Lessons In Video Game History: The Ultima Saga, Part 2- Ultimas II and III

[NamerOfStars]

Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress is the weird one. That may sound like quite a claim, considering that the last game had you buying a space shuttle to launch to orbit to take down TIE fighters so a princess would tell you where a time machine was, but it's true. Quick show of hands- how many of you recognize this?:

Put your hands down; I can't actually see you

That's the map from the movie Time Bandits, which was a MAJOR source of inspiration for this game (incidentally, if you haven't seen Time Bandits, go and do so now. I'll wait. It was made by a Python, stars two others and a James Bond, was funded by a Beatle, and- look, just go watch it; you'll thank me later). See, back in the pre-VCR days, you couldn't just rent a copy of the tape and pause it, so when Garriott wanted to know what the map looked like, he had his fellow team members go out and watch the movie, again and again, until he had a good grasp of what it looked like. Why? Well, Ultima II didn't take place in Sosaria again, but in a place you may find a bit more familiar. Here's the map, in-game:

I sincerely HOPE you find this more familiar

Yep. Minax, apprentice and lover of Mondain (from the first two games) has followed us back to Earth and is taking it over. How? Via time travel, of course. Here's the printed map that came with the game:

Confused yet?

Those lines denote the various Time Gates, the eras they take you to, and the connections between them. And if you look closely, you'll notice those aren't Roman letters, either: they're the series' first example of Brittanian runes, which would go on to be the dominant written alphabet in-game (only for written things; actual spoken words and game-given descriptions are still in Roman text). And no, the game didn't come with a description of what letter each character represented; you had to decode it based on the names of the areas. If you're a linguistics scholar, you may have thought "hey, that's Old Futhark!"- it's not. It's an alphabet BASED on Old Futhark, just different enough to be confusing. Having played through the games in rapid succession, I'm only a little slower with them than with Roman letters now, which is both impressive and sad. Anyway...

Ultima II followed the great success of Ultima, releasing a little under a year later. This game is bigger, more complex, and much, MUCH crazier. So let's hop in:

Some changes from last time

Now we have ninety points to distribute among our six attributes, and this time, they're coded in hexadecimal, for some reason, which means each increase is MUCH larger than it looks. There's also a difference between the sexes now; males get +5 strength, while females get +10 charisma. Given the difference this makes in buying and selling prices, it's a BIG advantage to be female, especially early on. We begin in the northeastern US, which is understandable, in the year 1423 BC, which is not.

Yeah, we're going to be bouncing around four different eras here (well, techincally five, but the last is the "Time of Legends" that exists outside the normal timestream; we'll only go there to gain quick access to various Time Gates and to attack Minax's castle at the very end. There's 1423 BC, where there's not much of a developed human presence (one town in western Italy and one in what I think would be Namibia, plus a tower in south America and a dungeon in Greenland- good thing the Bering land bridge is still intact!); 1990 AD, which was in the future when this game came out (it's STILL weird to think about that), where there are a whopping THREE human cities, counting the castle of Lord British, who was thoughtful enough to teleport it in to help you, a dungeon, and a sensibly designed tower (unlike the earlier games, each location in Ultima II is deliberately and individually designed; this tower has treasure, some of which is hidden, and narrows as you get higher, like a real tower would); the post-apocalyptic 2112 AD, where a nuclear war wiped out everything on Earth, save one Soviet city (1981, remember); and 9 million BC, where there's one human town, populated by time travelers. One town, that is... on the supercontinent of Pangea. Yes. In nine million BC. I TOLD you this game was weird.

In the later eras, the land bridge between the old and new world is destroyed, meaning you'll need to get a boat. And here is where the problems begin. See, in the last game, all you needed to get a boat was to go to a port town with a transportation store and have enough cash. This time, you can't crew a frigate by yourself, so it's more complicated: you need to wait for a human enemy to spawn so you can kill it, then you grab the blue tassels from its body, then, when a frigate appears off the coast, you lure it up to the shore, charge aboard and commandeer it, then sail up and down the coast of Africa, blowing away demons with your deck guns. Sounds awesome, right? Yeah, the key word there is "sounds". If the humans aren't spawning, you keep waiting. If they have no tassels, you have to wait for another. If a thief attacks you and steals your tassels, you need to find another set (much like the more-managable-in-this-game gremlins, they don't drop them when they die). You have tassels? Great! Now you need to wait for a ship to spawn. They spawn only at sea, might be FAR away from you with no incentive to move towards you, and the number of enemies that can be spawned at once is limited- so if you've hit that limit, you need to travel around killing monsters until one spawns, hopefully near you. Even better: land travel between the Americas and Eurasia is only possible in the BC era, where there are no frigates (not that you could take them through time gates anyway). Well, I suppose it's also possible in the Pangea era, for obvious reasons, but it's also unnecessary. If you're in 1990 or 2112 and want to hop over? You need to run through the relevant time gates (oh, did you think they just moved you in TIME? Silly!). The beginning of the game drags HORRIBLY. As before, if you run out of food, you die. And while gremlins only have a CHANCE to steal a mere 100 food, it still adds up, since you'll be spending quite a bit of time grinding. The one upshot is that once frigates start spawning, they do so more frequently- you can BUILD a land bridge between Russia and Alaska (or anywhere else, if you're patient enough) out of captured frigates. It's impractical, yes, but DAMN, does it make you feel cool.

So where's the best place to earn yourself some XP? Why, Neptune, of course! No, not the sea; the planet. Remember how I said that in 2112, everything on Earth but that one city was gone? Well, in that city is a Soviet rocket test site, and if you can steal a rocket, well, you'll learn that the REST of the solar system is doing much better. Every other planet is accessible, and most have been colonized (although this was before the discovery of the latest four, and back when Eris hadn't joined the party yet). Neptune only has one settlement (some of the other planets have none at all), but it's almost all flat plains, so not only can enemies not get stuck, but you can chase them anywhere- they can't escape YOU, either. The catch is that you can only save your game on Earth, and if you try to land your rocket on anything other than grass, you crash and die. Got a bunch of XP on Neptune, but landed one tile too late? Too bad! Reload, try again.

The other frustrating aspect of Ultima II is that there's much less guidance given- kings don't do anything but convert cash to HP, the only way to raise your attributes is to travel to New San Antonio, visit the Hotel California (where, despite what the Eagles would have you believe, you actually CAN'T check out- or in, for that matter), and (O)ffer the clerk some gold; if he feels like it, he'll raise one of your attributes, selected at random, by 1 for every hundred gold you offered. And the manual mentions none of that. Still, if you've ever wanted to play a game where you have to kill a guard to steal a key to break INTO prison to find a captured warrior and randomly bribe him with 500 gold so he'll give you his legendary Quicksword, Enilno (which they apparently let him keep in PRISON), which you'll then need to fight your way out of the swarm of guards coming after you, and which is the only weapon that can harm Minax, well, now you can! But, again, the manual offers you NO clue that you need to do that, unless there's some tavern tip I missed.

I don't know whether it's cause or effect, but the actual list of stuff you need to do to beat Ultima II is pretty small: talk to enough people to learn that you need a magic ring to enter Minax's castle AND that an old man in New San Antonio has such a ring but won't give it to anyone not blessed by Father Antos, earn enough money to buy (and enough points of strength to equip, if you don't start with them) reflect or power armor so you can survive spaceflight, gather enough fuel to fly to Planet X (of COURSE there's a Planet X) and meet Antos, gaining his blessing, then fly back, go to NSA, buy the ring from the old man, get the Quicksword, hop through a gate to the time of legends and defeat Minax.

Attacking the castle, Shadowguard, IS suitably epic; there's a massive battle just outside of it where a small army of demons and balrons (TSR threatened to sue them if they called them "balrogs", so they changed the name) attack you; the one bad part (aside from the difficulty) is that most of them will attack you with a spell that makes a REALLY annoying noise; which I can best describe as what whining would sound like if a computer did it. It DOES make blowing them away all the more satisfying, though. The castle itself is occupied by a number of enemies, but not nearly so many as you just fought through. It also has this guy, locked in a prison cell:

WHAT? WHAT DID YOU DO?

Who he is, what he did, and how he came to be imprisoned in a castle dungeon outside of time itself is never addressed, in this game or any other; a pity, since it REALLY piques my curiosity. These games are FULL of inside jokes and references to things and people in the lives of Garriott and other Origin staffers; that's probably the case here, too. But you can't help but wonder... If you ever hear about Richard Garriott being grabbed and viciously shaken by a large ape-man screaming "What did David Alpert DO?", that'll probably be me.

Anyway, you defeat Minax, destroying the castle, and the time gates collapse; Earth is saved. Ultima II, viewed from four decades on, is a game with a lot of wonderful ideas that it couldn't quite realize. Granted, the genre was basically new, and the industry as well, but it definitely could've done with a few more rounds of playtesting from people critical enough to question and criticize, and not be overwhelmed by the amazing openness. On to Ultima III!

Ultima III- Exodus came out in 1983, 364 days after Ultima II. The rapid turnaround time of these games REALLY shows just how much the industry has changed; it's not like it used to be at ALL. The graphics of Ultima III are another step forward- go back to my previous MyTake and compare these first three; you'll see the differences if you're looking for them; probably not otherwise. The sound, and in particular the music, was MUCH improved. It was the first to be released by the newly formed Origin Systems. And the game actually had a real plot, that was more than just set dressing! Akalabeth didn't really have a map worth mentioning, and Ultima I's was just four slightly twisted versions of the same landmass. II took place on Earth. III was the one that established the world that the rest of the series would take place in. Here's the map:

I'll have more to say about it later

So peace has returned after Minax's defeat, but pieces of a manuscript are found in the ruins of her castle (HOW, exactly, they're found when the castle was in a pocket dimension cut off from the rest of reality is never specified), but these pieces speak of the fruit of the unholy alliance of Mondain and Minax. Troubling signs start appearing, and monsters with them. Then an island rises in the middle of the sea, and a ship sent to investigate it returns will all aboard dead, and the word "Exodus" scrawled on the deck in blood. The call for heroes goes out and you're summoned again (officially, the hero of the first three- four, counting Akalabeth- games is known as "the stranger", as distinct from "the Avatar" of four onwards, but later games imply, then outright STATE, that they're the same person: you, the player, of Earth) to find out the cause of these troubles and fix it.

This time you create a party of four characters (you CAN create less, but there's no real reason to, aside from self-imposed challenge). Akalabeth (which I'll refer to henceforth as "Ultima 0") had two classes; I and II had four, III has ELEVEN, and there's a new race available: the fuzzy, which has a picture in the manual I wish I could show you. It's an Ewok, plain and simple. So if you've ever wanted to make a party of Ewok wizards, well, now you can! I wouldn't suggest it, though. Eight of the eleven classes have some degree of magical ability, and for a change, you don't need to buy anything to use it! You have an attribute keyed to your spellcasting (INT for wizard spells, WIS for cleric), and get either full or half that value in mana points, which regenerate over time. Your class has access to a certain list of spells, and if you have the MP, you can cast it. It's wonderfully simple and easy to understand, and was the only game in the series where it worked that way. This was also the game the added the Moongates, one of the series' most iconic elements. II had time gates, which moved you between eras and locations; Moongates shifted you between various parts of the same world. Here's my newly-created party:

Party time!

See the (4)(5) atop the left window? Those are the positions of Sosaria's moons, Trammel and Felucca (note: not Feluc*i*a; that's from Star Wars). Trammel's position determines where the gate appears each night, and Felucca determines where it leads. It takes some getting used to, but it makes travel around the world a much quicker once you're familiar. It can also come in handy when you're being chased by an enemy too powerful to fight, but the biggest impact is on how deep and real it makes the world *feel*; like a place where strange and interesting things happen- something to explore, instead of just conquer. The dungeons, too, were no longer procedurally generated, leading to crafted designs that were not only more clever, but made them feel truly different from one another- the Perinian depths required plunging to the very lowest level before moving upward into safer areas, and was a high-risk area to explore; Dardin's Pit was full of traps and gremlins; the Dungeon of the Snake was a pain to get to, but filled with gold; and so on. Also; take a look at this:

Exploring the overworld

See how the view gets cut off by the mountains and the heavy trees? It was annoying, and required you to do some mapping of your own, but it added another level of immersion- why WOULD you be able to see through thick forest, or mountains?

Combat, too, became much more elaborate (as you'd expect, with a party of more than one); getting into a fight became much more tactical:

Undead Scoundrels!

Compared with the prior games' trading blows, it made for a much more in-depth experience. Which was fortunate, because at the start, you were weak as kittens, and you HAD to fight smart. Planning and position were the difference between walking out richer and more seasoned, and not walking out at all. The game also featured one of the creepiest magic spells I've yet encountered: Anju Sermani. See, each character could be killed without causing a Game Over, since other survivors could revive them, either by taking their body to the healers and paying exorbitantly, or by casting the Surmandum spell. Only clerics could cast that, and only those whose wisdom was quite high- the elven wisdom limit meant elves couldn't cast it at all! But there was a chance- not a good one, given the high wisdom (which lowered spell failure chances) requirement, but a chance- that the spell would fail, and the corpse be reduced to ashes. Surmandum couldn't help with that; it needed a whole body. Enter Anju Sermani, which COULD revive a body so destroyed. What's so creepy about that? Well, it's established that the souls of the dead hang around briefly after they die; that's why Surmandum works. But when a body is destroyed, they move on and reincarnate. Anju Sermani restores the body, then pulls the soul back- killing the newly reincarnated being. It also permanently drains 5 points of wisdom from the caster, so it's something you want to avoid anyway, but geh! It's unpleasant to think about the broader implications.

The errand-running of Ultima III felt less like the busywork of I and less like the blind flailing of II. And the final dungeon- the castle where Exodus was to be found- featured not only frequent explosions from the erupting volcano and random dragon attacks, but actual sections of the floor that came to life to attack you. When playing through it, I discovered that it's entirely possible (and makes the final charge much easier, in fact) to not WALK off the boat, but actually charge into the flaming castle on horseback. The game's graphics don't do it justice (and I lost the hard drive with that save file on it anyway), but it's an amazing mental visual. And metal as all get out, for what that's worth. Ultima III was the series really coming into its own, and wrapped up the first trilogy (again, not counting zero) in what's known as "the age of darkness". Up next is Ultima IV- the BIG one, that redefined Ultima and made it stand apart as something truly unique, not just a defining and very solid example of the genre. I can't wait to tell you all about it. Up next- part 3: NOW we're cooking with chlorine triflouride.