A Game for Somebody
My first attempt at Ultima IV was an unmitigated disaster.
I thought I was doing well. I put in the time beforehand! I read the History of Britannia just like the game told me to, I answered the class-choosing questions at the outset honestly and wound up as a bard, I kept my mind open despite the graphics being what they are.
Then I got into the game itself, and I couldn’t do anything right. I walked over the Lord British’s castle and had to fumble around at the keyboard to discover that “E,” for “Enter,” is how you go into things. I figured only a select few of the keyboard buttons would be used in this way, perhaps with an organized system or some kind of in-game indication of what should be used when, but nope. This is from 1985. People were more desperate for interactive fantasy adventure, or something, and things like logical user interface just weren’t important. You’ll be doing things like hitting W to choose what armor to wear, hitting Y to yell (Note: I have no idea what yelling does), and hitting K to klimb.
I don’t mean to make it sound like I think this is a bad game. It’s really cool in a lot of ways. One of those ways is in the main (only) quest: You have to become the Avatar by embodying eight different virtues.
The virtues permeate the game. Those questions I mentioned above, the ones that determine your class, are all grey-area questions of morality. Things like, if you’re tasked with delivering a sack of gold, and you come across a beggar, do you give him some gold knowing it won’t be missed or do you just complete your task? The answer is to come back and give the beggar some money when you’ve gotten paid for completing your task, but that’s not an option, so obviously the second answer is to just give the dude some money, come on. Regardless, this is all a little bit arbitrary, because you ultimately need to embody all of the virtues anyway.
Not motivated to go beyond the required three hours, I didn’t play long enough to get past the initial stage of the game, where you collect items blah blah blah, but I did some research/spoiler seeking. I mean… it sounds fine. You go through the motions, you use the spells that aren’t useless, you collect some reagents, you manipulate the systems to keep your virtues up…
I’m dancing around the central issue. I’m afraid I might not like RPGs very much.
There, I said it. And I understand if you may have recoiled from your computer screen at this. The truth is, the core RPG systems in video games have always been something that I grit my teeth and force myself to bear the mechanics of in order to harvest from them the precious white meat: the scenery, the characters, and the story. And when the scenery, characters, and story are at this level, I find myself not feeling that it’s worth trying when I’m having so little fun.
It’s those mechanics. For some people, diving into a densely constructed game is a pleasure, but I’m all context. I suppose I should be able to fill stuff in with my imagination, right? I read books all the time, I can imagine stuff like crazy. But a curious thing happens at just about the point of Ultima IV’s level of sophistication: the game is filling in so much of the content that my imagination finds it really difficult to fill in the blanks. Add on to that the frustration with the mechanics and interface, and the moments of really interesting elements have a hard time shining through, and even when they do they’re obscured by other weirdness.
This is a game for somebody. Probably lots of somebodies. But it’s not for me. And hey, maybe I’m just down on CRPGs because this one sort of totally defeated me, but it definitely defeated me. Two stars.
