Game 139: Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990)

Note: this post has a lot more full-game spoilers than the typical first post for a game. Read with caution if you don't already know the story of Ultima VI.

       

Ultima VI: The False Prophet

United States

Origin Systems (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 DOS; 1991 for Commodore 64, FM Towns, PC-98; 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST, Sharp X68000; 1993 for Super NES
Date Started: 8 February 2014

   
Origin System's motto was "we create worlds." It was a fitting motto for a company so dedicated to detailed back story and lore. Britannia is the most obvious example, but even the company's minor titles, like Times of Lore or Knights of Legend, have rich game manuals and complex histories. For years, I've thought of Origin as the paramount example of what became the first category in my GIMLET index: "game world."

Richard Garriott created the Ultima series in a time when hardly any games were paying attention to good stories--and even if they did, the technology of the times wasn't sufficient to justify much of the prose. In this era, Ultima IV comes along like a revelation, with a manual outlining Britannia's history, detailed descriptions of every town, monster, and item, a fully constructed virtue system--and, most importantly, a game that made full use of all the manual's lore. It's one of the few games of the era in which the manual and game seem like partners in the gameplay experience. It is, in fact, one of the few games of the era in which the manual and game feel like they were written by the same people.

But perhaps as notable as the effort and detail put into Britannia's history is how poorly Origin maintained it. The Ultima series is rightfully famous for re-inventing the game engine and magic system between numbered titles, but it also re-invented its stories, too. Hardly any aspect of the world holds up to scrutiny between any two games. IV and V are the closest, but in general, the game manuals engage in a rampage of retconning between titles. To take a few of a million examples:

• To excuse nothing more than a desire to create a bigger, more geographically complex game world, the games suggest that the destruction of Exodous at the end of III created earthquakes and tsunamis and other geological upheavals, transforming Sosaria to Britannia. I'm pretty sure that global catastrophes capable of so re-shaping continents would also kill every living thing.

When you think about what had to happen to turn the map to the left into the map to the right, you wonder if it wouldn't have been a better idea just to learn to live with Exodus.

• Starting in the Ultima VI manual, the Avatar is explicitly named as the same hero who won the first three Ultima games, never mind that III had four characters, and any of the characters in the first three games could be of non-human races.

• Minax is given in the manual as having threatened "Sosaria," despite the game taking place on Earth.

• Exodus is manifestly a computer in III but becomes a demonic entity in later depictions.

• Lord British is said to come from Earth, as are Iolo and Dupre. This supposedly accounts for their long lives. But Iolo and Dupre never really talk about Earth, and Gwenno and Shamino, both Britannians, are similarly long-lived.

• The enemies in VI are the "gargoyles," despite gargoyles having existed as separate creatures in V and gargoyles having been called "daemons" in previous games.

• Ultima IV and V took place on a three-dimensional world that wrapped around on itself. Suddenly in VI, it's possible to reach the "edge" of the world and see the void of space beyond. The gargoyles apparently live on the other side of the world, and the "underworld" from Ultima V is now the space in between the two. This suggests that there's some point in the underworld where gravity flips around, I guess, but I suppose if we're talking about a world shaped like a cereal box, considerations of things like gravity, hydrology, and atmosphere are already pretty absurd.

I'm afraid getting here so early in the game, just so I could take this screenshot, involved a bit of homicide.

There have been all kinds of attempts to explain or hand-wave these inconsistencies, both in canon and fanon, and I don't doubt my message board will be full of them. That's fine. Discuss away. Tortured explanations for inconsistencies in fiction are usually fun, as are fan theories. (Here's my pet one, which I never heard anyone else talk about: what evidence do we really have that "the machines" are the enemy in the Terminator franchise? Just the beliefs of a bunch of terrified, depopulated technological throwbacks, but you could easily see this belief growing out of their incomprehension that any organic mind could cause such death and destruction. Since the series has never convincingly argued for the developments in AI necessary for a computer to become "self-aware," commandeer machinery, and create replicas of itself, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that there's an organic intelligence behind them, either human or alien.) But the important thing is not to confuse something mildly plausible that someone pulled out of the air with a carefully-constructed game world.

What's particularly startling about many of these retcons is that they're utterly unnecessary. Who in the world came up with "gargoyles" as the best name for this other civilization? The word carries all kinds of baggage in existing lore, and it's always been tied to creatures who spent at least part of their time as stone. That's how Ultima V had them. Why create all kinds of confusion between gargoyles and daemons? A bolder choice would be to just leave them as daemons but, through this game, show that they're a lot more complex than the "always chaotic evil" creatures of the previous games. It would have allowed the game to explore themes of absolute good and absolute evil so common in CRPGs.

Then there's the Avatar. Not only is it unnecessary to make him the hero of the first three games, as if the Sosarians and Britannians are so inept they always need outside help to solve their problems, but I honestly think the series should have abandoned the concept after Ultima IV. In that game, it worked perfectly. The creators were making a meta-commentary on the very nature of playing role-playing games. The Avatar was clearly meant to be the player himself or herself, warped into the land through the "moongate" of his or her computer screen, represented as a literal avatar in the game window. Ultima IV was a game that invited the player to act in a way that was more courageous, more virtuous, more adventurous than in the real world. At the end of the game, when you're manifestly returned to your real life, you're invited to "live as an example to thine own people"--to apply the lesson of the seven virtues to the real world. It was brilliant. They should have left it alone.

Already in Ultima V, though, they were weakening the concept. In that game, the Avatar is clearly not you, but some guy who lives alone in his single-family house of a precise layout. But fine, you rationalize, all that is just a metaphor for where you actually do live. By Ultima VI, you have some weird picture of a pole-dancing centaur girl on your wall, you're inescapably a white male with long brown hair.

"To be looking like a hippie. To be rectifying this."

By Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, the game has fleshed out a whole Earth bio for your character, including his associates. It was when I read the manual for that game and found the Avatar talking to one of these associates, saying "I told you that I occasionally do favors for a foreign dignitary who goes by the name Lord British," that I decided not to play the game. By the end of Ultima VII, when you find yourself remaining permanently in Britannia, the game has abandoned all pretense that the player is the Avatar.

It's not just the Avatar that's the problem. As the game world starts to lose its iconographic abstraction to take advantage of the latest graphics and sound technologies, to become more "realistic," the world begins to feel a little sophomoric. With the eight major cities, each "founded on a virtue," each featuring one major profession that exemplifies that virtue, each with a nearby dungeon named after an antonym to the virtue, all ruled by a benevolent, immortal sovereign, Britannia has always been a little too tidy. This was fine when it was as much of an abstraction as your little CGA icon, but Ultima VI begins the era in which the series wants to have it both ways--gritty realism coupled with a goofy master-planned fantasy kingdom

Although it's not quite a retcon so much as an expansion, Ultima VI also goes beyond the originals by giving specific portraits and personalities to your NPC companions. Geoffrey becomes a bit of a drill sergeant, Dupre a womanizing, boozing adventurer; Julia a bleating woman with calloused hands who looks more than a little like Julie Brown. I honestly don't remember my reaction to these personalities the first time I played the game back in 1990 or 1991. I generally find them welcome now, though if you'd spent a lot of time imagining your own personalities for the NPCs in the previous games, you might not like the contrast.

I went through more effort getting to Minoc to take this screenshot than was worth it. And I'm not sure how rumors got there ahead of me, since I used the moonstone.

If I have misgivings about the game world, though, I have none about the gameplay experience. The interface for the Ultima series has always been state-of-the-art (at least when it comes to a top-down view). Ultima V had one of the best game engines I've ever played, and yet Ultima VI manages to improve upon it. The game uses both a mouse and keyboard, but in a comfortably redundant way so you can choose what works best for you. The world is still tile-based, but movement around it is quick enough that it feels fluid (having the characters face the direction they're moving helps with this illusion). The paper-doll inventory is extremely easy to use. You can LOOK at any object or person to get more information, and interact with a lot of the objects. The multiple keyboard commands from the previous games have been consolidated into about a dozen (LOOK does both looking and searching; USE handles opening, jimmying, and other actions).

I loved how you could interact with the Ultima V game world by moving things around, locking doors, playing a harpsichord, and so on. VI continues and expands on this tradition in a hundred ways. There are books to read (not as verbose as those in The Elder Scrolls, but still good), paintings to look at, and dozens of objects of furniture to move around (which might reveal hidden items beneath them). You can shatter mirrors by attacking them, look at clocks and sundials to get the time, pull decorative swords, paintings and torches from the walls, break doors and chests with a weapon, rob graves, play a variety of instruments, and douse fires. There are a billion little items--bouquets of flowers, knives, spatulas, rolling pins, cooking sheets, pitchers, mugs, bottles, gavels, pliers--most of which do nothing but add some flavor to the game world in a way that all those inkwells and embalming tools do to Skyrim. The game offers one of the first "sandbox" worlds that we have seen in RPGs.

Moving a bouquet of flowers isn't a great example of this, but I haven't gotten far into the game yet.

The game preserves the dialogue system of the previous two Ultimas while allowing an option that highlights keywords so you don't have to try absolutely everything (purists can easily turn this off). It also preserves the day/night cycle of V, with NPCs going to work, bed, and places in between at appointed times. V and VI remain the only games that do this in my chronology (before you say The Magic Candle, it's not quite the same; those NPCs just disappeared and appeared at certain times; they didn't move around).

Starting with this game, you no longer "enter" cities, keeps, and such; they're integrated into the game world. Dungeons are now top-down instead of first-person, and there's a lot more to see, do, and find within them. There's also no real separation between regular exploration and combat, and since it takes place on the regular screen, you can establish yourself in helpful terrain ahead of time, even altering the terrain with objects.

Perhaps the best part is the ability to take control of a single party member at any time. Different party members can be in different places accomplishing different things, and indeed many of the puzzles rely on this. For combat, you can decide whether you want to control the individual actions of party members or have them fight on their own with predetermined scripts (attack forward, attack the flank, attack the rear, etc.).

In total, I think it's one of the best interfaces ever designed for a CRPG. If it lacks some of the graphic sophistication of more modern games, it more than makes up for it with the ability to interact with objects and NPCs in ways that we no longer see. My only real complaints are that the game window is just a little too small, which makes it all the more infuriating when night falls. This is one of the few games in which trying to accomplish something in darkness is about as realistic as it is in real life, and the game mechanic actually encourages you to just go to bed.

Night falls as the party tries to navigate around some buildings.

Ultima VI begins with a partly-animated sequence in which the Avatar is sitting at his home on Earth, "five seasons" after the events of Ultima V. He's got that famous pole-dancing centaur woman (with zebra legs, to make it odder) on his wall, and he's mindlessly flipping through TV channels. The animation here is fun, showing commercials for some digestive medicine and a razor, a news report that alters between a plane crash and something to do with the Soviet Union, a rock video, and a televangelist who gets struck by lightning while soliciting donations. The Avatar is missing his friends and adventures in Britannia.

The number at the bottom of the screen is Origin's.

Suddenly, there's a storm outside and lightning strikes the ground in the midst of the circle of stones where the moongate has appeared in the past. The Avatar heads outside to investigate and finds a small obsidian stone--the same type of thing that Lord British used to banish Blackthorn in the previous game. Then, a red moongate appears. The Avatar is hesitant because the moongate has always been blue in the past, but when it starts to disappear, he decides screw it, and runs on through, his long hair flopping along behind him.

He emerges on a "desolate plain" next to a "rune-struck altar." Before he can react, a bunch of gargoyles surround him, chanting. They bind him to the altar stone and one of them whips out a sacrificial dagger. Just as he's about to plunge it into his heart, another moongate appears and Shamino, Dupre, and Iolo pop out, nailing the gargoyle leader between the eyes with a crossbow bolt as they enter the plain.

They cut the Avatar's bonds, hand him a sword, and haul him back through the moongate to Lord British's throne room. Unfortunately, some of the gargoyles follow through the portal, so the gameplay itself begins in the middle of a battle.

Characters can be created anew or imported from Ultima IV or V. If you create a new character, you go through the whole gypsy virtue test again, answering a series of hypothetical questions to identify your overall bent, which affects your starting attributes. The questions are different from the previous games, and I somehow ended up prioritizing "spirituality," which would have made me a ranger in Ultima IV, but it has less of an impact here since there are only three NPC professions (fighter, bard, and mage) and the PC is always just an "Avatar."

You can also choose your sex during character creation, and assign a portrait that includes among its selections one black PC, so perhaps what I said above about the PC being a long-haired white male isn't quite true; he's just portrayed that way in the game introduction. I guess they had to choose something as the default, but I don't see why they couldn't have done the intro from a first-person POV without actually showing the PC.

Against all odds, I still had my save game files from Ultima V, and I found that transferring the character gave me significantly higher strength (28 vs. 21), dexterity (28 vs. 22), and intelligence (29 vs. 19), as well as a higher magic point total (58 vs. 38), though some of these differences may have been due to different choices with the gypsy. The transfer process reduced me from Level 7 to Level 3, but on the plus side, I was able to change my name to my new preferred PC name, and I was still able to select my own character portrait.

The available character portraits. I had to go with the black guy as having the only respectable hairstyle. You also have to admire how he just straps that ankh to his forehead. No doubts about who's the avatar in this room.

The beginning of the game, in which you have to defeat the gargoyles who followed you into Lord British's throne room, is not its finest hour. The player is just getting used to the controls, and he already has gargoyles whaling on him. Lord British, Nystul the Mage, and Geoffrey the Fighter (now promoted to Lord British's guard captain) just stand there and watch. You'd think Lord British could help quell an invasion of his own throne room, given that he's effectively immortal.

The opening scene.

When you first talk to Lord British, he greets you by name, but then immediately runs through a copy protection exercise in which you have to answer questions from the manual, all under the guise of "I must make sure it is thee."

After this slight fumble in the opening, though, the game immediately starts being fun. Lord British relates how the underworld has collapsed and the gargoyles (he uses the term right away) have started to invade Britannia through the dungeons. They've captured all the shrines to the eight virtues.

Lord British tells me that he's set aside some quarters in the castle for me, along with some equipment, and he--at last!--gives me free reign to take anything else from his castle that I might find useful. He's come a long way from the guy who used to make me buy hit points. He also notes that the obsidian stone I found is a portal stone, and if I experiment with various placements around me, I can fast travel to various locations in the game world. More on that next time.

I get a couple of quests almost immediately. Geoffrey recounts a failed attempt to liberate the Shrine of Compassion and suggests I speak to the wounded survivors of the battle, who are recuperating in Cove. I guess Geoffrey had more important things to do than to stay with them. Nystul the mage (named after RPG developer and onetime Origin employee Mike Nystul) has a look at the book I recovered from the gargoyle leader and suggests I take it to Mariah in the Lycaeum for translation. Since Cove is comfortably on the way from the castle to the Lycaeum, my initial route is clear, but I need to finish exploring the castle and Britain (now essentially one big city) first.

I didn't get very far into the gameplay in this posting, but I wanted to get my misgivings about the world and the Avatar out of the way first, so I can just ignore them and enjoy it from here. I've won the game two or three times before, the last time in (I think) 1999. Those 15 years put me in the sweet spot of having forgotten most of the game's details (particularly its puzzles), but still remembering enough to know that I'll enjoy it.