Once again, I have to apologize for the lateness of this review. I blame repeated failures to run Ultima VI in DOSBox on either Linux or Windows, thus hampering my ability to take screenshots. In fact, I wasn’t able to grab any. Thus, this review will have to do without visual aids. Sorry about that; I hope to have this fixed in time for the Ultima VII review.

Of course, you didn’t come here to listen to me whine about my computer issues – you came here to listen to me wax nostalgic about the Ultima series. And we’re now entering a most interesting period in the game’s history; Ultima VI was the first game in the long-running franchise that was primarily developed for the PC platform (by 1990 firmly established as the de facto standard home computer platform), and not the Apple II. (I have learned that an Apple II version was planned at an early stage in development, but abandoned when it became clear the Apple market was rapidly receding from the shores of commercial viability.) It was also the first Ultima that would see the world of Britannia under the creative stewardship of others within Origin; Richard Garriott, who had been the primary programmer of the preceding five games, on VI began to step into the background, becoming more of an “executive producer” whose job it was to guide the development of the game to his vision. He would contribute some code to the finished product, but in essence this meant the days of Ultima being primarily Garriott’s “baby” were gone.

Interestingly, the notion that someone other than Lord British might have perfectly acceptable ideas would become, whether intentionally or otherwise, one of the themes of this watershed game in the Ultima series…

Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990): Let’s review. In Ultima IV, you became the Avatar, champion of all that’s good and just in the world of Britannia. To formalize your accomplishment, you delved down to the lowest level of the Great Stygian Abyss to retrieve the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. In Ultima V, you learned that when you removed the Codex from its subterranian shrine, it opened the way to a new world located beneath the surface of Britannia, and it was on an expedition to chart this Underworld that Lord British was lost, allowing the Shadowlord puppet Blackthorn to usurp power. When you finally found the missing monarch and restored him to his throne, the Underworld collapsed into ruin.

It’s a little over a year later, and you, the Avatar, are relaxing at home when, suddenly, a red Moongate appears in your backyard. Thinking it’s another summons from Britannia (but wait – weren’t those Moongates always blue?), you quickly decide to enter it… and (after another trip through the now-familiar Questions of Virtue, unless you’ve imported your Ultima V character) you soon find yourself surrounded by Gargoyles, who’ve apparently decided that you’re the perfect candidate to play Aslan in their re-enactment of the Stone Table sequence from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Luckily for you, before the chief dæmon can turn you into Avatar-kabobs, your old buddies Iolo, Dupré, and Shamino arrive to rescue you and pull you right into Lord British’s castle… but a few enraged Gargoyles will follow you there, and a big Battle Royal will ensue right there in the throne room. When the dust settles, LB will bring you up to speed on what’s been going on in Britannia lately… in a nutshell, the Gargoyles, their homes destroyed with the collapse of the Underworld, have declared war on Britannia, and your mission – as odd as it may sound coming from the man who devised the Quest of the Avatar – is, in essence, to do anything you can to end the Gargoyle threat, up to and including genocide.

That, in and of itself, should be your clue that things aren’t as they appear. After all, waging indiscriminate war against an entire race of beings would run counter to the ideals of Avatarhood… or so you’d think. And, you’d be correct. As you play, you’ll discover that the Gargoyles aren’t quite the malevolent entities they at first appear to be, and that they in fact have a very legitimate gripe against the Avatar, who matches to an almost scary level their scriptures’ definition of the “False Prophet” that will eventually destroy their entire civilization. In the end, Ultima VI is a game about racial tolerance and the notion that, once you learn about your enemy, you may find that you have more similarities than differences after all.

As the first Ultima game developed with much more powerful hardware in mind, VI is groundbreaking in more ways than just its clever manipulation of player expectations. The process of making Britannia more “interactive” that began in Ultima V continues exponentially here; thanks to the added memory and processing power of 16-bit machines, you now have more control than ever over what your characters can do. To cite one famous example: You can buy seeds from a merchant, sow them in an empty field to grow wheat, then harvest the wheat and sell it at a profit to a miller. Or you can combine the wheat with flour and water to bake bread, upon which you can feed your party or sell it to a bakery for a nice profit. Nearly every object in the game can be somehow manipulated in a way that affects gameplay… as the ad copy on the back of the original box boasted, “If you can touch it, you can use it!” This philosophy creates one of the most immersive and interactive RPG worlds of all time… though even this is as nothing compared to what would arrive in the next game!

Ultima VI also introduces a “paper doll” inventory and equipment system. In essence, this mechanic allows you to equip new weapons and armor as if you were putting clothes on a paper doll (hence the nickname). It also allows you to easily place items into whatever bags you might have in your inventory. Care must be taken that you don’t carry too many items; for one of the first times outside of the Roguelike genre, you have to worry about the weight of your items, and how your agility and strength diminish the more heavily burdened you are. As with other Ultima innovations over the years, it’s now something we take for granted in many computer fantasy games, such as the Diablo series.

Since they were no longer required to display meaningfully on an Apple II display, the visuals in Ultima VI have been given a drastic makeover. Gone are the days of 8×8 tiles with lots of black space… in their place are impressive (for the day) pseudo-isomentic graphics in a full spectrum of VGA colors. Also banished, as of this game, is the concept of a “dual-scaled” map, still a standard in the genre, where towns, castles, and dungeons are represented by symbolic icons or structures on a larger-scaled “Overworld” map. Instead, in this and future Ultimas, you go from fields to outskirts to right in the middle of downtown Trinsic, all in a believable fashion just as you would in real life. And while the dungeons are no longer in first-person perspective, they now fit below the Britannian surface in a way that you would logically expect them to given the layout of the land.

The Gargoyles themselves represent yet another level of innovation. At first they’re presented as pretty much the “black hat” villians of the piece, speaking in tongues and with completely unknown motives. As you play, however, you will learn more about them, and why they act the way they do… you’ll even learn their language, which is actually a real language with a structure and syntax all its own! In this respect, Gargish is a far cry from the simple cyphered-English “languages” in other RPGs (*cough*AlBhed*cough*cough*), including Ultima’s own trademark Runic alphabet. It’s a bit like Japanese in that it doesn’t always smoothly translate to English (owing to its different structure), but it’s easy to get the gist of it in relatively short order. In a novel twist, you learn that you’ve been speaking Gargish without knowing it since Ultima IV; it is discovered that the familiar Mantras of Virtue are directly derived from the Gargoyle language! As they say in Gargoyle circles, “inuiste kor ling inuiste ver de kor murom” (“To learn our language, to discover the truth of our society”).

It’s also the first Ultima to utilize that new-fangled input device known as the “mouse” to enhance gameplay. While there are still times you’ll need the keyboard (for instance, to type in words during a conversation), for the most part you use command icons to perform common actions — movement, attacking, searching for usable objects, and so on. Compared to having to learn keystroke commands in the previous five games, this seems a bit more accessible to the first-time player, though longtime Ultima veterans have been known to complain about how “clunky” this interface is compared to the speed and (relative) elegance of the keyboard. (Of course, that’s hardly unique to Britannian adventurers; mouse-vs.-keyboard is a long-standing debate among users in all walks of computing life, with no satisfactory end in sight.)

Overall, Ultima VI represents a quantum leap in RPG technology, creating one of the most complete and believable game worlds you could ever hope to see on the computer screen. Its extreme attention to detail and making things work the way they would in reality is surpassed only by the next game in the series… which we’ll get to in our next installment.

The Guardian awaits…

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active Special: The History of Ultima, Part V: Lord British Takes a Holiday
2. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, The Finale: Stark Raven Mad
3. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, Part VIII - Balance Game
4. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, Part VII - Of Black Gates and Red Skulls
5. Retro-Active: The Better-Late-Than-Never History of Ultima, Part IX: Super Avatar Bros.?

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