressed using an LZSS algorithm. The game can now be saved in Sosaria by pressing the Start button. New graphics inspired by Ultima IV has been used to replace most sprites and background tiles, including the 'cutscene' with Lord British after forming a party for the first time. Many routines have been optimised for speed. The random seed is now properly initialised using the frame counter the moment the player presses the Start button, instead of having a fixed value and thus producing the same sequence of pseudo-random numbers every time. The intro credits have been compacted to fit into two screens instead of 5. Most colour palettes have been slightly altered to better fit the new tile and sprite graphics. I think the suggestion of making loot scale with the area makes perfect sense, and also works as an incentive for players to visit dangerous areas instead of grinding the same map over and over as they used to. But the result was players not levelling up at all until very late in the game since there was no reward for doing so. The reasoning was that Exodus is sending stronger monsters to fight you as you become stronger. When levelling up you would not get more powerful, but you would automatically meet stronger and stronger enemies that still all gave the same reward (a random amount of gold). Unfortunately though, all chests are the same and the only variables that is set when you open one is a pointer to the character opening the chest.īut now that you mentioned it, the ID of the area where the chest is is always in memory, so I could use that instead and have better loot in more dangerous areas such as dungeons.Ībout the rest of the level-scaling: when it was released, the game was extremely punishing just because of that. To put it in context: I initially wanted loot to depend on the enemy you got it from. That's a very valid point, thanks for the feedback. Or maybe a sophisticated random equipment (ranging according to the difficulty of the region, of the dungeon, etc.).

If the rest of the game design is not about level-scaling, personnaly I would prefer completely random items, and no equipment, to avoid too impactful equipment loot. Is level scaling a thing in other parts of the game? I tend to dislike these kind of tricks in open worlds, as they make the world revolve around the player, à la Truman Show, instead of the player inside a world stranger to him.

Ultima iii exodus town of grey