Tuesday, September 04, 2007

PC to tabletop: Ultima IV

There's been a lot of talk lately about video games like Worlds of Warcraft and Final Fantasy informing design decisions in the upcoming 4th edition of D&D. I fall in the camp that I don't care where a good mechanical idea comes from, but I'm not yet sure whether I want what other people consider to be good ideas in computer gaming. Still, I agree with the basic premise that a video game has the potential to positively impact tabletop play. Case in point: Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.

I don't really play PC games any more and Ultima IV represented the highpoint of my interaction with computer gaming. I had played a bootleg copy of Ultima III, a less ambitious but still fun predecessor and I tried to enjoy the sequel but largely found it exchanged the soul the the earlier installments for greater technical sophistication and graphical embellishment.

Ultima IV featured great exploration of a huge overland map, secrets to be discovered, clues to be found, and interesting people to interact with. I found the dungeons genuinely thrilling and travel by sea exhilarating. And the quest of the game featured something previously unencountered in various Bard's Tales and Might & Magics and such: the evil to be defeated was not an external threat like an evil wizard or something. Rather the goal was to ennoble the hearts of the inhabitants of Britannia by leading an exemplary life of virtue. It was a game with a genuine moral dimension, not just a lameass alignment system.

The graphics were pretty weak, even by '80s Commodore 64 standards, but I loved the overhead view of the overland and town maps. The art was stylized in a way that made the lack of detail less important, in the way that a chess piece can be abstract but still symbolic.

One of the greatest thing abotu Ultima IV was the extra thing-a-ma-bobs that came in the box. (I guess someone at EN World decided that we would start calling this stuff "regalia".) For starters, you get an awesome cloth map of Britannia. Most of it is quite accurate, such that you can navigate large chunks of wilderness travel with it. The labels are all in a modified Viking style runic. A key for translation came in the box, but it wasn't necessary to use it to finish the game.









You also got two nifty stapled digest-sized books. I love digest-sized gamebooks. They just seem so light and fun. One of the books was titled The History of Britannia as told by Kyle the Younger. It was a great little mechanics-free overview of the gameworld, printed on a lovely heavy stock cream colored paper with brown ink and adorable little illustrations. Flipping through this book is a delight. Everything a starting player needs to know about the gameworld is contained in this small book, all presented in nice little snippets.

The second book was the spellbook. The cover was dark red with shiny gold runes on it. How can you not like that book? Inside each spell gets a one page description, largely free of mechanics and such, and a fullpage illo of some cool-looking wizard using the spell. Spells in Ultima IV weren't divided along class or level lines. Magic was just... magic. You might not have enough Magic Points to cast a particular spell, but you would only find something like that out via trial and error. The spellbook also explained the spell component system. There were only six or eight components and all spells made use of one or more of that set. The majority of these components could be bought at magic shoppes. But the two most potent components had to be found in the game.

Finally, each Ultima IV box came with a little cheap metal ankh, the symbol of morality in the game. In retrospect this use of the ankh has shades of Crystal Dragon Jesus written all over it. But I still treasure the ankh that came with my original copy of the game.


I look back at Ultima IV and see a lot of stuff I would enjoy in my tabletop games. Wouldn't it be great to be able to hand out a cute little booklet of campaign information, instead of a drab printout? And presenting a spellbook that looks like an occult tome would be the bee's knees. A cloth or parchment player map that looks genuine and is useful but that doesn't exactly match the official campaign map would be great. And I'd love to give out some sort of little gew-gaw to give players as a momento of a campaign. That's not even touching on the actual morality at work in Ultima IV. I'm not sure exactly what to do with that.

12 comments:

  1. Ultima IV is the #1 reason there's a Denis Loubet illustration in Uresia II ;)

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  2. I look back at Ultima IV

    Back?

    Your blog makes me feel old :)

    [Returns to his game of Beyond Zork ...]

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  3. Anonymous1:58 PM

    I thank you for introducing me to the term "Crystal Dragon Jesus". I intend to use this term with great frequency when describing religions in certain campaign settings now that I know that it exists.

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  4. I never played Ultima IV, though - from the sound of it - I ought to have done so. If you can address some of the ways it approached morality, I'd be appreciative. It is an interest of mine, you know...

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  5. Anonymous6:07 PM

    I died so often in this game. I loved it, but I really sucked at playing it.

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  6. Anonymous7:54 AM

    hey Jeff,

    Do you have an email address that I can contact you at?

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  7. wulfgar: jrients at the gmail to the dot com

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  8. I dropped many hours on Ultima IV. I had the cloth map hanging on my wall.

    Defeating the pirate town was one of the hardest things I've ever done in a video game.

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  9. I had wanted to post on this earlier, but I got distracted and forgot.

    Anyway. I absolutely loved Ultima IV. It influenced my D&D games for years afterward, and I wanted to use that chargen morality system in my own game somehow, though I never quite worked it all out. Many of my happy nostalgic memories are of playing Ultima IV on the C64 in the wood-paneled living room with my friends sitting around the desk.

    However, my best friend's favorite pastime was making his character as evil as possible, just so that Hawkwind the Seer would verbally blast him every time we checked in on him ("Thou art lower than a slug!").

    Man, I miss that map, too.

    And kudos for the Denis Loubet illustration, S. John! I always thought those were gorgeous illustrations in the Ultima IV booklet...

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  10. I almost forgot to comment on the point of the post. Aside from Ultima IV's coolness, I mean.

    I think it would be absolutely super-keen if gaming companies were willing and able to package an RPG like Ultima IV. I've been pleased to see more companies releasing games in a smaller format - from Castles & Crusades collector's boxed set and Mongoose's $20 players' handbooks to Burning Wheel and other indy games. Since getting my Traveller LBBs, I've also enjoyed the easy portability of such gamebooks.

    The in-character map, history book, and magic book double as props and as rules for players. Granted, being produced for a video game, they aren't required to detail the rules like your average RPG, but then, having a separate GM's book in the box would probably solve that, I warrant.

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  11. And kudos for the Denis Loubet illustration, S. John! I always thought those were gorgeous illustrations in the Ultima IV booklet...

    It's also a long-term quest of mine to produce a short run of screen-printed Uresia cloth maps ... Not much progress on that front, but it's my own fault for self-swamping; it's not like it's rocket-science to find a local scren-printing house that could do it :) Sigh.

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  12. Anonymous6:24 PM

    I'm a game technology Master's student at the University of Abertay in Dundee, Scotland. At last year's GDC I heard Waren Spector say, "Ultima IV changed my life"

    I couldn't agree more. I have a big U4 poster on my wall to remind me why I'm here.

    http://gamedev.alaskajohn.net/htsrv/trackback.php?tb_id=42

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