Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, part 5- the spinoffs!

[NamerOfStars]

One of the points I've been emphasizing in this series (Lessons In Video Game History: the Ultima Saga, Part One , Lessons In Video Game History: The Ultima Saga, Part 2- Ultimas II and III , Lessons in Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part III- Ultima IV! , Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 4- Ultima V! ) is that Ultima was groundbreaking, and in a LOT of different ways, yet the series is dead today, and given who currently owns it, will hopefully stay that way. And few people who weren't around at the time know more than the name, if that. One of the innovations it pioneered (well, okay, technically it's more like three dozen of said innovations, but I'm trying not to be MORE confusing than I have to be) was the one that more or less torpedoed the series- thanks to EA's intervention.

I'm stepping out of chronological order somewhat here (an inevitable consequence of covering all five-and-change spinoffs in one entry), but in 1992, Origin studios was bought by Electronic Arts. Now, this was not the EA of today, the company that keeps winning "Most Hated Company" awards, despite having competition from the likes of Blackrock and Nestle, but it still wasn't a fun place. They were a BUSINESS, and run for one purpose- to make money. The art and the fun were secondary considerations at best. Was this was brought Origin down? Well, sort of- I'll talk more about this when I get to the later games, but ultimately, what killed the company was EA putting everything- and I do mean EVERYTHING- into the multiplayer side of things. Yes, it's time for Ultima Online!

Home of dragons who spend a LOT of time at the gym

Now, I'm skipping ahead, here, only because this game I DON'T have pictures of; it's the one in the series I don't own and have never played. This may surprise you, but Ultima Online is STILL ACTIVE, *twenty five YEARS* after its launch. Considering how quickly online-only games die, and EA ones in particular, this may seem baffling (not least because it's older than many people who'll be reading this), but the loyalty of the old playerbase is VERY strong, and even EA's not stupid enough to piss THEM off.

Ultima Online was not, in fact, the first MMO; the earliest of those arose in the late 80's (depending, of course, on how one defines "MMO"). But it WAS the first hugely successful one. The game that showed what the genre could be, and showed EA that you could create a continuous money stream without having to continue innovating in ANY meaningful way. And how much faith did they have in Richard Garriott, who'd been proven right time and time again, with this series and others? They were SO down on the idea that he only got approval by forcing his way into the boardroom and REFUSING TO LEAVE until they gave him approval and a budget. They reluctantly gave him a quarter million (about twice that, in today's money), figuring that they'd say maybe- MAYBE- 35,000 units of the life of the game. Just for the record, there are, as I type this, about 7,200 people playing Ultima Online. A quarter of a century on.

And that no fire marshals means no maximum tavern population.

You may wonder why I include a game I haven't played in this, but it's a vital piece, not only of Ultima history, but gaming history in general- a lot of things would be VERY different today without it. No UO means no Asheron's Call means no Everquest means no World of Warcraft, which means no Skinner box "games" pushing dopamine hits at the expense of everything else, which means no lootboxes, and THAT means the industry is a little smaller and a LOT better. Damn EA.

So let's talk about something happier; leave the formative year of 1997 and go back to 1989, where we left off. Then hop ahead to 1991, because we need to make sure we're not being chased by temporal enforcers. In 1991, three companies were working on games that were going to be big, groundbreaking titles in the as-yet-unnamed genre that would eventually come to be first-person shooters: Bungie's Marathon (which makes Halo a VERY different experience, and is downloadable via the open source Aleph One project at https://alephone.lhowon.org/ ), Looking Glass Studio's System Shock (which is not, in fact, a gift from the heavens to prove God's love, but sure feels like it), and id software's DOOM (which had a LOT of its original complexity stripped out to make it simpler and more fast-paced, and showed you can do that and still have a game be fun. Here's what each of them look like:

Marathon gave us dual-wielding and co-op AI

System Shock gave us a genuine 3D world, distinct ammo (and enemy) types, and a strong narrative

And DOOM... don't give me that. You know what DOOM looks like. DOOM was considered a HUGE step forward over Wolfenstein 3D, since THAT game was just a series of square rooms, with no varying elevation levels or decor:

Okay, some of the rooms were rectangles instead. WOW!

But in 1992, before ANY of those four games were made, Paul Neurath gave us Ultima Underworld, because God loves us and wants us to be happy, and some of us can't or don't drink beer.

HELL YES.

Want a 3D map with real verticality, and angled ramps that allow for function jumping puzzles despite lacking a jump function? They're here. Want a complicated skill system, that actually built off of the previous games in the series? Got that, too. Want internal systems so complex that you can actually (for example) use a torch on a corncob to make popcorn? I have no idea who thought of that, but yep, it's here. A system of carrying capacity modeled by weight, stat-limiting functionality and requiring careful planning as to where and how you store various equipment stockpiles? Yeah, no casual meaningless chests here; you need to PLAN what you're going to put in that bag, since if you have to dig through six of them to find the poison cure you need, you'll be dead before you reach it.

I was kind of brief on Ultima V, mostly to get this out quickly (which, um... look, I didn't anticipate winding up computerless for a while; cut me some slack!); this one I'll be brief on because I don't want to spoil anything. Seriously; if you play only one game in this series, it should be Underworld. It's a game that's *worth giving money to EA for*, and that's praise indeed.

That brings us to the "Worlds of Ultima" games, which were spinoffs, made using the Ultima VI engine that I haven't told you about yet (whoops), that have NO direct relation to the mainline series. Underworld didn't really, either, but that was awesome enough that we didn't care. Are THESE games equally awesome? Well... remember how Ultima II involved awesomeness like "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"? Savage Empire involved persuading Aztecs to help you build flintlocks to take down dinosaurs.

We're gonna need a bigger fireplace mantle.

Well, we don't kill ALL of them; some we just make drunk, so we can hang bells on them.

One of these days, you'll stop disbelieving me when I tell you this stuff.

The story fares better, but it quickly dissolves into a series of fetch quests, running back and forth between the far ends of the map, as you learn "Oh, to do X, you need Y, but that's in the village on the far end of the valley- better get hiking again!". Without magical means of travel, you're limiting to hoofing it, at a very slow pace, through thick jungle, requiring constant backtracking if you don't follow the roads. All in all, it doesn't really feel like an Ultima game. For example, at one point, you need to deal with the Sakkra. To which you logically ask:

"Oh, you mean these guys?"

And the answer... is YES. Well, they look more like their MOO 1 version:

Kinda. And they have an 'H' in their name for some reason.

But still! How many times in this series have I sarcastically referred to something that shared a name with something else that came later, only to have it be a coincidence? But now, NOW it's actually the same thing! I'm as confused as you are. That doesn't feel like Ultima at all! On to Martian Dreams.

I got bored of being "Namer", so I'm "Hal" in these pictures.

Okay, now THIS is more like it! Don't like trees in the way? Just wait; they'll move. Bored by lackluster combat? Now you've got elephant guns and spray cans loaded with weed killer- which doesn't sound impressive until you remember that most of the Martian life is plant-based. You're exploring the remains of a fallen civilization lob spears at you, hoping to find enough oxygen to keep breathing.

Martian Dreams starts in- well, it STARTS in nineteen ninety-something, when your friend Dr. Spector (who you rescued in Savage Empire) stops by, claiming you sent him a telegram telling him to come quickly to your place (of all the things we've lost in the past thirty years, I wouldn't've thought it'd be TELEGRAMS that dated this game, but...). You have no idea what's he's talking about; you didn't wire him, but then a mysterious redhead shows up and hands you a package, then bolts (she's not the last mysterious redhead the series will feature, but the other one- well, we'll get to that later). Inside is a photograph of you and Dr. Spector- and Nikola Tesla and Sigmund Freud. And a book written by Spector in 1895. A note in the package says that the 1893 Colombian exposition saw an act of sabotage send several high-profile social and political leaders to Mars (it makes sen- okay, even in context, it's kind of contrived, but it's a helluva neat idea), and you need to go rescue them. But... how? Well, it turns out that the orb of the moons that you have can also move you through TIME (an incredible ability... which is never used again)! So you travel to Tesla's secret Colorado lab and go back to 1895, just as they're preparing to leave on the second mission, pissing off everyone- until you hand him a note he wrote you at the end of your adventure, giving proof that you're from the future, so they let you join the mission.

First priority in space mission cargo: pipe organs.

A promisingly bizarre opening- but it declines kind of quickly. The great personalities of the characters you deal with aren't really present:

Yeah, RIGHT.

And some of the pictures are REALLY off:

He's 39 in 1895, not in his 70's. Also, why did we bring him?

She's 31 in 1985, not 19. And why use her pseudonym when she'll openly tell us her real name?

It's like they threw in famous people just for name recognition- though I DO give them credit for bringing up Tesla decades before an obsessed webcomic artist with a poor grasp of history catapulted him to fame; full credit there. The game's inexplicable versions of Iolo, Shamino, and Dupre, however, are MUCH better realized than Savage Empire's. And the new characters have at least SOMETHING going for them in the personality department.

So, how does the gameplay hold up? Well, as you may be aware, an Italian astronomer in the 19th century mapped out a series of "canali" on the surface of Mars. The word means "channels", but was often mistranslated as "canals", a structure more obviously artificial, which made people suspect Mars was, or at one point had been, inhabited (it also means that we were one letter off from thinking Mars had cannolis; had THAT been the mistranslation, we'd've been there by now). In real life, they're canyons, caused by... well, no one knows, actually; it's obviously not water, since they're not open at either end. Lots of theories, no answers as yet. But in Martian Dreams, they're actual CANALS (part of the ancient Martian irrigation system), and, lacking water, are just as traversable as you'd expect:

Get ready to spend a LOT of time hiking back and forth, looking for a bridge. Gravity's a third lighter there; you could easily climb down and cross safely, but then it wouldn't take twenty minutes of walking to get where you wanted to go. The ludicrous distances you have to walk kill the game's pacing; getting attacked by identical swarms of creeping cacti or sextexts of sextellegers (unless it was for that pun, I have no idea why they called them that). The combat's better than Savage Empire's, in that you can't just run past it, but need to stand and duke it out, but many of the enemies are actually dangerous in melee, ammo's expensive (and money very limited), and sometimes your AI allies will just... stand around during combat, not moving to help OR run away. I'd see the same thing in Savage Empire sometimes, but never in Ultima VI; I don't know why, since it's the same engine- and made later, too, when it should have been more refined.

The biggest nail in the coffin, however, is that the game doesn't take itself or its setting seriously enough. Okay, sure, it's inevitably going to be loose with the physics and history; that's okay. And it's probably going to be kind of lighthearted and silly; I can take SOME of that, but it just goes WAY too far with it. Savage Empire did the same thing, but to a lesser degree. There's potential for a good, deep game in a setting like this, even IN 1895. The Ultima series had been getting more and more serious- not somber or dour, but intense and driven, as it went on; particularly with VI, which I'm realizing I REALLY should have been before doing these. These two were a diversion from that, and playing them all in sequence really hurt the immersion. Had they been completely comedic, with no real attempt to connect to the series' ongoing tone, it might actually have been better- a Three Stooges short in the middle of a Sergio Leone Western marathon isn't nearly as disruptive as it would be in the middle of a Marx brothers marathon.

So that wraps up the spin-offs, and it's on to the rest of the mainline set. Up next: Ultima VI- Return of the Bugfuck!

[monkeynutts]

Pretty incredible where computer games have come from, and now unreal engine 5 and next it will be full immersion I can't go back myself, I'm addicted to third person RPG'S