Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 7- Ultima VII!

[NamerOfStars]

Ultima VII. If you ask most people (who played them) which was the best of the series, they'll probably say VII. I disagree, as I said in my last entry; I prefer VI. But VII was damn good, and a very legitimate choice for that title. If it was where the series began to decline, it was a slow slope, not a precipitous drop. Let's take a closer look.

The first thing you need to understand about Ultima VII is that it's two games. I don't mean it was too ambitious and had to be split in half, like Anachronox; both parts are freestanding. The only reason part 2 isn't called "Ultima VIII" is that Garriott had decided that every Ultima game was to be made in its own engine, and part 2 used the same one as part 1. The plots DO overlap, but how much of that was intended from the beginning is up for debate. So let's start with the first.

Kinda minimalist artwork, here.

So this game, unusually, starts with us at our computer... firing up Ultima VII. Before we can wonder if the subtitle shouldn't've been "Mandelbrot set", a redhead shows up.

No, not the one from Martian Dreams.

He tells us that he's the true lord of Britannia, come to rule it at last, and that we, like all others, shall kneel before him, as Britannia has entered into a new age of enlightenment. "But wait," you say, "didn't the Age of Enlightenment end with Ultima VI?". Yes, it did. And the new age is that of... Armageddon. Uh-oh. So we check the stone circle by our house and find a moongate already waiting for us. Off we go!

Ultima I was about becoming a knight. II was about exploring time and space. III was about adventure. IV was about virtue. V was about the corruption of virtue. VI was about prejudice. VII is about... Scientology.

Remember this image if you think I'm kidding.

Now, as was show in V and VI, red moongates (like the one that brought us here) aren't like the blue/white ones; they can take you pretty much anywhere, so it's no surprise we wind up INSIDE a city, instead of just nearby. But this time, we're right outside a house- a house where a murder victim has just been found.

Yikes!

And not a CLEAN murder, either- check out those detailed SVGA graphics! You can CLEARLY see the horrific details of this guy's dismemberment, from the lit candles (which flicker and glow in ways that static images don't show) to the bloody footprints leading away through the stables, to the BUCKET OF BLOOD off to the side. Man, I did NOT pick a soothing first picture for this, did I? Here's a better one, showing off the new and improved beauty of Lock Lake:

Eww...

Oh- well, I guess heavy industrialization has its consequences. But this is awful! Let's forget our troubles with a trip to the quiet fishing village of Skara Brae; surely THAT place won't be racked with pollution. Since we don't have our Orb of the Moons, we'll have to hoof it, but that's okay, there's a ferry waiting to... to...

Um...

To take us to Hades, evidently. The GRIM FREAKING REAPER is piloting the raft. I get the feeling I'm REALLY not going to like what's on the other side of the river.

Okay, so it's been a VERY eventful 200 years since we were last in Britannia. Even worse, recently the moongates have stopped functioning- even Lord British's Orb of the Moons doesn't work right. Magic, too, has been disrupted: LB can't so much as magically summon food anymore, but he's one of the BETTER cases, because at least he's still sane- the rest of Britannia's mages have gone senile. Or worse, as we'll see. Meanwhile, a new group called "The Fellowship" is growing in popularity, spreading its philosophy of "sanguine cognition" and capturing the loyalty of an ever-growing portion of the population. Many people are claiming that the group is attempting to force itself into positions of power. The intertwining of these four factors- murder, magic, mysterious redheads, and mFellowship (I couldn't think of a way to start that with an "M") forms the heart of the plot of Ultima VII.

So, let's take at the changes. Beyond the sharp new graphics (SVGA all the way!), this game was reoriented to having a mouse-centered control scheme; in fact, the only part of the game you NEED a keyboard is to name your save files. Yes, you FINALLY have more than one save slot! And two SORELY missed features of Ultima V, lacking in the last game, have returned: the magic carpet, which made exploring the underworld SO much smoother, and your pocketwatch. You probably doubt me when I say that the latter had its lack felt even more, but recall that we had the Orb last time; travel wasn't restricted. Whereas telling time was always a pain, since there were no mobile timepieces, stationary ones were rare, and the only other way to know the time was by the level of sunlight. But it's back! Excellent! The conversation system, too, is revamped, as a consequence of the mouse-driven interface:

The portrait shows why I went with the character name "Squinty".

As a side note, "Library of Scars" is a GREAT name for a fighter training facility and/or emo metal album. But this system even allows for OTHER characters to talk to each other, making interactions even deeper:

It's not ALWAYS about making fun of Iolo, but it usually is.

The real change, though, is the depth of the open world. I don't know if it was Ultima VII that enshrined the idea of an "open world" game being one where you can bake bread, but that IS a feature- you even bake bread without water, by using the blood of murder victims (what, you didn't think there was only going to be ONE, did you?). You can even then feed that bread to the child of the murder victim, and feel like a serial killer. Hooray! You can almost (and I stress ALMOST; I'll get into why shortly) ignore the main quest and just make your living as a migrant laborer, helping farmers collect eggs and bakers make bread, eventually ferrying commodities back and forth to play the market, ignoring the quests. You can also stack crates atop one another to climb on top of buildings, adding an actual Z-level of depth to the world; V and VI let you take over an empty house and make it your own, but VII lets you build up onto the roof as well!

The world-building, too, shows that same depth- one of the game's most powerful weapons is the hoe of destruction. Why enchant a farming tool to be deadly? Well, YOU wouldn't- but a brain-scrambled mage, who's asked to enchant a hoe to improve its ability as he's already working on enchanting a sword to make it more lethal? Winding up with a deadly hoe and a sword good only for cutting grass? And getting beheaded (with a different sword) for your troubles? Yeah, that could happen. The entire gargoyle population, forcibly relocated when their world literally fell apart, struggling to integrate and find a place for themselves among the people whose friends and relatives they killed? Industrial pollution? Labor disputes? Drug addictions and smuggling? It's all here, and it shows just how much thought went into the game. Why, then, do I rank this one below six? Well...

Overambitiousness caused some problems. The scope was simply SO big that some things had to be left out, and others weren't properly fact-checked to make sure nothing was retconned.

Julia, you were a tinkerer in Minoc in Ultima IV, TWO CENTURIES AGO. How you can spend that long doing something you "don't have the patience to be"? Also, who stole your accent? Why do HOSTILE mages have no problems casting spells, instead of being driven insane and unable to use them, like friendlier ones? Why, if the Guardian feels the need to build a giant throne to sit it while he terro- um, "rules" his newly-conquered subjects, did he have one built in the middle of nowhere, facing a STONE WALL?

This would only be acceptable as a mini-golf hole

The newer changes are worse problems, though. The combat's moved to full real-time, which means it quickly degenerates into a maddening mess, where you can't properly see what's going on and don't get enough feedback to recognize it. I kept my party to six (of the maximum of eight), and even so, I'd have to check after every fight to see if any of us had died, since the blood-covered ground made telling that way impossible, and no notification was given when it happened. The final battle, in particular, was hopelessly chaotic; I honestly didn't know how ANY of it was progressing until I saw the victory cutscene. Even a simple pause function would've done wonders, but I guess that was too much to ask.

There's one phrase that's guaranteed to strike mortal dread in the heart of an Ultima VII player, and that's the seemingly innocuous "When do we eat?". Now, for the first time in the series, gremlins actually DROP FOOD when they die! Regardless of whether they stole yours! It's definitely a step forward, but an unfortunately necessary one: your characters metabolize like nuclear submarines, and you'll find yourself CONSTANTLY shifting around between bags to see who has food, then using it around, because just GIVING them the food isn't enough. There's a hunger meter, that goes from zero (dying of starvation) to 31 (fully sated), and they'll constantly gripe and whine about hunger as soon as it dips a few points below max. But the meter is HIDDEN, so your only clue as to how bad it is is the intensity of their bitching. And while having different foodstuffs nourish you for different amounts SOUNDS good, it also means that you're constantly trying to juggle giving equal food around, just to keep the pausing to a minimum, so you can feed everyone at once. It doesn't work; they don't burn through it at the same rate.

This, too, could be bearable, but the game *doesn't let you sell captured equipment*. Dropped gold works just fine, and gems CAN be sold, but the early game is a constant struggle to engage in menial tasks fast enough to keep your party fed, especially if you took too many people on too quickly. Yeah, that open-world make-money-by-farming approach? It's not so cool when you HAVE to keep doing it to keep yourself fed. Clear a dungeon? Sorry, can't; don't have enough baguettes. That magic carpet (which makes accidental sequence breaking WAY too easy, considering how much earlier you get it than in V) may get me places quickly, but not fast enough to dodge hunger! Sure, I'm the Avatar, great hero of legend and the central figure of the populace's religion, but asking them to spare the odd sandwich is beyond them.

The worst interface gripe, however, is the dialogue system. Yes, I praised it for its speed and efficiency before, and I meant that, but it also takes the edge off the parts of the game that are supposed to be detective work. It would've worked just fine in earlier games, but part of the challenge (and the immersion!) is putting yourself into the investigation, which just pops up automatically now; you don't even need to read the text. I solved an unrelated mystery in Empathy Abbey by just clicking through dialogues without even leaving the room.

Nor is it always efficient: consider getting Lord British to heal your party. In VI, you would (t)alk to him, type "heal", and he'd wave his hand and heal your whole party; six keystrokes. In VII, you click through his whole spiel about how he can heal you, cure poison, or resurrect you, then select want you want done and to who- EACH TIME. Six clicks *per treatment*, *per character*. It bogs things down.

And Lord British, despite being able to keep up a conversation, seems have gone completely senile- I don't blame him for not realizing how bad things in Vesper had gotten; Britan's far from where the gargoyles live, and the humans wouldn't tell him, and he WAS hearing out people trying to fix the situation in Lock Lake (although it REALLY shouldn't've taken that long; take a look at that screenshot again, and know that it's far from the worst part of it). But ignoring the situation in Skara Brae, where a crazed mage sparked a disaster that killed everyone, binding their souls to the place and leaving them to walk the land as ghosts forever? Telling the Avatar, who warns them about the Guardian (the big red head), "I've never heard of him; are you sure he really exists?"? Putting a damn MONSTER into your castle's moat, in the middle of town, next to a busy street?

Two seconds after I took this shot, half my party was dead

What have you been DOING all this time, Cantabrigian?

Oh, the chambermaid. The ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED chambermaid.

Now, granted, that's an Easter egg from within an Easter egg (which I'll talk about more in a later entry), and supposed to be non-canon, but in a way, that even makes it WORSE, because it means there's no explanation whatsoever of LB's sudden incompetence. There are all SORTS of interesting directions you could've gone with it- is he senile? Learning that even HE won't live forever? Bored with ruling, but unable to pass the crown to someone else? Going through a midlife crisis? Who knows? Not this game, certainly.

You said it, guy-thrown-in-prison-for-stealing-apples-to-feed-his-starving-family-in-British's-own-castle. You said it.

As I've said repeatedly before, it's by no means a bad game, but the little bad things add up, and in my opinion, the sum total comes in a little lower than VI did. So, beyond reaching too far, what went wrong?

This.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. But the increasing consolidation of the home computer market under Microsoft left Origin with LOTS of ported copies (it had been worse earlier: Ultima IV wound up ported to more than TWENTY SIX different platforms, though many were years later), and that wasn't done by people working for free. Changes in the market can hamper tech companies; it happens. That's what taking business loans is for, right? Yes- but Texas had just been stomped with the First City Bancorporation bailout, the biggest since the S&L scandal, and nothing was available. The company was in serious trouble, and in the distance, storm clouds came rolling in. Storm clouds shaped... like this:

Find out how Ultima VII finishes in part 8- the turn of the tide!

[420Rachel]

Nice! This isn't a game I've played before so I'll have to check it out one day! 😎

[NamerOfStars]

Thanks! It's definitely an interesting series, as you can read in the earl- aw, nuts; I forgot to link the earlier entries! Well, I'll see if I can fix that, but in the meantime, feel free to check out my commentary on the earlier parts of the series, which you can find a link to in my profile.