Ultima III: Opening Thoughts

From the light-hearted adventure that was Ultima I and the disjointed mishmash that was Ultima II, it's time for me to move on to the more seriously-bent Ultima III, and the end of the Ages of Darkness. If Ultima II was the awkward adolescent of the series, then I suppose that makes Ultima III the high school graduate, having sorted out a little better idea of what it wants to be and beginning to act upon said idea.

Ultima III was released in 1983, and marked a lot of firsts for the series. This was the first Ultima to allow a full party rather than just a single character, for instance, and the first game in which combat takes part in a separate tactical screen. It's also the first game to take line-of-sight into account during travel. And most importantly to my pianist-slash-violinist background, it's the first Ultima to feature music! Needless to say, even though the DOS version doesn't include the music, I've patched it in for the full experience. I've also patched EGA graphics into the game (again thanks to The Exodus Project), but this should be the last game I modify graphically. I considered for a bit using the more recent version of the project, which decreases food consumption and increases enemy spawning, but I mentioned earlier I'm trying to stay as close to the originals as possible, so I declined.

The plot isn't entirely novel, as it's the same defeat-the-baddie as the past two games - this time with Mondain and Minax's progeny-of-sorts Exodus - but it does take a more serious approach, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this all plays out - Ultima III is the first game I've blogged about here that I haven't actually played in its entirety before.

Ultima III came with three manuals of sorts - one for the game itself, and one each for the two brands of magic that are used in the game. And the game documentation is really starting to shine by this point - all three come with beautiful illustrations, wonderful flavor text, and set the stage excellently for the game ahead. Although it does make some allusions to potential mechanics that don't pan out in-game - the suggestion that party members can be recruited in the game world, for instance. Maybe it's just poor word choice in the manual or something planned but not implemented.

The manuals also leave some questions open about game lore and such, but that's half of what I love about the series - I actually find a setting that isn't 100% consistent with itself and only expounds upon relevant details somewhat more believable than an impeccably designed one where every detail is consistent and explained, but it's a fine line to walk! Ultima III's documentation does a decent job of this, I think - sixth circle of mages? What's it like for the other five - and the three above that? What's this 'One' the clerical book of magic refers to, the 'Dark Lord' one invokes for the P-spell? Enough seeds to get the imagination churning, and I love it.

One last thing to mention about the game documentation - the map. No towns, dungeons or the like are actually marked on it, just the general landscape, and I like this idea a lot. Actually having to notate the map as you explore - that's a nice touch.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with Ultima III, especially compared to its predecessors. It never quite clicked with me, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact I'm more used to Ulimta IV, which streamlined things a little more - here you have to keep track of all four of your party's food, weapons, gold, etc., whereas later it's just one big pool. Most of my time with Ultima III was just fooling around with different characters, wandering into combats and playing around with the system a bit. So I'm interested to see what happens when I actually hunker down and play the game with the intent of seeing it through.

It took me far longer than it probably should have to figure out what my party's make-up would be. I toyed with the idea of including a druid (on account of Aric having been a wizard in Ultima I and a cleric in Ultima II), but eventually settled on a paladin, ranger, wizard, and cleric - Aric filling the role of the cleric, and the other three named after characters of mine from elsewhere. I went with a paladin and ranger instead of a fighter/thief combination for a bit more spellcasting ability, giving Ivan the paladin enough wisdom to cast a healing spell if need be and Olivia the ranger enough stats to at least open a chest.

So with my party assembled, my map ready, and my notebook close and hand, time to fling myself unto the breach again and strike down Exodus!

The adventure begins...

Ultima II: Closing Thoughts

I stated in my opening thoughts for Ultima II that I viewed the game as the series equivalent of the book of Leviticus - the first major potential stumbling block for anybody trying to proceed through canon in order. (Numbers is also an apt comparison. Any of the last three books of the Pentateuch, really, there's something in there for everyone to trip over.) While I still think the metaphor holds a decent amount of water, now that I've played it right off the tail end of Ultima I and am preparing to go into Ultima III, it's become fairly evident to me that more than anything else, Ultima II is a transition stage, the 'awkward adolescent' of the series, trying to figure out exactly what it wants to be and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks in order to do so. I feel that's a good deal of why it feels so disjointed as compared to its predecessor and sequel - it's trying to do everything at once because the series hasn't sorted out exactly where it's going yet. It's straddling the middle between the sandboxy open feel of Ultima I and the streamlined seriousness that Ultima III begins to demonstrate, trying out different things and seeing what works for it.

A sentiment I couldn't help but feel fairly often.

And while I can appreciate this (you never know what'll pan out if you don't give it a whirl, and Ultima II does represent an important developmental stage for the series), there's a lot of the game that I simply find uninteresting and/or frustrating. I think my biggest issue with the game is its terrible pacing. It's very easy to go through long stretches with little to no development - and I think this is more due to a confluence of certain game mechanics than anything else. Ultima I could throw you into bouts with no discernable progress under the right circumstances, but there was enough of a variety that the mundanity of it could easily be broken up, as well. That's not really the case with Ultima II - at least not until you've got the freedom of motion a ship provides and/or the stats to take on tough foes, neither of which come particularly swiftly in the game. Anything that could break up the monotony of the grinding requires results from that grind - so you're stuck doing it one way or another with no good alternative. It makes for a very static-feeling game up until the last third of it or so, when you have enough resources to start heading for space.

Exploration was fun, if mostly fruitless in the end.

A lot of this bad pacing has to do with the random factor in the game, or at least the feel of a random factor. There's a lot that relies on luck in Ultima II, and when it's game-critical knowledge or objects or mechanics that are gated behind random numbers, it's a problem. Obtaining a ship seems the most egregious example of this - you have to lean on luck to produce a certain type of enemy, where you're able to actually get to it, and that the item it gives you once you defeat it is the one you need. Then you have to wait for another type of enemy to spawn. If any of those factors doesn't pan out, then you're waiting a very long time for something that truly changes the game. There's also critical intelligence found nowhere else in the game that's gated behind nearly prohibitively expensive oracle readings, which also have a random factor beneath it. Developing your stats is mostly luck of the draw that it'll affect the stat you want - okay, so maybe it has something to do with the number of steps you take to get to the clerk, but that's not something the average layman would interpret as connected events, leading to that random feel again. When obtaining important items, developing your character, even knowing what to do is locked to the realm of the random, it can make for very frustrating circumstances when luck doesn't go the player's way. There are games that make random work (thrive on it even, roguelikes readily come to mind), but what makes them work is allowing player choice to have the chance to mitigate bad luck - not always successfully, but something that can allow a player to say, "Maybe I should have done that differently." Here the only thing a player can do differently is reload and try again.

Lots of little nooks and crannies to poke around.

Another problem I have is something I brought up while exploring space, and that's how empty the game world feels. It's cool to have a lot of very varied maps to explore (running around space was probably one of the best times I've had exploring in a game), but there's not much in them of note except for the occasional feature that makes you go 'huh, that's different' for a brief moment before moving on. Most maps only have one or two towns to play around in - while Ultima I's locales were pretty much carbon-copies of each other, at least they were numerous enough to give a sembleance of civilization. Here it just feels sparse. Even the dungeons feel somewhat superfluous - they mainly provide monsters to fight and by extension gold, but you need items obtained from overworld enemies in order to make full use of them anyway, and it doesn't feel like you gain anything faster in a dungeon, so they just end up redundant - more empty space. (And I still can't help but harp on the fact levels are meaningless, and therefore so is experience.)

But for all of the issues, Ultima II has its high points. The time gates are the first iteration of a fast-travel system in the series, and getting the hang of how they function and how best to make use of them was a fun problem to wrap my head around. There's actually some sembleance of conversation in this game, townsfolk providing clues and hints as to how to progress in the game - and even if a lot of them are just fluff, self-referential fourth-wall-breaking, or pop-culture reference (which used to bother me, but actually kind of makes sense since the game purportedly takes place on Earth), it provides some actual flavor to the towns, takes one step closer to feeling like a living world populated by characters rather than just pixels, plot devices, and mechanics. The towns themselves, though limited in number, feel unique, and poking around Shadowguard led my overactive imagination to some gleefully unsettling moments - the museum in which there's an example of not just every enemy, but every brand of citizen present was eerie indeed. There's reason to explore, if only to finding something out of the ordinary and interesting.

It's a little disconcerting these are right by each other...

So how does this all relate to the narrative of the game and series, my purported Topic of Interest? Well, this is still the era where game stories are pretty simplistic by their very nature, and when it comes down to it Ultima II's story isn't much different than Ultima I's - at their core, they're both the 'here is a baddie, now build yourself up to the point where you can beat them' type of tale. The differences are in their execution, and Ultima I pulls it off better. While Ultima I is streamlined, dropping hints at regular intervals, revealing relevant game information with the completion of each king's quest, Ultima II basically relegates this intel to random oracle readings and dependent on finding the one townsperson that reveals a hint. While this does take a step to a more 'nautral' feel, plying the locals for knowledge and squealing with glee when you finally find the one who knows what you need to know, it's not quite perfected the method - again, the bad pacing created by game elements hurts the story here.

As far as its place in the Grand Ultima Story, that's hard to say. It's probably the most glossed-over game in the series besides the semi-canon Akalabeth prologue. I do think that it does set up a very nice pattern of retaliation, though - the fact that events do lead to consequences that the Stranger-slash-Avatar has to deal with. It's something of an overarching theme of the series as a whole, whether it was intentional or not - practically every game after the first deals with some sort of after-effect of the previous games, and that's begun here in Ultima II. We're still in the opening chapters of the series, but it's already establishing precedent of needing to deal with the repercussions of actions taken, for better or worse. And for that, even if it gets mostly hurried over in the rest of the Ultima canon, I think Ultima II is a rather pivotal point in the story of Ultima.

Now that Minax is dealt with, I can turn my sights to the Island of Fire looming on the horizon. I'm currently working my way through the manuals (and boy am I going to have a lot to say on them!) and trying to plan out my party of four, so it may be a bit before I lay out my opening thoughts on Ultima III. But Exodus won't wait for me long, I'm sure... and I look forward to the chance to face the beast.

Ultima II: Revenge on the Enchantress

With space conquered and Antos having given me his blessing, there was only one task left in this strangely condensed, time-twisted version of Earth for me to do. Defeat Minax.

Aric's final stats

Which meant, of course, that tonight's session began the same way most of them have. With a grind-fest to gather the resources necessary.

I sailed around the Time of Legends, smacking down the baddies I found there for a rather hefty stack of gold - I should have done that sooner, it feels like the spawn rate for monsters in the Time of Legends is a lot faster. I don't know if it actually is, or it just feels like it due to there being considerably fewer nooks and crannies and islands for monsters to get caught up on so I find them faster, but either way, it meant that it was a lot easier to get myself a pile of gold there (then?) than anywhere (anywhen?) else.

Awfully expensive ring... that could have bought me 3000 hit points!

Once I amassed myself a sizeable chunk of change, it was off to Lord British's castle to buy as many hit points as I could hold (it still strikes me as somewhat odd that HP is a purchasable commodity), then off to - where else? - New San Antonio one last time to pump up my stats as high as I could off the several thousand gold that I'd stocked up. The last time I finished Ultima II, I ended the game with my strength somewhere in the 70s, and most of the rest in the mid-to-high 50s. This time around my strength was at a whopping 96, wisdom not far behind, and no stat lower than 60.

I was feeling pretty good, until I realized that I depleted my gold resources *before* obtaining the ring.

Have fun storming the castle!

So it was back to the Time of Legends for another smackdown session until I had 500 gold to dart back to claim the ring from the old man beneath ATREE. I never did get the message in-game that it was necessary to get the ring from him, I think it only comes from oracle messages, the near-prohibitively spendy ones, I'll have more to say on that in my closing thoughts post. Suffice it to say that I was properly equipped now, and I headed for Shadowguard.

With trepidation I wandered in through the gates, past the force fields and the devil-and-demon pair of guards, who left me alone. Slowly, carefully, I explored the castle, finding a life insurance salesman, a small chapel for devil worship, an eerie museum with a specimen of nearly every creature and brand of townsfolk I'd met, a she-creature that looked strangely like an orc begging me to take her... Minax was keeping some twisted things in her castle. I eventually found her in one of the corner towers, and I rushed her amid spell slinging and many shrieks of "Die fool!" before I landed a hit and she simply vanished from her position.

This is no time for a nap, Aric!!

I found her again in the opposite corner's tower (conveniently labeled 'Chamber Two') where I again suffered at the hands of her long range spells before getting close enough to land a blow with Enilno, and again she simply winked out of the room once I struck her. Back and forth I ran between the two towers, taking ever more circuitous routes with copious use of the strange coins I'd collected throughout my journeys to avoid dealing with any more of her minions than I had to (they overpowered me on two previous attempts to assault her stronghold). With each blow, she grew weaker and weaker, until with the fifth strike, she perished beneath my blade, her castle crumbling to ruins around me, all her works dying with her.

So ends the tale of Ultima II and the Revenge of the Enchantress, time and space one again set right with her death. The game continues to be something of a slog - it didn't feel much different the second time around - but I did a fair few things this time around I didn't last time, and the assault on Shadowguard was just as gleefully tense as any endgame sequence should be. I'll have a post with my final thoughts on the game in the coming days, and then it'll be time to gear up for another adventure - there's rumors of a creation of my two previous foes still lurking in wait...

Ultima II: Small Spaces

...wait, Father Antos is a she? I'm confused.

True to my goals in my last post, I borrowed a plane to steal a rocket to head out and explore space, to the fullest! (Space is a lot tinier than I expected it to be. Then again, what did I expect when I can sail around Earth a dozen times in the space of a few minutes?) But that's going a little too quickly. Let's start back at the beginning, shall we?

Some good ol' hack-and-slash.

Now that I can smack guards around and keys and locked doors were no longer an issue for Aric, I made one last round of the towns and villages to poke around to see what I might have missed in my previous explorations. Not much, as it turned, out, although I realized that I forget to ask around in Baradin's Town way back in the Pangaea era, which was rather a blunder, as it's there where one can obtain a good deal of information about Antos and Planet X! Kind of confused that some of this information comes from astronauts - prehistoric astronauts - but I guess that can kind of be handwaved due to Minax's confusing time shenanigans in the first place.

Anyway, during my explorations, I blundered into the Time of Legends, and decided to take a whack at the first wave of monsters that I met there. I remember the first time I played through Ultima II, I blinked several times at that massive gathering, thinking 'oh shoot.' It's not a terribly difficult fight to plow through, though, when it comes down to it - just simply finagling of enemy pathing and making use of the tight passageways. This batch of monsters is a lot tougher than their standard counterparts, but I made my way through them without too much difficulty. I was glad for my large stash of idols, capes, and boots picked up from my many grinding sessions, though, they saved me from a good deal of sleep and paralysis spells.

Forget going through Customs. Takes too long.

I saved the bunch of baddies awaiting me outside Shadowgate for later, ducking back into the time gate for the A.D. period and New San Antonio, this time to break into the hangar and steal myself a plane. Musing once again on how many rules I have to break in order to win the game - and how much worse that seems since I'm playing a cleric this run-through - I leapt into the plane, shot down a few guards, and ducked my way into the jail to nab Santre's Quicksword for 500 gold. I'd bought some power armor after a grinding session too, so now armed with the best equipment in the game, I taxied the plane past the time-negated guards at customs, and took of for a time gate and the Aftermath Era.

From there it was a quick flight to Pirate's Harbor, home of the remnants of the Soviet Union. First priority was exploration, of course, finding such places as 'Red Skware' (ow), 'Red Magic,' and a run-down 'Red Lobster'. It was here that my plan ran into its first snag, too - I found myself backed into a corner surrounded by guards and ended up dying. One reload later, I made a beeline for the launch center, negating time to bypass the guards and hop into a space shuttle.

Enilno is mine!

And then it was off into space! I actually had a lot of fun poking around the planets this time around, I just went straight for Planet X last playthrough. A lot of space and the other planets is... well, empty space, as I think I've remarked upon before, but at least somewhat interesting things are done with it - the tight mountain passages of Mars, the huge empty plain of Neptune, the transportation logistics necessary to explore Pluto... this session by far had the largest collection of screenshots yet, from all the interesting things I thought to snap a picture of. Proof that George Washington visited Mars; Izod Burgers on Jupiter; daring the swamp of New Jester on Uranus; some meta-humor, orcs around a campfire and a belligerent cook in Computer Camp on Neptune... all fluff, when it game down to it, but it was the flavor I'd been missing in-between all the grindfests. I also found a few clues pointing to Antos and New San Antonio on Pluto... which was kind of extraneous at this point.

So from there I went on to Planet X, and Castle Barataria, home of Ozymandias. After replenishing a few hit points, ducking through Kueen Susan's Room (ow again) through the jail (why is the jail right off of the queen's room?), I managed to find my way to Father Antos in the castle's chapel, who gave me his blessing and the exhortation to return and claim the Ring. Which I shall do next session, after making my final preparations to face Minax herself.

A camp run by orcs? Think I'll pass.

That covered my progress for the day - I actually think this was one of my favorite days playing Ultima II! I wish more had been done with space, either making it a bit easier to get there and eliminating some of the grind-slash-busy work in building a character up to the point where it's actually feasible to steal a rocket to explore, or having a bit more than just a lot of extra space with the occasional single dungeon or town to poke one's head into. It was nice having a few more maps to explore, something apart from the areas I'd become far too familiar with from seeking monsters to kill for cash. Much of it served little to no purpose as far as the overarching plot/goals of the game went, but it was good to have a little change of pace. I'm glad I took the time to explore this time around.

There isn't much left to do in the game, so I should be able to strike down the sorceress in my next session - my own revenge against the enchantress is close at hand!

Will do, Father.

Ultima II: Guarded Thoughts

It's been approximately two months since I last documented one of Aric's ventures through the varied worlds of Ultima - I suspect Minax is beginning to get impatient. Once again life decided to slam me all at once (this time with work/moving-related issues), but I'm still here and rarin' to get back to the journey.

I did have some opportunity for a play session during the down-time, but I'll be relying more on my notes rather than fresh memories for this particular record, as there's been a decent amount of intervening time between session and blog post. This ought to be interesting!

The Midwest gets overrun...

It does strike me, however, how... forgettable a lot of Ultima II seems to be. I think a lot of it has to do with how insanely grindy that it feels, and how... well, empty and superfluous the world as a whole feels. I haven't made my way into space yet (that's the plan for the next play session, at the very least), but there's a lot of empty space that doesn't feel like it has much purpose other than to just Be There. I mean, we get to see Earth in four distinct time periods, but beyond a settlement or two and a handful of dungeons that need a fair amount of equipment to really poke around, there's... not really that much. And even those towns don't really have all that much to them once you've found the handful of citizens that say something unique, most of which are closer to in-jokes and pop culture references than actually relevant to the game. I'll go into more detail on this in my closing thoughts (note to self), but Ultima I felt more streamlined, and it's not just because of the fact I was playing a remake. Ultima II's kind of the transition between the dungeon crawl of Ultima I and the sense of a living, breathing world with a story that Ultima III kicked off, and it puts it in kind of a unique position.

Man that's pricey.

We're here for the continuing story of Aric at the moment, though! I mentioned in my last post my belief that the moment the game opens up is the moment the player obtains his first ship. It serves as a fine first goal (beyond survival, that is) for a new game of Ultima II, but it's only a first step. Defeating guards is the only way to get keys, which are a necessary item in that necessary vehicles are behind locked doors. That being the case, my goal for this particular play session was to build Aric up to the point where he could take on a guard and come out of the fight in reasonable shape. Can't get to space without unlocking a few doors!

Of course, doing practically anything in Ultima II involves scads of gold, which means slaying a whole bunch of monsters, so of course I went sailing around the world again in order to find baddies to beat. I was amused by the veritable deluges of monsters that politely lined up to get smacked around one at a time by either my cannons or my weapons.

All of my new toys!

There were three things I needed to see to in order to ensure I could take down a guard and live to tell the tale - better stats, better weaponry, and better armor. Stats took precedence, and there was a lot of running back and forth into New San Antonio and the Hotel California to bump my stats up to the 40s-50s range. That done, I turned my sights toward a new weapon and a new set of armor - which turned out to be rather expensive, and that was with fair-to-middlin' charisma! Still, enough time gave me enough money (and a fair few more levels - I know I said this before, but what's the point to keeping track of levels if they don't do anything?) to pick up a shiny new phaser and reflect armor!

Yes, that gold and experience is from a guard. One down...

Since I was spending most of my time in that time period anyway, I meandered over to Port Boniface to test out my new toys and see if I could slap a guard silly. I felt a little weird doing so, especially as a cleric - I suppose this is part of what makes Ultima IV so poignant, the Stranger ended up doing a lot of questionable things before he became the Avatar, didn't he. I can't count how much food I've stolen throughout the course of this game, and my guard killcount tally is starting to spike. (Where do they find guards in Sosaria, anyway? Can't be a pleasant job, standing around saying the same thing over and over until some adventurer shivs you for a few keys. Although apparently you don't need much more the UG, ME TOUGH.)

I survived the encounter little worse for the wear, so slapped a second guard around too. Now I finally have the keys I need to progress further! I spent a while going in and out of the city to smack the guards' new replacements, so I could build up a good stockpile of keys. Now that those are in my pocket, I can poke around town a little further, and most importantly, turn my sights toward space!

That's what my next goal is, and hopefully it won't take a few months to get there...