Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 9- Ultima VIII!

[NamerOfStars]

So. As you know if you've read my prior writings on the series [Last entry here (Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 8- Ultima VII part 2! ), prior entry here (Lessons In Video Game History- The Ultima Saga, Part 6- Ultima VI, continued! ), which contains links to all previous entries.], Ultima was the franchise that basically INVENTED the RPG as we know it today; draw out the evolutionary chart of video games (which is an interesting idea in itself), and you'll see it as the common ancestor of both the Japanese AND Western forms of the genre. From IV onward, it took on a more complex, in-depth examination of morality, of what "good" and "evil" actually meant, raising standard fantasy settings beyond their Tolkienian roots. It didn't rest on its laurels, either, but kept pushing forward, looking at the same conflict from different angles, and the same issue from different perspectives, always taking new looks at what a hero SHOULD be.

Then THIS game came along. Ultima VIII. The one that ran the series into the ground and turned it into a... what's the equivalent of a laughingstock, but for tears? A weepingstock? Well, it's a word NOW. This was when the dip that Serpent Isle might've been was shown to be the start of the plummet that destroyed the franchise. You doubt me? Well, let's rip the band-aid off and dive in. Note that while I'm not going to reveal EVERYTHING, this is a game you should NOT play, so spoilers ahoy!

The flames of Hell in the logo are NOT a coincidence.

Serpent Isle (Ultima VII part 2) ended with us restoring the Chaos serpent and returning it AND the Great Earth serpent to the void, and for some reason, we were sent there as well. With balance restored, the disaster was averted, and everything seemed dandy (save that we were stuck in what was essentially the oxygenated void of space)- then the Guardian showed up to taunt us. He claimed that we'd "thwarted him once again" despite the fact that it was BATLIN'S plan we'd stopped, not his. Then he grabs us, and boasts that he'll crush both Britannia AND Earth, and drops us down into the world of Pagan- the world he conquered before trying to enter Britannia.

Now, despite the bizarreness of the Serpents not helping us, this is actually a cool idea- an adventure through a post-apocalyptic world, destroyed by the very enemy that we'd fought in the last two games, could not only be an interesting look at how the Virtues fared in a darker, more brutal place, but could show us the actual threat he represented. It's a hard thing to make a defeated villain still intimidating, but showing the aftermath of his conquest could do that JUST fine. Nor was this wholly pulled out of EA's ass; in Serpent Isle, we meet an exile from Pagan (similarly long-lived on that island as Earth people are in Britannia), who tells us about the world he fled, and how the Guardian destroyed it (although what he describes is MUCH cooler than what we ended up getting). But the end product... eugh.

The Ultima games (excepting the Underworld spinoffs) were 2D dungeon crawlers. VIII was... an isometric platformer. Which no one involved had experience making, so you'd THINK they'd hesitate. But they didn't, or were ignored, and we wound up with this:

See the pale blue arrow? That's my cursor, and that's about where I'd have to have it positioned to make the first jump on to that rock. See, in platforming games made by SANE people, the distance of jump is set by one of a few options: either it's a fixed distance, or it's how long you hold down the button, or you jump where you click. Not here- here it's all about how far the cursor is from you when you release the button. Yeah, not press, RELEASE. See, Ultima VII was mouse-driven, and it was decided that Ultima VIII should be mouse-*exclusive*. You CAN'T use the keyboard for precision maneuvering. To jump, you press and hold the right mouse button, then press and hold the left, then release them both together- unless you need to grab on to the far ledge; then you want to release the left but not the right, since that'll make you let go of the ledge and fall. Got that? Good- but remember that you need to be quick, because pressing and holding the right mouse button is also how you MOVE. The blue stuff in that picture, there? That's water. Go ankle-deep, and you're dead. And since British is in another dimension and can't help revive you, you need to reload- and EVERY SINGLE TIME you do, you'll hear the Guardian taunting you.

Now remember that in 1994, EACH of those reloads would've taken a good twenty seconds. And some of the platforms you're aiming at are MOVING. And they don't stop when you're in the air.

Now I'm not scared of difficulty, and while I'm sure I'm not as fast as I used to be, I took on the biggest challenge games of the era (well, the PREVIOUS era, but my brother wanting to play with the more modern hardware, so he told me I had to beat the old stuff first). I finished Castlevania and the Adventures of Bayou Billy. I BEAT BATTLETOADS!

Anyone who tells you this was the hardest level is showing they never got any further.

I even beat Ghosts 'n Goblins- both times!- and that was a game that thought "margins of error are for wimps". But there's a difference between "hard but fair" and "hard, because half the times your controls decide not to work", and Ultima VII is in the latter category. And this is with the update that FIXED them. Because even when they DO work, they suck. Let's say I'm being chased by an enemy:

Like the colorful spider fellow on the left

and I want to open a door, dash into a house, and close the door behind me. Well, even at the distance I'm standing from it, I can't open that door- I'm too far away. But see how the arrow is shorter than the one in the previous picture? That's because while the jumping is at least theoretically reasonable now, the base movement still isn't- your speed is determined by how far away from you the cursor is. If I right click to move closer to the door, I carefully move toward it, one slow step at a time. If I move the mouse to the edge of the screen and run towards it, I can't maneuver it back to the door before I'm pounced upon. I might get it open, but then I'll slowly creep inside while my pursuer takes bites out of my butt. If I manage to dash in, the arrow'll be too far out to close the door again before I'm followed inside. Even the most basic of keyboards has almost a hundred keys; WHY WILL YOU NOT LET ME USE THEM?

Let's not forget combat, either. If I'm fighting a zombie...

And I'm trying to hit him. I can't just click ON him, because the aiming is based on where the cursor is relative to ME, not the enemy- I have to click on the area to the LEFT of him to hit him. And while they're tough, zombies are one of the EASIER enemies to fight, because they actually give FEEDBACK when you hit them; many enemies make no sounds and seem perfectly fine up until they drop mid-fight from sudden heart attacks. You know who that applies to? ME. The little gauge on the right has my health and mana; the red dropping is the only clue you get that you're taking damage in combat. Attack speed is also based exclusively on click speed; weapon type and attributes don't matter. There's room for debating the importance of player skill vs character skill, but not in an Ultima game.

Okay, so the gameplay's pretty lacking. But how's the story? And the worldbuilding? I think that can be answered with one image:

The "populus". Not the "populace", nor the "Populous" (Peter Molyneux's head would've exploded if they'd tried that). And it's not about a revolution of angry poplar trees, either. THAT is the level of care and accuracy that went into the making of this game.

See, the world of Pagan (which didn't always have that name) was once a pleasant place, but then the Guardian came along and started whispering into the ears of specific people- not many, but enough to start moving society in a direction he wanted. He told these people that a great evil called "the Destroyer" was coming to destroy their world, and that they could be saved by rejecting their old ways, and turning to the worship of the four elements, and building an enormous blackrock altar. Some did, and began calling themselves "pagans", and eventually their worship of the elements gave rise to metaphysical embodiments (the Titans) of those elements, who began pushing hatred between the groups, and eventually drove the pagans to attack the zealan (followers of the old ways) people. When enough of them were killed, the Destroyer arrived, and fought the Titans- the ensuing battle blocked out the sun, leaving the world in perpetual twilight, and wiped out the vast majority of the planet's landmass. When the dust had settled, the Destroyer was gone, civilization was destroyed, and the Titans, claiming they and they alone had saved the world and the people, demanded to be worshiped as gods. Then they started fighting amongst themselves, causing even MORE devastation, until one by one, the human population either bargained with or tricked them into settling down and coexisting with the others, and humanity. Each of the Titans granted magical powers to a specific subset of the people, and the situation stabilized, remaining calm for centuries- until WE showed up (it turns out that the altar build by the Pagans was actually another black gate, which the Guardian came through on his way to Britannia, then destroyed to remove the evidence, but of course the people don't know that).

We're dropped into Pagan (literally) and rescued by a fisherman who tells we're doubly lucky he saved us, since those who drown are taken by Hydros, the Lurker- those who are buried normally spend eternity serving Lithos, the Earth Titan, while those the Lurker takes are doomed to walk the ocean floor instead. Fun! Then we hear a commotion on the nearby docks, and discover the Tempest of the local city (the ruler, who's of the bloodline of the hero who trapped Hydros and was granted powers to all his descendants) is carrying out an execution- a guy's been accused of treason and blasphemy (since she rules by divine right, criticizing her is both), and sentenced to be beheaded. He defiantly claims Lithos won't find him wanting, and she declares:

the guard objects, since this would violate the pact with Lithos, but she overrules him. Then we see the decapitation and watch his head roll off the dock and fall into the water, where a sea serpent eats it. That woman in black, next to the guard (behind the text)? That's his WIFE. Who has to watch and listen, helpless, as her husband is essentially condemned to Hell and killed in front of her. And all this is in the first three minutes of the game.

So it's dark. REALLY dark. "Makes-the-dystopia-of-Ultima-V-look-like-paradise" dark. Well, that can work; in a way, it's a logical continuation of where the series had been going. IV was about the virtues, and trying to become an embodiment of those ideals. V was about those virtues being twisted. VI was about the collision of different systems of virtues, and VII was about how the failings of one were of excess, and the failings of the other were of lack (for parts one and two, respectively). VIII was intended to be about how to cling to one's virtues and still navigate a world that was a much harsher place, where it was expected that only the strong and brutal would survive. That's an interesting idea, but you need a REALLY good writer to make it work without become nihilistic or Pollyanna-ish. Ultima games always hinged on their writing, and VII had had the legendary Raymond Benson, but he'd left the company. Who did VIII have to replace him?

No one, really.

Oh, there are a few names under the "head writer" category in the credits, but it was a collection of programmers and artists tasked with writing the story out. And it shows- anyone who thinks writing isn't a skill needs to play VI or VII and then this game. It's incredibly bare-bones, and STILL clunky and full of plot holes. It has little of the humor and none of the charm of prior Ultima games, and (bizarrely, given the bleakness) even lacks their bite.

The worst part of the writing, however, is that beating it requires you to be absolutely AWFUL. The virtues aren't "questioned" or "challenged", they're IGNORED. It's not that you face difficult choices or have to be superhumanly cunning to work out agreeable solutions to your difficulties- there ARE no agreeable solutions; either you lie, cheat, steal, and break your word, or you don't finish the game. Pagan's not a nice place, but it's a stable one, when you arrive. When you leave, it's a burned-out wreck, and you've pretty much consigned everyone on it to a slow and painful death, all so that you could get back home. There's nothing clever or subtle about it, and you'll find yourself wondering "Who IS this asshole, and why do they keep calling him 'the Avatar'?".

So what the hell went wrong?

The common narrative is that it was all the evil publisher; that in the pre-EA days, it was all sunshine and rainbows, and people at Origin worked insanely hard because they were so inspired and loved making games so much. That EA came in with crazy crunch demands and had people working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, rushing incomplete products out the door in the name of profits. That's not untrue, but other sources paint a less rosy picture- they claim that it wasn't EA who decided to make VIII a platformer, but Garriott himself, inspired by the runaway success of Prince of Persia. And conditions at Origin were far from great even before the buyout; it was the demands of ludicrous work hours that drove Benson away. When Garriott went out on his own... well, we're not there yet. And there was one more factor that got Garriott's goat:

Wing Commander was quite possibly the biggest bar-raising game the industry had seen up to that point. The graphics, laughably primitive now, were so jaw-dropping you'd probably need to upgrade your computer just to RUN it, and the gameplay was astounding (it even had a missile chase camera mode, and this was in *1990*!). It was an incredible experience, cost five times what its peers did to make, and pretty much single-handedly reestablished the street cred of the action game genre. It was EXACTLY the kind of game you'd expect from the people who made the Ultima series- but it wasn't. Oh, it was made by Origin, and some of the same people did both, but it was mostly a different team- and Garriott himself had nothing to do with it. Yet not only did it outsell Ultima VI (which released two months before), but it quickly became THE product (and later, product line) that defined Origin as a company, in the minds of both the consumer base and the industry leaders.

Garriott was a brilliant man, but brilliance often brings egotism, and it certainly did in his case. And now he was being outdone, in both sales and excitement, not only by Wing Commander, but by the Underworld games as well. The Golden Boy was being outdone by others at his own company, and some working in his own world- and that is NOT something that many people can just roll with. He doubtless felt that the industry was leaving him behind. So he tweaked the basic Ultima formula, which after the series established itself was basically 50/50 innovate and iterate, and copied what someone else was doing. It was a very uncertain time in the industry, and the big money and energy seemed to be going into ever-increasing spectacle using new and shinier technologies. It was the 90's now; what did WORDS matter in a video game?

...and I refute that assertion with a picture and no words.

If there's one positive thing to be said of Ultima VIII, it's that it wasn't simply swept under the rug and forgotten about; Mike McShaffry (the project head, who never denied he didn't have the experience necessary to manage a project like this at the time) took the code home, recoded the jumping system HIMSELF- which turned the jumping from a game-breaking problem into an almost meaningless annoyance, but was necessary to save the game from TOTAL disgrace. And Garriott himself, after the usual post-release CompuServe session, claimed that Origin had "heard the cry of the fans", and would be moving away from action-oriented gameplay and back towards the systems and spirits of the prior games. They'd also be making sure not to bite off more than they could chew, and toward that end, he'd be putting Warren Spector in charge of Ultima IX. Warren Spector had lead Ultima VI, and would later (when given free reign to make the game of his dreams) go on to make Deus Ex.

Not true, but only because no one UNinstalls it any more.

He'd done it before, and would go on to it again- but could he pull it off this time, reversing the fall and pulling the series out of its tailspin? Find out next time in Part Ten- Not with a bang, but with a scream of anguish!