The Fabulous King (1332) on 6/2/2020 6:50 PM · Permalink · Report

On June 1st 2020, Ultima 6 turned 30.

Naturally I loaded up this on GOG and spent some time playing it. I had a pleasant time rediscovering it, and I think, there are still many things that modern day designers could learn from Ultima 6. Here are some of my impressions.

The game begins with combat. It's a brave choice: - for the purpose of storytelling, it's an effective way to manipulate you into thinking of gargoyles as evil. Even the cover art lies. On purpose. It's quite clever - it's an exciting way to begin a tutorial. I believe most players will figure out how to kill the gargoyles and feel thrilled to do so - you can't really die in the beginning. It's a no-death, instant heal situation. But the player will most likely not notice that, because he's busy thinking "oh shit!" and "oh wow!"

Then you have the tutorial area of Lord British castle, which requires you to learn how to manipulate your environment. You need to use key to unlock door, so you could pull the lever inside. Now you know everything you need to survive. And having learned that, the game sends you out to the real world.

The great thing about this tutorial area is that it doesn't feel like a tutorial area. It's rather well disguised.

I also appreciate it how strongly the game suggests you to go to Cove. It doesn't hold your hand, but it doesn't leave you completely clueless either.

Now some other parts of the main quest are more obscure: the whole find the pirate map pieces part for example. It's not because it's difficult to figure out, it's just you probably forget many of the given details.

Orb of the Moons is a nice idea, but badly implemented. You can instantly skip parts of the main story with it, by instantly travelling to the gargoyle world. And why wouldn't a player abuse this power? The Dungeon Siege Engine Remake fixed this by allowing you to teleport to locations only after you had been there.

But it's a great idea nonetheless. It's an instant travel ability that makes sense inside the world and it's context. Using the Orb of the Moons to escape from difficult combat feels like a clever solution to a problem and not like a cheat.

When it comes to characters and writing, Ultima 6 is still more silly than insightful. But for some reason, I will always remember the mortician who chewed the grape delicately and asked: "want some?" :D

There are some minor character stories that can make a player pause and even feel something. I felt a little moved by the tavern-keeping family in Britain (the hard-working mother, the deaf father, the little child talent).

Already the ambition is there to make this world feel real, by making it's people feel like real humans (but Ultima 6 is very high on the idealistic side on the scale of idealism vs cynicism).

I also noticed that some characters had location specific interactions, i.e some characters in a tavern reflected that they were currently in a tavern and not in their normal situation.

And there is something unique about a game that has no final bad guy to kill. Yes, U6 is not the first (nor the last) Ultima do not have the final bad guy. But it's done really great here.

I mean, suddenly you discover that your first impressions about the gargoyles were not true. And then you go, "Whoa!"

Well, that's how the game designed it to happen anyway. I like to imagine that first-timers in 1990 had their minds blown when they had that realization. Chances are the players accidentally orb-of-mooned themselves to the gargoyle world and killed everyone there.

I'll have to try it now and see, if you can actually do that.

Just because you didn't know any better.