Ultima IV: Quest For The Avatar, let’s talk about that. In this short analysis essay, I will be telling you a little a game called Ultima IV. I will be telling you about the history of the game, a little bit about the impact that it had on the game industry and what happened with my own personal experience with the game.
Ultima IV is a role-playing game that was originally released for the Apple II in the year 1985 and is the first in the “Age of Enlightenment” trilogy. This game represented a change in how the Ultima series o game would be approached. The game moved from the hack and slash dungeon gameplay of its predecessors, to a story driven approach. This is not the only change that Ultima IV made from the earlier releases of this franchise, they also made a drastic change in the size of the game and unlike modern developers that boast a map change of four times when it has barely changed at all, Ultima IV is genuinely sixteen times larger than Ultima III. Ultima IV was designed by Richard Garriott who has worked on every Ultima game from Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness in 1981 to Ultima IX: Ascension in 1999. He has gone on record saying that Ultima IV was his favorite game to work on. The music in Ultima IV was composed by Kenneth W. Arnold who was one of the developers of the 1980’s rouge. In Ultima IV you play as a character who you create through picking a card out of a set of two that a gypsy would set in front of you and ask you an ethical question in a scenario with two options, each card representing one of the two options you have to choose. As you choose these cards you are deciding the traits that your character will have and the class that you are. There are three separate classes that your character will become, one is a bard which you become by showing compassion in your choices. Another one is the Paladin, which you become by showing honor through your cards. And yet the final one is a tinker which you get by showing the traits of sacrifice through your choice of cards. You come too in a world full of monsters and people. There are towns where you can buy weapons and armor. There is no great evil that you must overcome for the world like most other RPGs but your goal is to instead do good and just work your way to becoming the best you can.
My experience with the game was a little weird. Starting off I could get any version of the game to work on the website. I spent an hour or so trying to get the game to work and it never did. So I moved on to trying to find another free version of it to download, which I did. But the first download I found didn’t work either. So I had to create an on a gog.com, Then I had to download their launcher and then I could finally download the game and it worked. I got into the game and made m card choices and I ended up being a bard, which is a little awkward because you wouldn’t think that being a bad would be the way to go for fighting monsters. I spent about four hours playing through the game and never beat it. I don’t know if it was a glitch or if there was something I was supposed to do, but every half hour my character would just die randomly. And Before all this I had trouble with figuring out the controls. That seems to be a common problem with a lot of these older games. If they would tell you the controls beforehand I would probably enjoy them a lot more.
In conclusion, Ultima IV is a great and fun game, I enjoyed my time in it. And while I don’t agree with the common sentiment that it’s the best RPG of all time. I do think it is fun and if it were to be remade using a lot of things that they didn’t have back and made use of a better story, then I think that it would actually have a great reason to be considered the best RPG of all time.
