As an older person and an avid player of Ultima I - V this article is really interesting. Its fascinating to, some 30 years later, get a peek behind the curtain. My personal opinion is that Ultima IV was the pinnacle of computer gaming. Ultima III was supremely entertaining and Ultima V was more polished and still a very enjoyable game, but Ultima IV was absolutely groundbreaking in injecting ethos into an RPG. For any of the younger HN readers who don't mind archaic graphics, I highly recommend checking out Ultima IV.
Ultima is to this day the single most impactful RPG ever made in terms of its influence on future games, it seems nothing new has been done since, almost.
Ultima 6's keyword-based dialogue is in my opinion superior to today's dialogue trees, some of the keywords would be highlighted in the conversation, but some you would have to come up with on your own from your adventures.
Ultima 7 has a much more detailed world than even the modern Elder Scrolls games, its breathtaking how full that world is; Elder Scrolls is still playing catch up almost 30 years later, insane!
Ultima Underworld was also tremendously groundbreaking, it's real, texture-mapped 3D (in 1992!) and does all the things you'd expect from a modern RPG, which is why I am excited that "the band is back together", so to speak, making Underworld Ascendant (no Ultima branding, Underworld was originally not an Ultima game, but was rebranded and reworked for marketing reasons)
I could ramble for hours about these old games. But I'll stop here, go and play, people. :)
As a member of the Ultima Underworld team, I'm looking forward to seeing what Jimmy has to say about it. It's been really fun to watch him cover the stories behind the games of my youth.
The complexity split happened when every game started needing full voice acting to be marketable. Before, text was perfectly sufficient, and a lot more flexible.
When text-to-speech algorithms approach real voice acting, game world depth will start to notch back up.
It's the feature I miss the most in modern RPGs, specially in the "total freedom, sandboxy" subgenre.
I remember it in Morrowind. It was daunting at first, coming from more traditional RPGs. But then it clicked. The ability to ask anyone anything is, may I say it, realistic.
As @mratzloff said, voice acting killed this. It is also my opinion that voice acting impoverished dialog in RPGs greatly.
I couldn't agree more! If I recall, by the time I encountered Ultima IV, I had gone through dozens and dozens of games on Atari, Apple, and other platforms. I had even tried Wizardry (but although a D&D fan, it did not immerse me as much as the Ultimas). With the exception of the Infocom games, mostly Zork, Enchanter, Spellbreaker, nothing came even close to Ultima IV around that era, in terms of immersion and fun. I remember writing down in a notebook, every single town, and every conversation in each of those towns, for later reference, probably my first discovery of the power of analytical thinking as a kid. Ultima V was also great, but I think mostly due to the fact that it was a sequel to U4 and carried on much of the same sense of imagination, excitement and wonder. I played Akalabeth first (from a zip-lock bag), U4, U3, U2, U5 then rest of series.
Agreed, even to this day I long for the characters of Ultima IV and the conversational power of picking out keywords as you talk to them to gleen more and more information. Skyrim, Witcher 3.. for all their graphical power lack what is compelling about Ultima IV. There was a definite conceptual integrity about the game you can only really get when you just have one programmer who can take risks.
Gaming back then was very different. There was an expectation of a big time investment on the end-user. Games were much more 'mentally' immersive. It's something that's hard to describe, but back when games lacked in graphics, they made up for it in a rich story and character development.
I remember plotting dungeon maps for hours on graph paper. For the gold box D&D games you had to translate things with a decoder wheel.
In the case of Ultima IV you had to had to actually converse with people or they didn't give you any information. For those that don't know what I'm talking about you basically have to say:
- name
- job
- <virtue like humility>
to everyone in town. If your lucky they will lead you into another piece of conversation that you have to find 'tag' words in to ask about.
Games like Zork (which literally had NO graphics) had to reel you in on the story alone.
I think it's because the target audience was "bored kids who live in the suburbs." For all intents and purposes, it was like living on your own island, and you had a ton of free time.
Nowadays though we have the Internet, as well as smartphones, much more variety on TV, and many more things competing for attention. Most gamers today are casual gamers, therefore most games are pretty shallow.
Ultima Online continued this. keywords required for opening shop and bank menus, for example.
There was always the urban legend that if you said just the right thing to a wisp, good things would happen...
So ahead of its time, that game. And so unable to evolve to become relevant after most of its groundbreaking ideas were dropped because, for 1998, they were unattainable.
In some respects, it was a victim of its own success...
I've finished IV, V, VI, VII. I think VI and VII are much better not just in terms of graphics but also gameplay, plot, dialog, and characters. That said there are still good things about IV and V, but I wouldn't go back and play them again.
