Game 16: Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985)

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

United States

Origin Systems, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released 1985 for Apple II and Commodore 64; 1986 for Atari 800; 1987 for DOS, Atari ST, FM-7, PC-88, PC-98, and Sharp X1; 1988 for Amiga and Sharp X68000; 1989 for NES; 1990 for Sega Master System

Date Started: 25 April 2010

             

Ultima IV offers a roleplaying experience like no other CRPG, set in a world as rich in detail as anything in the modern CRPG era. Although the gameplay has advanced only a little since Ultima III, the story, game world, and quest are a huge leap forward.

Remembering back to the mid-1980s, it feels like I played Ultima IV for years, first on my friends' Commodore 64s and then on mine, before I won. I have no idea what took so long. When I replayed it in 1994, I was surprised and disappointed at how quickly the game progressed, and how many of the gameplay features I thought I remembered were actually from Ultima V. I played it a third time in 2000 and won it in, I think, a single long day. I hope that 10 years later I've forgotten some of the details and I can approach the game fresh. Blogging should slow down the progress.

Searching for a fresh experience, I decided to play the "recreated" version of the game offered at http://xu4.sourceforge.net. Everything about the game is the same except the graphics and sound are much better, and there are beautifully designed screens at certain points, such as when you meditate and achieve part of your avatarhood.

I'm going to try something different with this game and blog it in the order of gameplay, elucidating new features as I come across them, rather than summarizing them at once in long blog posts.

The game begins with a character creation method absolutely unique for its time, and rivaled today only in Morrowind and Oblivion, both of which are paying homage to Ultima IV. After you give yourself a name (mindful of Lord British having obtained his name from his homeland, I chose "Americus") and sex, the game draws you into Britannia slowly. You begin at your own home, in the real world, on a walk in the countryside.

Wow. It's like the game knows me.

You fall asleep under a tree when suddenly a moongate appears in a circle of stones (moongates were introduced in the Ultima series in Ultima II). Before it disappears, someone tosses through a package containing an ankh cross, a cloth map, a copy of The History of Britannia as told by Kyle the Younger, and the game's spell book. These items, of course, were contained within the original Ultima IV game box. The game insists that you read the book of history.

All right! Jesus.

The map and the History introduce a rich and detailed game world that will remain essentially the same through Ultima VII Part 1. What happened to game manuals like this? After recapping the light stories of Ultima I, Ultima II, and Ultima III, it describes the new land that arose from the "rubble of Sosaria," which Lord British named Britannia. In the new era of peace, Lord British was able to concentrate on improving the quality of life, erecting institutions to learning, meditation, and martial prowess.

Eight major cities developed "into cultural centers for one of the eight major professions." Moonglow focuses on mages, Britain on bards, and so on. One of the towns is Skara Brae, apparently an homage to The Bard's Tale but ultimately drawn from the name of a neolithic ruin in Scotland. The professions, or character classes, include two new ones: shepherds and tinkers.

The map that I know better than my own home town.

Equipment, character classes, monsters, and terrain are described in florid and exciting detail. Oh, we must have some examples:

• "DAGGER: Ten inches of beautifully worked steel make the standard Britannian dagger. The traditional basket hilt looks very functional. A favorite weapon of novices."
• "FOREST: The going is slow through dense woods, with thy speed cut fully in half. The oak so dearly loved by the Druids predominates here, along with healthy growth of Ash and Beech. There is quite a lack of visibility in the forest regions."
• "HEADLESS: Another evil being best suited to terror and destruction, the Headless is indeed a creature of nightmares. Many a traveler has fled in abject horror at the sign of these headless torsos bearing down upon them."

Only at the end of the manual do we get a hint of the quest to follow. In an afterword penned by Lord British himself, he says that "we seek the person who can become a shining example of our nation and guide us from the Age of Darkness into the Age of Light. We have sent this message out to the farthest reaches of the known universe; indeed, we have even spoken across the void of time. Is there one who can complete the Quest of the Avatar?"

Here we have the key to what makes Ultima IV unique. The game is not about fighting some "big bad" like Mondain, Minax, and Exodus; it's about achieving moral enlightenment. There is nothing else like this in CRPGs.

Roger Ebert, Games, and Art

Roger Ebert's comments that "video games can never be art" (both his original comments on the subject and his most recent update) have the Internet in an uproar. He wrote his latest comments three days ago, and already there are hundreds of blog postings both agreeing with him and castigating him. His own blog posting has, of this moment, 1,746 comments. The first one is representative of many of them: "Roger - as you are sure to be inundated with comments for this post, I will simply say: You just don't get it." Many of the rejoinders criticize Ebert for never having played video games himself. How, then, can he presume to pass judgment on them as being "not art"? It's a fair point, so I would like to say, as someone who has played hundreds of hours of computer games in the last three months alone: Ebert is absolutely right. 

No one who has played games would seriously argue that video games are not at times artistic. From the beautiful images of island and sea in Myst to the view from Dive Rock in Oblivion to the cinematic cut scenes in too-many-games-to-name to the movie-quality voice acting in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to the music compositions that grace the backgrounds of countless games, games have always featured artistic elements. Some of them are quite grand. But the games themselves are not art any more than The Last Supper or The Thinker are games. You may disagree by supplying your own definition of "art" or by trying to shoehorn games into an existing definition of "art," and it will be difficult to argue with you because at its basis this entire discussion is semantic. But in the same discussion, I could prove that video games are "pornography," that pornography is "literature," that good prose literature is "poetry," that poetry is "religion," that religion is "comedy," and on and on until we just end up hitting each other with shovels. Let's try it this way: whether something is or is not any of these things depends on its primary purpose, not what it might happen to accomplish tangentially along the way. Video games do not have, as their primary purpose, the enrichment of human experience through interpretation, and thus they are not art. Don't like that definition of "art?" Choose another, but either you won't be able to make video games fit the definition except through selective examples, accident, or metaphor, or you'll be using a definition too broad to be useful. Gamers are upset about Ebert's comments, I suspect, because they're equating "art" with "good" and "not art" with "bad." This is just silly. There are plenty of wonderful things in life that are unquestionably enriching and enlightening and worth experiencing but that are just as unquestionably not art. How about:

• The view from a balcony overlooking the Grand Canyon
• A muffuletta on Decatur Street
• A game of chess
• The Winter Olympics
• A Sunday New York Times crossword
• Falling in love
• Kant's theory of categorical imperative

Ebert sums it up nicely: "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves?...Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, 'I'm studying a great form of art?'" I just wrote a posting about how, as a young man, a CRPG shaped my moral development. I'm investing hundreds of hours in this blog and playing the games that it covers, and thus I have as much reason as anyone to make believe that playing games isn't a complete waste of time. But something doesn't have to be "art" to not be a waste of time. And games are not art.  

 

[Later Edit: For those of you stumbling on this posting years later, please read this comment below before getting all upset.]

Ultima IV and Virtue

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin recalls that once he established himself as a successful printer in Philadelphia, he "conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection." Through his readings, he had identified a list of 13 virtues that together would equal this perfection: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Realizing that trying to practice all 13 at once would be impossible, he set up a system by which he focused on one per day, carefully recording his progress in a ruled "score sheet" he set up in his notebook.

"I determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the virtues successively. Thus, in the first week, my great guard was to avoid every the least offence against Temperance, leaving the other virtues to their ordinary chance, only marking every evening the faults of the day."

When I was 13 or 14, I did the same thing Franklin did, only not having been exposed to his autobiography at that point, my list of virtues was different: honesty, compassion, valor, justice, honor, sacrifice, spirituality, and humility. I wrote each with its definition on an index card and every morning I shuffled the cards and chose one at random. That one, I did my best to practice for the day. If honesty came up, I was careful to tell no lies throughout the day. If it was sacrifice, I looked for ways to do something charitable. Valor was always a tough one. I scoured Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in the school library and made little signs to hang around my room. I still remember some of them:

• "Honor and shame from no condition rise; act well your part, there all the honor lies." -- Alexander Pope
• "God hath sworn to lift on high he who sinks himself by true humility." -- John Keble

 

Not many, I suspect, would admit to deriving what amounts to their religion from a computer game. But I had rejected conventional religion even as a pre-teen. I balked at Judeo-Christian doctrines that seemed both haphazard and arbitrary: meticulous rules about food and dress, but none about the need to actively seek out and destroy evil (my interpretation of "valor"); commandments against adultery and sabbath-breaking, but none against assault and slavery. Ultima IV, on the other hand, offered a comprehensive and completely nondenominational--secular, even--system of virtue. It fit me like a glove. Perhaps if I had read philosophy, the history of the samurai, or Ayn Rand, I would have encountered an equally suitable virtue system that would be more "respectable" as a source. But I didn't. Instead, I played Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.

Ultima IV's system seems to owe something to Hindu mythology, particularly in the concept of the "Avatar," which I think has been misunderstood by Ultima players and critics alike. In Hindu belief, an avatar is an earthy manifestation of a god--a form the god takes to walk on the mortal plane. In the Ultima series, however, your character is repeatedly described as the "Avatar of Virtue." "Avatar" in this sense is not being misused as a synonym for "exemplar" or "missionary"; rather, the game is suggesting that virtue itself is made manifest in your character; that abstract concepts like honor and valor can, in fact, be given physical form. By using the term, the creator is equating virtue with godhood, suggesting that our gods can be--perhaps should be--principles as well as beings. Why, indeed, should we worship a god who personifies truth, love, and courage when we can instead worship truth, love, and courage themselves?

At the same time, the use of "avatar" has a subtle second meaning. The character that moves around the screen is literally your, the player's, avatar in the game world. From the opening cut scenes of several of the Ultima games, showing you sitting at your computer, a soda can at its side, the games invite you to engage in a sort-of metacognition about the CRPG dynamic in which your fictional alter-ego acts in a way that is more virtuous, more courageous, more adventurous than in the real world.

In most games, this process is one-way--usually, at least, and thankfully so. Gamers who spend hours killing fictional enemies and then go out and kill real enemies are justly labeled as murderers, with negative consequences for their victims, themselves, and the gaming community. In less dramatic examples, no one learns how to sword fight from Oblivion or cast real magical spells from Wizardry. But here, in Ultima IV, we have a game that invites us to apply its lessons to the real world--to improve ourselves in the same way that we improve our in-game character. And if we decline to do this--decline to take this system of virtues seriously--just because its source is a "video game"...well, what better example do we have of a failure to live up to the most difficult-to-master of the eight virtues: humility.

Creating your Ultima IV character.

There has never been, and I suspect never will be again, a CRPG--or, indeed, any game--like Ultima IV. Today's gamers wouldn't have the patience for it. I'm surprised they ever did. Perhaps it was only because CRPGs were so young, computers less ubiquitous, and computer gamers more cerebral (in the 1980s, mostly nerds had computers), that Ultima IV ever found an audience in the first place. Imagine, today, a game without a "big boss," but rather a more complicated quest to become a moral exemplar; a game in which progress is made less through combat than through meditating at shrines; a game whose character creation process invites you to explore your own morality; a game in which, to win, you must give gold to the poor, sacrifice hit points at a blood bank, always tell the truth, and let fleeing monsters escape; a game in which NPC dialog occurs not by choosing among options but by actually typing the words you want to speak.

If you came here for gameplay details, I apologize for the long and abstract polemic. I'll actually start playing (re-playing, in this case, for the first time in 10 years) in the next posting. But this discussion explains, I think, what ultimately led me to create this blog. Ultima IV wasn't my first CRPG, but it was among the first few, and for years it has stood in my mind as the foremost example of what a CRPG can achieve. If this intrigues you at all, ignore that it's old, ignore that it has lousy graphics and sound, ignore everything but the plot, and just play the game.

Phantasie: Final Rating

Back in town, the adventurers review their progress.

 

Phantasie

United States

Independently developed; published by Strategic Simulations, Inc.

Released in 1985 for Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64; 1986 for Atari ST, PC-88, PC-98, and FM-7; 1987 for Amiga and Sharp X1; 1988 for DOS and MSX

Date Started: 13 April 2010

Date Finished: 19 April 2010

Total Hours: 12

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 39

Ranking as of Game 359: 298/359 (83%)

              
This is the second time I'm applying the rating system I outlined a few weeks ago. Phantasie may be my favorite or second-favorite CRPG so far, so I'll know the system works if it produces a reasonably high rating.

1. Game World. Although mostly a standard high-fantasy world, Phantasie does a good job fleshing itself out with back story and characters. It doesn't approach the depth and detail of modern games, but it's good for its time, rivaled only by the Ultima series. Although its towns are completely interchangeable, its multiple dungeons each have their own unique character. Your quest is clear from the start, and although Nikademus himself doesn't make an appearance until the end, your progress through the game shows the effects of his tyrannical rule, and the Black Knights are a constant reminder of the main quest. The only thing I can fault the game on is my preference that your actions affect the game world. In this game, they don't, really. The dungeons continually re-set, meaning you find the same NPCs in the same perils every time you enter. In the end, you can kill Nikademus again and again. Final score: 6.

2. Character creation and development. The classes and characteristics are RPG standard, but the wide variety of races is interesting. Unfortunately, the choice of classes and races has no real bearing on the game except for a single dungeon you must have a minotaur to enter. Character advancement is fairly basic, giving you extra hit points and spells. Uniquely, all characters--including fighters and thieves--can cast spells, although not many. Final score: 4.

I can't think of any other game that allows you to play a troll main character. No...wait. Might and Magic VIII. Bollocks.

           
3. NPC Interaction. There are NPCs in the game, but your interaction with them boils down to you stumbling into them and them telling you things. Through the innovative use of scrolls, however, the game does allow you to learn interesting things about the world via your character interactions, and talking to them is necessary to advance the game. There are no role-playing options during dialog, however. Final score: 4.

4. Encounters & Foes. There are many monsters in the game, but they aren't very well distinguished among each other. They basically break down into two varieties: those that hit and those that cast. Aside from deciding whether to greet or fight (neither of which has long-term implications), there's no way to role-play during your encounters. On the positive side, there are both random and fixed encounters, and dungeons respawn, allowing you to replay battles and encounters, and re-find treasures. (Just so it doesn't seem like I'm inconsistent with #1, this is a good thing when it comes to fighting, but a bad thing when it comes to quests and NPCs.) Final score: 5.

5. Magic and Combat. At first, I thought Phantasie was equal with Wizardry in tactics with just a different battle screen. But it's not. First, since all your characters can attack (as opposed to just the first three in Wizardry or The Bard's Tale), you don't need to carefully plan the actions of half your party. Except towards the end, the battles are comparably easy, so there's no reason to meticulously ration your spells. Even at the end, they aren't very hard. My biggest objection is to the imbalance between combat and magic. You must have a wizard in this game, both to travel to the city of the Gods and to slay Nikademus. Fighters, no matter how high level, are completely useless--not relatively, but completely--against some of the higher-level creatures. Final score: 4.

6. Equipment. The variety of equipment in Phantasie is admirable. In addition to different types--swords, staffs, daggers, ring mail, chain mail, shields, and so on--there are different levels of augmentation, from regular through +10. Use of weapons and armor is not limited by character class but rather by strength and dexterity statistics. Items you find on your journey cannot be used right away; you have to get back to town and distribute them among your characters. During this process, it's very clear which weapons do the most damage and which armor and shields offer the best protection. Unfortunately, there are no terribly unique weapons and armor, and the game doesn't offer any descriptions of them. Final score: 5.
              

Distributing equipment among your characters.

           
7. Economy. Sucks a bit. After the initial equipment purchase, there's nothing else to buy. All gold goes to training, and for most of the game you don't have enough gold to fully train your characters to the levels they've achieved. Suddenly, towards the end, you end up with more gold than you know what to do with. Final score: 2.

8. Quests. Phantasie offers a compelling main quest, but there's only one outcome. Despite what I thought at the beginning, there are no real "side quests," although there is at least one side-dungeon. The quests do not really offer role-playing opportunities. Final score: 3.

9. Graphics, Sound, Inputs. The four-color graphics are pretty bad on the PC version, and sound had not developed enough by this time to be un-painful. Final score: 2.

10. Gameplay. Theoretically, the game is alinear, allowing you to march off in any direction from the beginning. In practice, this would swiftly get you slain by any number of creatures even if you could survive the swimming (a skill you don't fully develop until a higher level). Similarly, with only a couple exceptions, you can progress through the dungeons in any order you wish, but you can only fully complete them in a specific order. The game offers the same experience for each play; there is no replayability. Even though you can only save in towns, the overall difficulty felt a little too easy at times. But it is evenly paced from beginning to end, and it's over before it gets boring. Final score: 4.

Final Total: 39. This means I liked it slightly more than Wizardry and The Bard's Tale but not as much as Ultima III. I guess that works. Next up....yes! Ultima IV.

Phantasie: Won!

Well, damn. I guess I'll have to play Phantasie II then.

The ending of Phantasie came at me all of a sudden. I had intended to get in at least one more posting before I won. This is par-for-the-course in some of these older games, though, which don't telegraph their final chapters the way that modern games do.

Many of the assumptions that I made about the game in the last posting turned out to be false. First, there are no side quests--what I thought were side quests were just steps along the path to the main quest (although there is at least one dungeon that seems to serve no purpose but to provide an interesting diversion). Second, there aren't a fixed number of Black Knights. Although the game repeatedly tells you there are nine, they must regenerate, because I must have killed 30-40 of them.

             

In your progress through the Phantasie dungeons, you meet the heroes of the pre-Nikademus era: the dwarven fighter Kilmor, the sage Filmon, and Lord Wood. Each gives you clues, items, and passwords to help you along the path through the dungeons and, consequently, the main quest. Your progress culminates with a visit to the city of the gods, where you meet Zeus himself, and then finally to the castle of Nikademus. [Later edit: 5 years after I posted this, an anonymous reader pointed out that you don't actually fight Nikademus in this game; you fight the Black Lord, leader of the Black Knights. Every time I say "Nikademus" from here on, I mean the Black Lord. I was under this misapprehension for a long time!]

The reason I was surprised by the ending was that the game led me to believe I had to collect nine rings along the way. But when the game finished, I only had six of them. Phantasie makes the origin of the "nine rings" concept quite clear and pays homage via the name of one of the game's villains.

Shouldn't it be J. R. R. Trolkin?

The odd-dungeon-out is the interesting dungeon of the Bleebs, where you encounter a multi-colored race that offers you a series of riddles having to do with which color tells the truth and which lies. I like it when games throw logic puzzles at you like this. The Bard's Tale, in retrospect, offered some fun riddles that I forgot to mention in my postings.

This turned out to be a lie.

Some of the encounters give you at least some ability to role-play, although we're nowhere near modern games in dialog and freedom of decisions. You can choose whether to rob a jewelry store, whether to pray to or deface statues, and whether to rescue a young maiden or an old man from lava. (To be fair, though, if you rescue the young maiden you can't continue in the main quest.)

Nikademus himself is pretty tough, repeatedly casting spells that do dozens of points of damage to all of your characters. Fighters barely damage him. The only way to defeat him--like the only way to defeat a lot of other big bosses in the game--is to repeatedly cast Fireflash IV.

The cloak makes the outfit.

The game lets you keep playing after the final battle--in fact, even after the final battle, Black Knights continue to roam the land and you can go back and defeat Nikademus again. In fact, you have to go back if you want to finish the dungeon and get the final scroll.

I guess Nikademus is multi-dimensional.

I made a video of the end game--no sound this time. Final accounting to follow in another post.