In fact, I was surprised by how easy I often found its combat. It’s not that Ultima IV is an especially difficult game.
Doing anything contrary would just slow you down.Īnd trust me you’ll have enough working against you already. You may have to adjust habits and behavior from what other games have taught you, but really, what else are you going to do? The whole point of the game is proving yourself to be the good-est goodie that ever gooded. The virtues eventually feel less like a moral expense and more like the price of doing business. It can be very easy, once you’ve figured out how each one works, to integrate them into your routine the way you would any other mechanic in a videogame. While they do add a layer of moral complexity often absent from the mechanics of most other titles, they’re still a bit simple when taken on the whole. That said, Ultima IV‘s virtues aren’t perfect. Ultima IV, comparatively, takes the rare step of making heroism appropriately costly and calling you on behavior that, when you get down to it, is evil. Nathan Drake can gun down hundreds of people in every Uncharted game, for instance, but he’s still considered to be the good guy because he’s charming, funny and has nice hair. Most videogames play pretty fast and loose with the rules of morality when it comes to gameplay. Letting enemies run away, in turn, can be frustrating and inconvenient, but that’s kind of the point. The problem this can pose is that by allowing enemies to flee, you’re also missing out on valuable experience points that your party needs to level up. Being just simply means letting them get away. Enemies will frequently run away from you after you deal them enough damage in combat. Justice, for instance, requires you to avoid killing enemies whenever you can. Other virtues, meanwhile, call for some deeper sacrifices on the part of the player. Humility, likewise, pretty much just entails not bragging about how awesome you are when NPCs give you the opportunity to do so. Mastering the virtue of Compassion, for instance, requires you to be charitable with your gold when you run into beggars. Some of the things you’ll need to do are fairly simple. You’re given a set of virtues and, if you want to beat the game, you’ll need to uphold them by behaving in a manner reflective of their standards. Ultima IV, in turn, is pretty much all about that. I’m the guy at your tabletop game who’s less concerned with optimizing my stats as I am with making sure my actions are consistent with my character’s history, personality and goals. It’s a concept that very much appealed to me as I took my first steps into the game. Rather, your goal was to transform yourself into the Avatar, an exemplar of noble virtues that could stand as a living example of how people should lead their lives. You weren’t on a quest to take down some big bad or stop some ultimate evil. The brainchild of Richard “Lord British” Garriott, it presented players with a wide world and a goal that’s still fairly unique among RPGs. In the pantheon of great RPGs, you’d be hard-pressed to find a game as revered as Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. We wrap up our December of classic RPGs with Richard Garriott’s genre classic Ultima IV.
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