Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle: Summary and Rating

 

         

Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle

With The Silver Seed expansion

United States

ORIGIN Systems, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 29 January 2023

Date Ended: 3 October 2023
Total Hours: 112

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 43

Ranking at Time of Posting: 443/508 (87%)

         

Summary:

    

Serpent Isle takes the engine from Ultima VII: Part One - The Black Gate (with a few upgrades) and tells a long, full story worthy of its own game number. The Avatar and his three stalwart companions (Iolo, Shamino, and Dupre) travel from Britannia to the Serpent Isle, chasing former Fellowship leader Batlin, who has ostensibly gone to enact the next stage of the Guardian's plot to destroy Britannia. As a secondary quest, the party hopes to find the fate of Iolo's wife, Gwenno. They arrive to find a land of former Britannian malcontents who have built cities on the foundations of an older race that worshiped Order, Chaos, and Balance. In the end, the party destroys Batlin but unleashes forces that essentially wipe out the people of the island. The Avatar manages to restore Balance for the few remaining citizens, but at the cost of Dupre's life and the Avatar's own abduction into the next Ultima title.

    

The plot is long and complex, with abrupt, nonsensical, and inept developments balancing the relatively competent backstory and world-building. Like The Black Gate, the mechanics are weak in classic RPG elements. Combat remains more random than tactical; spells are mostly unnecessary; character development is an afterthought. Inventory and lever puzzles adopt far greater prominence than in previous Ultima games. The oblique-angle interface remains fantastic for exploration and character actions, less so for combat, even less so for inventory management. 

The narrative is relatively linear, and most of the game world is blocked off until you hit various plot points. And it just drags on forever. I enjoyed the beginning but was so exhausted by the end that I grew actively angry at each NPC, door, and puzzle.

         

****

    

The Ultima series continues to innovate. Past entries gave us the first CRPG mini-games, the first dialogue keywords, the first recruitable NPCs, the first map included in the game box, the first ability to play musical instruments within a game, and lots of other superlatives. Here, we have the first 100-hour CRPG plot. You understand, I trust, how that's different from the first 100-hour game. A game can take a long time to win but be primarily about mapping (Crusaders of the Dark Savant), or grinding (Disciples of Steel), or both (Fate: Gates of Dawn), or dying and reloading (NetHack, The Return of Werdna). It can exceed 100 hours because it offers a thousand side quests (The Elder Scrolls) or because the game simply has no single ending (MMOs).

   

But it's rare to find single storylines that cross into three-digit hours. Even today, main quests can usually be wrapped up in considerably shorter time. More important, modern games offer features that weren't available in 1993, such as quest logs, summaries of completed quests, dialogue notes, and quest items that you cannot discard. Long plots tend to be divided into digestible chapters or regular points of return to a central resting place.

   

Thus, when I say that Serpent Isle is "too long," I don't mean necessarily that it's too long a game (although, let's face it, it is) but that it's too long of a plot, and more precisely that it's too long of a continuous, unrelenting plot in which the player must keep track of hundreds of things said by hundreds of NPCs as well as dozens of quest items, lest he literally lock himself out of continuing. That I only had to use the cheat menu a couple of times is something of a miracle.

      

I just like this shot.

    

If I'd liked the plot, I might have minded less, but I just didn't. I liked the plot of The Black Gate. The Fellowship was a sinister organization seeking to usurp everything I'd built, and I enjoyed discovering their hidden motives. In Serpent Isle, the part I liked best was trying to track down the items lost in the teleportation storm. The rest of the plot just didn't hang together well. The history makes no sense (e.g., the rise, peak, and disappearance of the "Ophidian" culture in less than a century). The motives of the Guardian and Batlin are nonsensical. The plot twists are abrupt, and the NPCs don't have enough of a reaction to them; for instance, no one in the party reacts to Dupre's cremation, and the world's NPCs are awfully ho-hum about the deaths of 90% of the citizens. The Imbalance (i.e., teleportation storms) is handled inconsistently. I have to give some praise to the depth of the backstory and the development of the Ophidian virtue system, but I couldn't bring myself to care about it. That's the, what, sixth system of virtues that the Ultima series has introduced? At some point, you have to say enough.

      

Commenters have offered conflicting opinions on whether the central problem with the game is that the developers had too much time or too little, were under too much pressure from their new Electronic Arts masters or given too much leash. (Jimmy Maher has an excellent pair of articles on this period in Origin's history, as it was subsumed by its larger partner.) I think a more obvious explanation for the difference between The Serpent Isle and The Black Gate is that the team lost their writer. Raymond Benson, who had done such a great job with the plotting and dialogue in The Black Gate, only worked on Serpent Isle for a couple months before he left Origin to go write Return of the Phantom (1993) for MicroProse. (These facts are attested in a 2013 Ultima Codex interview with Benson.) Replacing him was . . . well, it's not clear. Unlike The Black Gate, Serpent Isle doesn't have a "lead writer" credit. It does have a "Writing Team," but I don't think anyone on it is a professional writer. It's made up of career Origin employees whose talents are in coding, not dialogue.

       

This part never made any sense.

     

The team was led by Bill Armintrout, who according to MobyGames credits was occupying the director's chair for the first time. In another Ultima Codex interview, Armintrout indicates that his big break wasn't a sign of confidence from Origin or EA management, but rather a consequence of three project leads quitting the company at the same time. He describes a one-hour briefing in which he had to learn "what an Ultima was." The interview indicates that Richard Garriott was occupied with Pagan while a mostly-inexperienced team worked on Serpent Isle, adapting to changing visions and requirements. In an early draft, the game was going to be pirate-themed.

    

Armintrout's interview also gives some indications of material that was cut from the game. As commenters have already mentioned, originally the Banes of Chaos (occupying the bodies of Dupre, Shamino, and Iolo) were supposed to take over the three cities of Serpent Isle, not just kill everyone. They would have perverted the values and virtues of the towns. The Bane of Wantonness was to have turned the citizens of Monitor into actual leopards, wolves, and bears; Iolo was to have unleashed a plague in Fawn that made everyone ugly; and Shamino was to have become the new MageLord of Moonshade. The Avatar would have had to evict them all from their respective cities before facing them at the Castle of the White Dragon. These bits of lost plot appear in the game in various forms; for instance, there are leopards, wolves, and bears roaming around Monitor, and there are some notes and dialogues in Fawn and Moonshade hinting at the other lost plots. Overall, it sounds like a slightly better story, but it would have also added unnecessary length to the game.

      

A scroll in Fawn references content cut from the game.

     

In contrast to the plot, the Serpent Isle team completely inherited the engine. It has the same strengths and weaknesses of The Black Gate. I mostly like it. No other game was offering an exploration window completely unencumbered by interface elements, and it works great. Single keys call up windows and execute the most important actions. The mouse is used as it should be used, for selection of on-screen objects and positioning them. But we still have the problem with characters needing to be fed and objects getting lost deep in characters' backpacks, including a lot of tiny-but-vital objects like serpents' teeth and keys. Darkness is still too debilitating, and enemies still respawn too quickly when you leave the screen and return.

      

The addition of the "freezing" mechanic didn't do anything for me, either.

       

Combat remains underwhelming. I'm not sure if such is inevitable with the interface or whether it would have been possible to do it better. Character development is also lackluster--a few extra attribute points maybe seven or eight times. Equipment rewards are okay but barely feel like they matter. Spells play a minimal role. Much more attention is given to the game's puzzles, leading a lot of people to comment correctly that for much of its run time, it feels more like an adventure game than an RPG.

       

Moments like this made me want to quit long before the game's end.

      

I would have loved to see the possibilities inherent with this engine if the script had been less tightly plotted and the areas less gated. I think I said as much when I was reviewing The Black Gate. The engine seems tailor-made for an open world game with plenty of side quests and lots of serendipitous discovery. Origin had been planning an Arthurian Legends title using the engine (accounts differ as to whether it was going to be a Worlds of Ultima game); it's too bad it was canceled.

It's worth reading the cluebook for the game, subtitled Balancing the Scales. Frankly, until you get to the "walkthrough" part at the end, it's less a cluebook and more a supplement to the manual. It clarifies the Ophidian backstory and virtue systems, and it offers information that ought to be open to the player, like lists of spells and reagents, exchange rates, and weapon damage. Even the maps hardly offer more spoilers than the typical automap of today's RPGs. It made me wish there was something like a halfway point between a game manual and a cluebook--maybe a "manual supplement" for players who want to delve deeper into a game's lore and mechanics but not actually spoil puzzles and plot developments. 

          

It would have been nice to have a map this clear and accurate throughout the game.

      

Usually when I offer a "summary and rating" as a separate entry, I give multiple paragraphs to each GIMLET category. I just don't feel like doing that here. I already did it for The Black Gate, and any major changes between the two parts of Ultima VII I've already described above. Let's just get this over with:

    

• 6 points for the game world. It gets all of it for depth and complexity. It doesn't do as well as The Black Gate (8) because I didn't like much of the material that went into that depth and complexity.

• 3 points for character creation and development. No change from Gate.

        

The party's final statistics.

      

• 6 points for NPC interaction. I gave it 7 in Gate. The quality of dialogue dropped here, and the classic keywords became more strained. Too much was gated by keyword. You have about the same number of NPCs who will join the party.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. It gets a little extra for the quality of the puzzles in various parts of the game. Enemies themselves are mostly unmemorable.

• 3 points for magic and combat. The variables are there, but they're lost in random actions and too much luck. Spells are mostly unnecessary and wasted.

       

The typical cluster@#$% that is this game's approach to combat.

        

• 5 points for equipment. Finding upgrades remains one of the better parts of the game.

• 3 points for the economy. Money is needed mostly for spells and not at all in the second half of the game. Having four different currencies adds nothing.

        

The last moment that money has any use.

      

• 4 points for the quests. There's a main quest, but no alternate ending. There are some side-ish quests and areas. You get a few choices in the order you handle things.

• 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The sound is horribly disappointing, so much that I mostly played it with sound off. The occasional voiced dialogue didn't excite me. I was happy with the graphics and the interface. I'm told the music is very good.

• 2 points for gameplay. Here's where it suffers most in comparison to The Black Gate. The world is less open. It errs on the side of too easy. It's way, way, way too long, and because of that it's the opposite of "replayable." There are very few games in my chronology for which I'm sure that I'll never, never play them again, but Serpent Isle is one of them.

   

That gives us a final score of 43, the lowest by far that I've ever given to a proper Ultima title, 7 points lower than The Black Gate. I know some people think it's the best Ultima and improves upon its predecessor, so I'm sorry I can't share your opinion.

     

I don't think I've heard of "MCGA Graphics." "Make Computers Great Again?"

         

Just be glad I didn't dislike the game as much as Scorpia. In the July 1993 issue of Computer Gaming--oh, Land of Goshen, when the hell am I finally going to open an issue of this damned magazine and not see an ad for Spear of Destiny on Page 2? I swear it's been there in every issue I've consulted since 2015! It's mocking me with my lack of progress. Sorry. As I was saying, Scorpia didn't care for it much. Choice quotes:

   

• "Many threads are woven into this tapestry, and at times, it's easy to lose sight of the pattern as a whole."

• "Inventory is the same nightmare it was in the previous game . . . Try locating a dark item, such as nightshade or black pearl, when it's against a black background."

• "Once a party member becomes hungry, he whines and moans about it until you stuff something into his face."

        

Amen, sister.

       

• "Party members . . . cheerfully walk over the most blatant traps, no matter how carefully the Avatar maneuvers."

• "The whole business of Shamino's background is bogus."

   

Aside from technical issues that I didn't experience, her biggest problem was with the puzzles, and particularly the gated nature of the puzzles. She noted, for instance, how the Avatar can't get into Skullcrusher until he speaks to the Gwani despite solving the puzzle well before then, and how the Hound of Doskar is still needed to lead you to where you already knew you had to go. She didn't like the inconsistencies in whether you could open doors with bashing and explosions or not, and she mentioned many of the plot holes, such as Wilfrid not noticing the corpses of his family members in the same room. I'm not sure what she means by "an amazing programming oversight that allows you to complete the game without performing what is supposed to be a crucial ritual," but it doesn't surprise me. Overall: "Serpent Isle is likely to provide more aggravation than enjoyment for most players."

       

To Deruvia, I guess.

      

We're in the minority, though. Most reviews put it in the 90s. Just a year after it was released, PC gamer rated it #13 (from the top) on a list of the "Top 40 Best Games of All Time." It's the highest-rated RPG on the list, which does not include The Black Gate. (The #1 game is Doom; the next-highest rated RPG is The Elder Scrolls: Arena at #18.) My own readers have shown far more enthusiasm than I've felt. Maybe it will balance out with my loving Ascension. Before then, of course, we'll take a look at Ultima VIII: Pagan, if I ever get to 1994. Chances just got a little better.