What I’ve always appreciated about Ultima IV was that it moved consciously against a common technique in fantasy games from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, both tabletop and computer: “Let’s go sack some monsters’ lairs and take their stuff.” When role-playing games started as an extension of wargaming, the “attack ‘n’ pillage” approach made sense. “I thought people were going to think I was going way off the deep end with the ethical, moral, parable stuff,” Garriott later said, but if he had any serious concerns about how players of the first three games would react to this “moral, parable” campaign, they quickly evaporated when Ultima IV turned into a huge best-seller. The land of Britannia now struggles toward enlightenment, with the player character as the center of the development. (Today the word “avatar” is common computer lingo, but in 1985 only people familiar with Hinduism had any familiarity with it.)Īfter two years of development, Garriott released Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, which follows the story of what happens to a fantasy world after the vanquishing of a great evil. What if the players had to actually live up to the extraordinary standards of acting as great, chivalric heroes? In fact, what if that was the whole point of the game: achieve the highest level of moral heroism so the players turned into ethical cynosures for the whole world? What was called, in game terms, an “Avatar”? He used them to see if he could devise a new challenge for a computer game that wouldn’t use the standard “defeat the Big Bad Guy” of fantasy RPGs. But Garriott did something interesting instead of shrugging off the complaints. He had received complaints from parents about the demonic nature of these games-and the cover of Ultima III: Exodus in particular-and certainly knew about BADD’s anti-fantasy game campaign. (This was also the year of The Bard’s Tale from Electronic Arts a major time for computer RPGs.)īy the middle of the decade, Richard Garriott, who programs under the pseudonym “Lord British,” had completed the first three of the Ultima games, featuring standard RPG plots where heroes had to vanquish a series of Dark Lords and their descendants. And I’m not the only one who got sucked into this fantasy computer game when it was first published by Origin Systems in 1985 for a variety of platforms. To this day, it’s only video RPG I’ve ever loved. If a single positive resulted from the work of that woefully misinformed but correctly acronymed organization BADD (Bothered about Dungeons & Dragons), a group that waged a crusade to stop children from jumping into the Bags of Holding that they learned to construct from an $11.99 hardcover rulebook purchased at a hobby store, it was the computer RPG Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar.
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