The Ultima Games and the Gaming Industry
The Ultima game series is an enormous accomplishment of game design and execution. It consists of nine main games as well as a handful of so called spin-offs set in the same universe. I truly grew up with these games despite the better half of them being released before I started playing them. They are absolutely fascinating and I’ve long wanted to write about them specifically as well as some of my thoughts about the ways in which these video games embody the history of their medium itself. The Ultima games serve not only as a masterpiece of education and a touchstone of inspiration for game, story and world designers, but also as a cultural mirror reflecting their contemporary video game industry — triumphs, failings, challenges and all.
I have a general outline for how I’d like to discuss the above, but these interwoven stories — of Ultima and the development of the gaming industry — are naturally enormous topics, and I foresee blog posts here that both follow a general narrative thread as well as others that diverge and explore particular in-depth sub-topics or adjacent issues. In a nutshell, today’s post on Ultima will serve as a foundation for a long series of blog posts, which will provide a continuing and interconnected discussion centered chiefly on the gaming industry. So without further pre-(r)ambling, let’s look at the Ultima series and what makes them such a great place to begin.
The Ages of Ultima
The series consists of nine games that evolve technically, mechanically and narratively through time. They also see the world(s) presented in the game evolve, at times radically, as well as the player’s character and their relation to the world. In this way the series stands out in the history of video gaming as perhaps the best example of a series that grew and evolved over a couple of decades (longer when including spin-off games). There are of course other such series (e.g. Resident Evil, Call of Duty, etc.) but there are few, if any, others that were developed by someone as creatively ambitious, technically gifted and unafraid of radical redesign as Richard Garriott. The enormously rich lore and beloved status of the series is a testament to his bold attitude captured in the games’ designs and experiences.
To get an idea of this kind of creative (re)design, it’s important to reflect on the arc of evolution manifest in the Ultima games. The nine major games in the series form three trilogies, each taking place in an age. These ages, whether by design or subsequent analysis, are understood as united by narrative theme, aesthetic, gameplay mechanics and story elements. Broadly, all can be considered high fantasy (with somewhat striking sci-fi elements in the earlier ones), but how they related to this very general genre differs throughout the series.
The Age of Darkness
The first three games belong to The Age of Darkness, which take place in the world of Sosaria (of imprecise relation to the lands of Britannia featured in later games). In typical high fantasy fashion, this is an unsafe world beset with monsters, dungeons, towers and kings in need of questing heroes. The player’s character, known as The Stranger, must in each of these first three games recruit a party and complete quests by defeating enemies in combat, thereby increasing their prowess until they are finally ready to defeat the games’ most powerful monsters.
While these early games featured some sci-fi elements to their plots, they established from early on the player’s character of The Stranger as someone who travels to Sosaria by invitation of Richard Garriot’s in-game persona — Lord British. Many of the places and characters from these early games persist throughout the series simply by reference or actual presence. From a modern perspective, these first three games are what we might relatively straightforwardly call early “hack-and-slash” RPGs or “dungeon crawlers”. Yet for their time these three games were major innovations and were technically hugely impressive accomplishments.
The focus in these early games was on the player’s character defeating evil monsters in service of the benevolent Lord British. Thematically, concepts such as time travel and anachronistic hyper-advanced technologies serve as plot elements rather than narrative devices or philosophical expositions.
The Age of Enlightenment
The transition from Ultima 3 to Ultima 4 was a radical one both in terms of game theme and game world. Ultima 4, in particular, was a genuinely unique game on its release. It differed from the previous games in the series, as well as from RPGs more generally (which were increasingly popular digitally and on the tabletop) in some fascinating ways. Chiefly, the game does not cast the player’s character against a primary evil enemy. Rather the antagonist, if one such is to be identified, is the player’s own nature.
This convolution of the genre-standard, central to the series continuation, is what earned the series its special place in video gaming history. An in-depth look at the innovative and contemporaneously unique design of the Ultima series from Ultima 4 and on will have to come in a future blog post, but I will just mention a couple of key points here given just how transformative this game was, and how unique it made the series.
The world from Ultima 3 is radically changed as you find yourself once again summoned by Lord British. Not only is it physically altered but it is also politically altered — it is now a united land known as Britannia under the benevolent leadership of Lord British, and no world-threatening evil looms in the shadows. Rather, the plot of the game sees Lord British task the player with embarking on the Quest of the Avatar; a spiritual journey that he envisions will inspire his people to live fulfilling lives of virtue of happiness.
This theme is not mere window dressing as a plot device — mechanically, the game observes the player’s behaviour and in order to win they must genuinely act virtuously in accordance with the Eight Virtues of the Avatar. The player’s aim is thus to have their character embody a virtuous life, the fulfillment of which sees them ascend to become the Avatar. This is achieved in game by penalizing players for engaging in mechanically possible but morally dubious activities such as fleeing from combat, stealing items or tricking other characters.
The transformative nature of this game for the series is mirrored in magnitude for the player — and the experience of having to adapt gaming style to succeed at this new form of gameplay is extremely powerful. These design decisions push the player to genuinely adopt the virtues in their playing, bringing player and character together and creating a seldom (if not never)-before-seen level of immersion. Not only does the player’s character ascend from The Stranger to The Avatar, the player themselves ascends from an optionally disengaged gamer to a necessarily immersed one needing to reflect and react in accordance with the Virtues of the Avatar. In terms of game design, these decisions are genuinely a work of genius.
Not only do the player and their character ascend to a higher level at this point in the series, the series itself does as well. Once the emotional barrier between player and character is broken so efficiently in Ultima 4 — and the player is drawn into the series’ world as the now-ascended Avatar — fascinating new avenues of design potential open up for the future games. With a truly immersed player invested in the series and its world, Ultima 5 and Ultima 6 build on this foundation to present genuinely deep philosophical themes (on religion vs spirituality, absolutism vs liberty, prejudice and xenophobia, etc.) and explore storylines that resonate with we the players and which we remember even now decades later.
The Age of Armageddon
The three final games of the Ultima series close off the main storyline by taking a darker turn and introducing an extremely memorable recurring villain in the form of The Guardian; a mysterious being of seemingly godlike power. The Virtues of the Avatar that the player has spent so long pursuing and spreading across Britannia are now undermined from the shadows by this evil mastermind. The narrative’s darker turn sees the Avatar’s work undone, and the player must come to terms with just how far they can justify straying from the path of Virtue when acting in its defence.
Ultima 7 is regarded by many as the masterpiece among masterpieces of the series — a huge open world RPG like its predecessors but one that feels alive and is wholly engrossing. Graphically each of the last three games stand out with their own distinctive look and feel, but for me personally, Ultima 7 holds a special place of nostalgia.
The final two games of the series, Ultima 8 and Ultima 9 are narratively extremely bold; the developers did not hold back from radically altering the game world and the player’s relation to it. In a more mechanical sense, Ultima 9 also explored a new style of gameplay, stepping away from the party- and turn-based RPG format to experiment with a more action-oriented solo RPG design. Generally regarded as a mistaken decision stemming from a problematic development process, Ultima 9 is not without its own merits — if nothing else for breaking new (and challenging) ground in its time’s real-time RPG design.
Ultima relative the gaming industry
The Ultima series relates to the broader context of the gaming industry at large in several interesting ways. First of all, its status as an iconic trailblazer can not be exaggerated. The games mentioned here released between 1981 and 1999, through the earliest time of video gaming as a phenomenon. To set such bold goals as an open-world RPG given the technical challenges involved at the time was hugely ambitious and enormously influential to thousands of game designers ever since. Similarly, managing to design such an interactive experience that pulls the player into its world so effectively was contemporary early evidence of the enormous potential that this nascent medium possessed.
In another sense though, the Ultima games’ evolution through their three ages mentioned above capture a very common pattern of game (or franchise) development in the industry. The ages correspond to phases in the life of a franchise typified by experimentation and innovation (Age of Darkness games), iteration on and perfection of a design and style (Age of Enlightenment games), and finally crowning brilliance followed by a collision of design priorities with commercial interests (Age of Armageddon games).
This last point, in particular, is a poignant one given the hyper-commercial state of the gaming industry today — with all its effects on innovation, risk-taking and gameplay consequences. Unfortunately, however, I will have to explore that discussion in my next blog post and let this post serve as the necessary introduction to the Ultima series such that the coming conversation is coherent to you! Until then, farewell!
