Quest of the Avatar

August 21, 2020 10:40 AM

Peter Bebergal on how Ultima IV forced players to grapple with morality in The Computer Game That Led to Enlightenment (The New Yorker)

Ultima IV is available for free on GOG (Win/Mac)

posted by adrianhon (26 comments total)

This was a great game. My friend and I wrote an editor for it (maps, graphics, etc.) back in the day. Good times.
posted by Sand at 10:47 AM on August 21, 2020

Great little article, saving away to share with people to explain how groundbreaking Ultima IV was. What I liked best is what Garriott alludes to in the interview; not only does the morality system make for an interesting story, but it also solves a gameplay problem.

One particularly clever choice was to make your morality a hidden stat (or stats; 8 of them). In a genre which mostly obsessed with putting every number possible on screen, it was a bit of a mystery. So you never quite knew whether you were actually being penalized or not. Unfortunately at some point I found the hidden code / cheat that showed you the score which immediately let me to minmaxing the system. Stealing 100g for -1 Honesty and then balancing it off with +1 Honesty for giving a blind person the correct change, that kind of thing. But that was me exploiting the game, it was explicitly designed to not allow that.

Ghost of Tsushima is just the latest in a zillion games that are in part inspired by Garriott's ethic design. It's filtered into almost every game now, particularly via all the BioWare games.
posted by Nelson at 10:51 AM on August 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

and for linux: http://xu4.sourceforge.net/
posted by Clowder of bats at 10:53 AM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Digital Antiquarian had a good series on this (and the other Ultimas too)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:58 AM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'm slightly annoyed and amused that the large image at the top of the article says that the game has "little more than four-color graphics" but the image is clearly taken from a version that has more than four colors (it's clearly from a later port - Atari ST or Amiga, maybe? - or a later version of the game).

In one of the several histories of role-playing games I've read, there is one encounter in Ultima III that is cited as a key inspiration for Ultima IV. There is a room in a dungeon that holds captured children. They're represented like all of the monsters in the game with small, humanoid icons. If you free them by unlocking the door, the "children" behave like the monsters whose code they share: they attack you. So you have to choose between letting the children remain trapped or opening their cell door and then killing them (or freeing them and trying to run from them but I don't know if that's really possible). This was clearly a mistake and not the designers' intention but they loved the ethical dilemma that resulted and it influenced the design of their next game.
posted by ElKevbo at 11:08 AM on August 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

I wonder if the "four-color graphics" line comes from the author's memories of playing Ultima IV on a computer stuck with CGA...
posted by egypturnash at 11:29 AM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

That looks like the Ultima IV Upgrade Patch for VGA. So, 256 colors out of 2^15, I think.

(Your pedanticness level has just gone up.)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:38 AM on August 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

Ha! In my house we played Ultima IV in 3 colours as Lord British intended. But only one at a time. Our garage-built Apple II clone had a monochrome monitor that was switchable between retina searing green, yellow, or soothing blood red.
posted by rodlymight at 11:45 AM on August 21, 2020 [14 favorites]

Many fond memories. I definitely did not finish it. In fact, It is my memory that on my most committed play, my game saved when I entered a city while poisoned and was about two movement away from having enough to reach a shop where I could get healing. At the age of fourteen or fifteen that was enough for me to move on to the next thing.
posted by meinvt at 11:46 AM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Wait, wait, wait. What is this GOG? There is a site where I can buy Ultima II? A game that forced me to grapple with....ok, I don't remember what it was about. But I think it had jokes that my middle school mind liked.
posted by eckeric at 11:51 AM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Slight derail: we had the four-colour Ultima IV years ago, on a Tandy with two different colour palettes: Green/Red/Yellow or Cyan/Magenta/White. The game was almost always in the first palette. However, I have vague recollections that while sleeping in a city you could suddenly find yourself walking at night time, signified by the cyan/magenta/white palette.

Was this a real thing, or do only I have some weird dream-memory of this?
posted by vernondalhart at 12:25 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh man, the Ultima IV/V/VI trilology of games (as well as the two Ultima Underworlds) are definitely some first ballot Hall of Fame games. I remember getting stuck on a puzzle in one of these (probably VI) where the key to opening some door was to replicate a tune on a harpsichord... except the Apple ][e we had didn't have the optional (hah!) sound card that could play the music.
posted by mhum at 2:06 PM on August 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

The harpsichord tune was used in Ultima 5, in Lord British’s bedroom. You didn’t need a sound card, just the regular machine could play chirps at reasonable pitches. 6789878767653. From memory.
posted by notoriety public at 2:25 PM on August 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

You didn’t need a sound card, just the regular machine could play chirps at reasonable pitches

Oh dang. Now I wonder if my computer's built-in sound was just plain busted?
posted by mhum at 3:22 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Also the harpsichord puzzle was horseshit: you had to do it to finish the game and there was literally zero indication of that fact.
posted by dismas at 3:29 PM on August 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Stones is one of my go-to tunes on mandolin when I'm just noodling by myself.
posted by biogeo at 3:36 PM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Never go anywhere without a little An Nox.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:12 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's been over 30 years and I'm still mad that my Ultima 5 save game got corrupted on wat I'm pretty sure was the final dungeon.
posted by aspo at 6:30 PM on August 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

High Score on Netflix has a fair amount on Ultima and Ultima IV in particular in the third episode.
posted by Badgermann at 8:55 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I had a pirate version of this gifted by a friend's brother and then Ultima V, complete with grainy photocopies of the map and manual. It was the absolute devotion of my childhood at one stage, although I never completed an entire game of either thanks to older siblings and wonky floppy disks. The harpsichord! The haunting music!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:57 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

And I just bought the set of Ultima V/VI/VII. I AM SO EXCITED
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:02 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

My secondhand C64 came with just the disks, no manual or anything else, but I could tell that this game was special (also it was one of about three games I had at the time) so I spent hours and hours working out what to do through a combination of trial and error and talking to the townsfolk. Played that way it was deep and dark and full of mysteries in a way that very few other games have ever managed.

Figuring out spell reagents was particularly painful - Mixing It fizzles! Mixing It fizzles! x100 - but at least you could get experimental supplies by cheating the reagent seller then quitting without saving so that your unvirtuous deeds, um, happened in a dream.

I think the way you were supposed to play was to do grand tours of the world's towns and castles, making a little bit of progress in each one and picking up leads to follow in other towns, and in between levelling up by fighting wandering monsters until your party could tackle the dungeons. I managed to reach enlightenment in several virtues, but never came close to winning because I wasn't dedicated enough to take the notes you need to follow all of the *vast* number of sub-quests. I still have no idea how they managed to fit such a sprawling game into the C64.

One particularly clever choice was to make your morality a hidden stat (or stats; 8 of them). In a genre which mostly obsessed with putting every number possible on screen, it was a bit of a mystery. So you never quite knew whether you were actually being penalized or not.

I never thought of it like that, but that's really clever!
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 9:38 PM on August 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I loved Ultima III bitf and I ordered, from a magazine (probably "A+"), an editor for it, and I spent a lot of time making town and world maps. I had more fun with that than any Ultima game proper; and really, the games I loved at the time like Maze Craze^, Adventure- and Pinball Construction Sets, Galactic Adventures, Mr. Robot & His Robot Factory, Lode Runner.. they all were all editable.

These video critiques of early Ultima games (as well as others) are kind of strange and good.
posted by fleacircus at 10:56 PM on August 21, 2020

I learned so much about morality from this game. I credit it with making me ponder the complexity of morality, at a developmental stage when I could have gone down the road to being an amoral bastard of a teenager.
posted by benzenedream at 1:29 AM on August 22, 2020

I still have the floppies for Ultima III and IV sitting around somewhere! In case I need them? It could happen. You don't know.

Ultima III was one of the first computer games I ever played and it was glorious. Ultima IV as well, of course. Shame what happened to the series post Ultima VII.5

My favorite part was sailing the little boat into the maelstroms and popping out elsewhere. Oh, and how the little hamlets would grow between games until by Ultima VII era Cove had basically linked up with Britain and even Trinsic wasn't separated by much.
posted by Justinian at 11:21 AM on August 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Now I'm concerned that floppies from the early and mid 80s might not work anymore. What if I need them?!?!?
posted by Justinian at 11:22 AM on August 22, 2020 [2 favorites]