Ultima VI: Combat, Equipment, and Magic

Strolling through a dungeon, picking up gold nuggets, encountering a reaper.

After the last post, I pressed forward and won Ultima VI in about six more hours. I haven't composed my final thoughts or rated it yet, but I feel reasonably confident that if Ultima VI doesn't end up as my top-rated game, it will at least land very close to Ultima V (which currently holds the top spot). I like combat a bit less, and I wish that more stuff fit into the interface window, but in terms of almost everything else, VI is the best in the series so far.

We needn't rush to conclude, though. In this post, I want to spend some time talking about the game's approach to several key elements of RPGs, because I'm not sure that this kind of detail has fully come through in my other postings.

Dungeons

Seven of the eight original Ultima IV dungeons are here: Deceit, Despise, Destard, Wrong, Covetous, Shame, and Hythloth. Unlike the previous games, these aren't the only dungeons: we also have the ant mound, Hawkins's treasure dungeon, a place near Shame called "Heroes' Hole," the Moonglow catacombs, Sutek's catacombs, and the caves that connect the Britannian sewers to Buccaneer's Den. I might have missed a few others.

Entering the dungeon Despise, just for fun.

 
Like almost everything else in the series, the game has trouble keeping its dungeon canon straight. The Stygian Abyss is gone, even though it reappears for Ultima Underworld. The dungeon beneath Lord British's castle no longer connects to Hythloth. Wrong and Covetous are presented not as separate dungeons (as in both previous games) but two entrances to the same dungeon. Deceit was a man-made dungeon in Ultima V and a cave in this game. The dungeons only have four levels instead of eight. Perhaps this is explained by the collapse of the Gargoyle world having sheared off half of them. It's disconcerting to think that while exploring Level 4 of a dungeon, you're really only a few inches of dirt away from the Void.

Even more notable, many of the dungeons are optional. Technically, I suppose, they're all optional (save a single room in Hythloth) if you use the Orb to move around and don't care to go through the rigmarole of the pirate treasure quest. But even if you do all of the steps on the main quest, you'll never have a reason to visit Deceit, Despise, or "Heroes' Hole" except for grinding and treasure. Deceit is particularly mystifying because it has virtually no enemies or treasure, just a bunch of bear traps and caltrops. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would go in it.

The Wrong/Covetous dungeon is the only one with clearly manmade walls, and just as in Ultima V, it's presented as a sort-of "jail," probably for those convicted at the court in Yew, although many of the cells hold monsters, so you have to wonder what those trials looked like.

Checking out a lever puzzle in Wrong.

 
The rest of the dungeons have a uniform "reddish-brown cave" appearance, although that doesn't mean that there aren't some interesting features and geography. In general, I'm happy with the transition between Ultima IV and V's approaches to dungeon (first-person corridors with iconographic, third-person "rooms") and these. Some of the rooms in the previous games were interesting, but they always seemed disjointed and artificial. The dungeons of Ultima VI feel slightly more realistic and natural. As you walk along, you encounter exploding lava vents, swamps, spider webs, stalagmites, underground rivers and lakes, and other neat features.

Gingerly walking towards a ladder surrounded by volcanic vents. Any of them could create an explosion at any time.

Treasure doesn't exist in conveniently-placed chests but in sensible places like waste heaps, scavengers' dens, and the bodies of dead adventurers who preceded you. You also find contextual "natural" treasures like gold nuggets, spider silk, and nightshade mushrooms.

With a few exceptions, enemies are sensibly placed. You might have some cyclopes and trolls hanging around a fire pit in a large cavern near the entrance. Snakes and rats scurry through the corridors. You get green slimes near swamps, spiders in caves surrounded by webs, and the occasional fire drake or dragon in rooms of lava. They aren't always coordinated, and in fact they will occasionally attack each other.

Small geysers spurt from glistening rocks near stalagmites. A sea serpent patrols an underground river.

Monsters in dungeons respawn, but you have to walk reasonably far away for that to happen, and they might respawn in slightly different numbers and types when you return. I seem to recall that in Ultima VII, they would respawn almost instantly when you left a screen, which made it nearly impossible to ever "clear" areas. That's not an issue here. There's just enough respawning to facilitate grinding, but not enough to drive you crazy. Items, I should add, don't respawn.
 
(I'm actually a bit mystified about how the game treats dropped and placed items. In general, things seem to be permanent. The Royal Mint never re-stocked its chests--or even replaced its door--after my burglary, and some stuff I dumped in Lord British's throne room early in the game was still there at the end. On the other hand, I left some gold nuggets in my room in the castle that disappeared almost immediately.)
 
The dungeons also deliver fun "scenes," such as a manmade structure that clearly once housed miners but is now occupied by their animated skeletons, or the body of an adventurer in a dead-end corridor, his pick-axe still close at hand. This is not the kind of thing that any other RPG was doing at the time.

This adventurer was sleeping on his raft when a giant spider covered him in a web. His corpse yielded 36 arrows, a bow, a gem, 3 torches, 35 gold coins, a mug, a loaf of bread, and a powder keg.

 
Creatures

One of the more interesting additions to this game: a hydra.

 
The game has added only a few entries to its gallery of creatures since the previous title, including drakes, hydras, giant ants, giant scorpions, alligators, acid slugs, and silver serpents. The bestiary lists a total of 42 creatures, but 7 are just helpless animals, and one is the non-hostile wisp, so that leaves 34 that you'll ever have to fight. I never encountered a lot of them, including corpsers, mimics, and rotworms.

A group of deer gamboling about Britannia. I could kill them for their meat, but the game doesn't really require food, so that seems kind of mean.

 
Orcs are notably absent, and come to think of it, I'm not sure we see them in Ultima VII, either. Has the entire race been wiped out? Ettins are also gone. The "beast-like humanoid" role is limited to trolls, headless, and cyclopes.

I like slimes. They're an experience point bonanza because they frequently divide when you hit them, and you get experience points for each one you kill. Arming your characters with fists and sending them wading through slimes will keep them occupied for almost an hour and rack up a thousand XP. I also like how the individual slimes "pool" together in this game. It's very well-done graphically.

Gideon grinds his experience points, hoping to achieve Level 8 (6400) before the game is over.

I named reapers to my "most annoying RPG enemies" list for Ultima IV for their habit of putting the entire party to sleep every round. In this game, they don't have that ability, but they can summon hordes of insects, which might be an even more annoying feature. Insects hardly do any damage, but they get about 20 attacks per round and they're damn near impossible to hit. A swarm of them produces a very long, unrewarding combat. Reapers can also move in this game.

This is what happens if they cast before you can kill them.

 
In a notable departure from IV and V, you hardly ever find enemies on the surface. I've encountered a few trolls here and there, a rat or two in the forest, a hydra on one of the islands, and the occasional sea serpent that I can just ignore, but you could easily walk from Minoc to Trinsic without fighting a single battle. It does make sense in a narrative sense that an evolving society would have eliminated most of the surface threats.

Combats with other humans are also quite rare, which makes it startling when they occasionally occur. You might run into a random fighter or two, accompanied by a mage, deep in the bowels of the Earth. You'll instinctively try to (T)alk with them, but they'll just start attacking for no reason.

A couple of ill-fated "swashbucklers" appear in a mountain pass.

Combat

For all its quality and innovations in gameplay, the Ultima series has never done a great job with combat. There have never been quite enough tactics, special attacks, or difficulty to create great CRPG battles. The series started weak in this area, with just a lot of button-mashing in Akalabeth, Ultima, and Ultima II. Ultima III introduced a tactical combat screen that greatly improved on what came before, and its development clearly culminated in Ultima V. This game takes a step backwards, and it all goes downhill in Ultima VII.

Starting in this game, combat occurs on the regular screen, just in a separate "combat mode"--and if you only want the Avatar to fight, you don't even need to enter that. In combat mode, you can choose to directly control your other party members ("command") or let them fight on their own. Neither is entirely satisfying. Manual control of every PC is tedious (and you can't set an "active character" while in combat mode), while computer control suffers from absolutely abysmal AI. The game theoretically lets you select six different "stances" for your characters--front, rear, flank, berserk, retreat, and assault--but I don't notice any correlation between what my characters actually do and what position I select, with the sole exception of "retreat."

The party faces acid slugs. Note that I have Dupre's action set to "Assault."

Half the time, no matter what I select, my characters just don't engage. Either their primitive pathfinding abilities can't figure out how to reach an enemy or they're just lazy, but my characters often just dither around in the background while my Avatar slugs it out with enemies. Even worse, they won't do anything when I specifically equip them with missile weapons. Thus, "command" is the only way to go when I want to make sure that everyone fights.

The bad combat AI for your party members is balanced by the relative simplicity of combat. Except for dragons and daemons, I don't find enemies challenging at all, and I could have made it just fine with only my Avatar with perhaps the exception of the dungeon Destard and all its dragon battles. (And it strikes me that intelligent use of invisibility rings and potions might have made that dungeon a snap: run in, grab the eggs, gate out.) The experience may be different for someone who creates a new character--my imported Avatar had near-max stats from the outset--but overall, the ease of combat means that many of the other elements of the game--economy, equipment, magic--are diminished in importance.

Many of the details of combat are unchanged from the previous two entries. It's still turn-based, though some actions take more turns than others. Health still progresses from "barely wounded" to "critical" before the enemy dies. Enemies flee when they hit "critical." Attacks can still go astray and wound party members. You can dual-wield weapons, and spiked helms and shields serve both offense and defense, so a character outfitted with a long sword, a main gauche, a spiked helm, and a spiked shield gets four attacks per round. Terrain still plays a big role--a narrow corridor can be a godsend or a hindrance depending on the specific enemy and what you want your party members to do.

My party does okay against a group of alligators.

 
Enemies still drop a variety of loot when they die--meat for animals and weapons, armor, and treasure for humans. The equipment drops make more sense than in some of the previous games; you no longer find treasure chests on bats or rats, for instance.

Equipment

Ultima VI features one of the most complex inventories of any game to date. The paperdoll inventory supports armor, weapons, shields, helms, amulets, rings, and boots. Your two hands can grip a single weapon, two weapons, a sword and shield, a weapon and a spellbook, torches, oil flasks, and wands. There are dozens of other special items activated with the (U)se command, including food, potions, lockpicks, sextants, musical instruments, and tools like shovels and pick-axes. Add to this a score of quest items, and your inventories are bursting at the seams fairly quickly. Fortunately, you also have bags, chests, and backpacks to help you organize everything. I keep the runes in one bag, the moonstones in another, and all my reagents in a third.

There are a variety of items that you can only effectively (U)se when they're on the ground, but the game lets you heft and tote them for the right occasion. I love that you can carry a skiff around on your back. The balloon (which you'll learn about soon) works the same way. Powder kegs are a fun addition to the game, useful for both blowing open doors and the occasional combat scenario.

The world is also full of things that you can pick up for no reason, like kitchen utensils, mugs, wine bottles, laboratory equipment, and clothes. More than a decade before The Elder Scrolls games started seeding its worlds with random calipers and embalming tools, it's fun to see a bunch of random items strewn about just to make the world feel more like a real place.

Encumbrance is limited by strength, but with enough party members, I haven't had any major problems. I try to organize by category. Dupre handles the gold nuggets and other stuff we're going to sell. Shamino is the torch-bearer and the rest of his inventory space goes to porting the skiff on his back. Iolo keeps the potions, Jaana the rings and other magic items. Sentri packs the food, and Seggallion hauls nothing but powder kegs. I never found an inventory use for Beh-Lem.

For the first time, you can (L)ook at weapons and armor to see how much damage they do and how much protection they provide. The best armor pieces are the magic helms, magic armor, and magic shields that you occasionally find or can buy at Trinsic. Yes, there are ways to clone magic armor and ways to buy it for everyone by exploiting the wisps, but I've been trying to play without those exploits and acquire it slowly (again, the relative ease of combat makes it not a big deal anyway). So far, I have four sets. I thought "magic boots" existed in this game, but I never found any, and in any event I wouldn't trade my swamp boots for anything.

Shamino's inventory consists of a skiff and its deed, a bunch of torches, and a backpack full of keys. He's wearing a magic helm, magic armor, a spiked collar, swamp boots, and a protection ring. He carries a sword and a torch.

I've been surprised at how few weapon upgrades I've found. My Avatar ended the game still wielding the same sword that he started with--I've yet to find a better one-handed melee weapon. As far as I can tell, there are no magic swords or magic axes in this game. There are magic bows, but they still consume arrows and I'm always running out. 

The best weapons seem to be wands of fire and lightning, which you find rather plentifully and last a long time. I tend to give these to the characters with the lowest experience totals so they can build them up faster. (Experience goes to the character who strikes the killing blow.) My strategy would work better if the characters would actually use the wands more consistently in combat.

Iolo fires his wand at a giant scorpion.

Economy

You rarely have to buy things in Ultima VI, and even when you can--like the magic armor in Trinsic--I find it so much more fun to find good items in dungeons that I rarely take advantage of it. Most of my money has gone towards spells and reagents. Spells are expensive enough, especially at high levels, that you're unlikely to end the game with all of them.

Unlike the previous two Ultima games, I rarely find myself "saving up" for anything here. Except at the very beginning, I haven't bothered to sell excess equipment at stores.

I decline to break the economy.

 
As commenters have spoiled, if you bring a copy of The Lost Book of Mantras to the wisps, you can get a reward consisting of as many gold nuggets your party members can carry. Unless you're way overloaded when you get them, you can generally go and sell these for a few thousand gold pieces at the Royal Mint.  However, that's only one option, and the wisps consider it the baser one. The buyers of the book--someone from the Rklbwm dimension--also offer to trade information instead. To avoid breaking the game, I went with the information:

If a substance with a partially reflective surface is positioned so that its third index of refraction matches the wavelength coefficient of the output of a polarized light source, and the resulting beam is focused on an ionized crystal suspended in a unipolar magnetic field, matter can be converted into useful electromagnetic radiation at an efficiency rate of 96 to 98 percent, depending on the desired output frequency.

I'm curious if this paragraph actually makes any sense whatsoever. I don't have the science background to interpret it.

Magic

Like the previous games, spells exist as combinations of syllables ("IN ZU GRAV" for "Sleep"; "VAS POR FLAM" for "Explosion") and require a combination of reagents to cast. Unlike the previous games, you don't ever have to use the syllables or mix the reagents; they just get deducted from your inventory when you cast. You also have to buy spells ahead of time from one of four sellers. They exist in eight circles, and your level has to be equal to the circle you're trying to cast. When you cast, you lose a number spell points equal to that circle. Spell points regenerate slowly in between castings.

Checking out my reagent stash before I buy more from Horance.

 
Spells and reagents are expensive enough that it really only makes sense to invest in magic for the Avatar. His spell points are double his intelligence, maxing out at 60. The few other characters who can use magic only get spell points equal to half their intelligence, meaning they max out at 15. I suppose it might be useful to have at least one other party member with "Dispel Magic," in case the Avatar gets slept or charmed, but I've managed to limp along without it.

In IV and V, I complained a bit that spells were mostly unnecessary, save "Cure Poison" (which oddly doesn't exist here; "Dispel Magic" handles that) and "Heal." This game takes a turn by making some spells absolutely necessary. You simply can't get through the game without "Unlock Magic," "Dispel Field," and "Telekinesis," at least, because so many of the essential dungeons are unpassable otherwise.

Gideon chooses from among various sixth-level spells.

I find myself using these and a lot of other "utility" spells quite often. These include "Create Food," "Detect Trap," "Untrap," "Dispel Magic," "Pickpocket," "Heal," and "Great Heal." A few utility spells have analogues in items of equipment--there's no need to cast "Light" as long as you have torches, "Peer" as long as you have gems, or "Locate" as long as you have a sextant.

I use offensive spells very rarely, mostly (again) because the combats are pretty easy without them and I'd rather not waste the reagents. "Paralysis" turned out to be very helpful against dragons, as did "Kill" when I got it late in the game. I might fire an occasional "Lightning" or "Fireball" spell at a fleeing enemy when my other party members don't seem to be in any hurry to use their missile weapons, and "Explosion" works well to clear out groups of low-level monsters (it basically replicates powder kegs).

Taking out a couple of reapers and an insect with "Mass Kill." 'Cause why not.

"Reveal" is a key spell that makes invisible enemies visible. It's the only way to get your party members to target an invisible enemy.

Gideon reveals a ghost.

 
There are a number of clever spells that, like most of the offensive spells, would be more useful if combats were harder and you needed more tactics to prevail. You can buy magic staves from Nicodemus and use the "Enchant" spell to imbue them with a number of charges of some other spell, like "Great Heal" or "Kill," give your characters unprecedented power in combat. "Summon" allows you to bring your own daemons into the battle, and "Energy Field" will create walls that help you reshape the combat landscape. There are spells of enormous power at the seventh and eight levels--"Energy Wind," "Wing Strike," "Mass Kill," "Mass Charm"--which would be awesome except that by the time you reach that level (if you ever do), you really have no major combats left to fight, and the spells are barely necessary even if you do.

There are a host of spells in the game that are simply mystifying--of no use except to screw around (though perhaps my readers can see uses for them that I can't). "Douse" extinguishes flames and "Ignite" takes care of a "lifeless torch, fireplace, or brazier." Why? "Infravision" detects warm-blooded beings in the dark, but if you're using that instead of "Light," I don't know why. "Trap" allows you to put a trap on a chest or door, but I can't really think of many cases in which an enemy chases you through a closed door. "Vanish" allows you to make small objects disappear and "Reappear" brings them back again. I can't think of a single use for either except to compete against Chuckles as Lord British's entertainer.

Ta-da!

Oh, there's tons more: "Magic Lock" magically locks chests and doors. Yes, I know about the exploit using this spell, but I don't think that was the spell's intention. On the other hand, it really has no other valid use. "Animate" causes inanimate objects to "come to life and wander about, though not under the caster's control." Again, why? (Yes, there's another exploit that allows you to then "Clone" these objects, then "kill" them, and now you have two of them. Again, that doesn't really seem to be the original intent.)

Gideon animates, then clones, magic armor.

"Clone" itself is a bit silly. It makes a copy of any character or NPC, but they just stand around and do nothing. They won't talk; they won't join the party. They seem to have the powers of the original character, but not the items, so it's not like you can clone your Avatar and then kill him for duplicate equipment or gold.

"Replicate" should theoretically do what the "Animate"/"Clone"/kill combination does, but it only works on "simple objects," which means literally nothing that you would find useful, including armor, reagents, torches, arrows, and lockpicks. 

Gideon replicates a bottle of mead. I'm not saying the spell wouldn't have real-life uses.

"Seance" is a mystery. It's supposed to let you speak to the dead, but it hasn't worked once any time I've tried it. I had this idea that it was useful in case you accidentally killed a key NPC, but it never works when I cast it on NPC bodies. It didn't work on Quenton's ghost, either. "Gate Travel" is a waste of time when you have the Orb of Moons. "X-Ray" saves you from, I don't know, having to open a door.

But the grandfather of all unnecessary, mystifying spells has to be the eighth-level "Eclipse," which expends 8 spell points and mandrake, sulfurous ash, nightshade, garlic, and blood moss to temporarily blot the sun and plunge the world into darkness--a condition that does absolutely nothing for you except require you to stumble around in the dark. Britannians don't even comment on it.

"I am Gideon of Earth! Behold my awesome power! Uh...Shamino, light a torch, would you?"

Finally, I should note the existence of a first-level spell called "Help," which requires no reagents. It sends you crying like a baby to Lord British's throne room and immediately restores all hit points. Not only would casting this spell be the most pathetic thing ever, but it's completely redundant since a) your Orb of Moons takes you to Lord British's throne room in only one extra step, and b) if things go so badly for you in combat that you die, you find yourself resurrected in the throne room anyway.

"You're so lame you cast 'Help' in Ultima VI" ought to be an insult among CRPG players.

Next up: how I won the game!