In both senses of the word. After Cate’s timely death on the road I feel rather disconnected from Ultima VII. My initial wonder at the astonishing amount of detail present in the game has rapidly given way to an encroaching sense of ennui at the UI and the fact that that detail makes performing even simple tasks a chore.

Take feeding the party, for example. To do this I have to

• Double click on Cate to open her character sheet.
• Move the character sheet somewhere where it won’t be blocking my view of Iolo.
• Double click on Iolo.
• Move Iolo’s character sheet somewhere where it won’t be blocking my view of the party.
• Double click on his bag.
• Move the bag window somewhere where it won’t be blocking my view of the party.
• For every party member present, double click on a piece of food in Iolo’s bag and then on the party member.
• Close all the open windows.

And feeding is something that has to be done roughly every twenty minutes. Even Dwarf Fortress doesn’t require you to micro-manage your dwarves eating habits (although you’ll probably end up doing it anyway). Another item on my long laundry list of complaints is the game world being pitch black at night time – which, bizarrely, includes character sheets and inventories so I really had to squint to see what’s in there. It pretty much makes the game unplayable, so I wandered off to try and find an inn to sleep the night away only to discover that the inn was shut. Shut. It’s like the first rule of RPG 101 is that inns never, ever shut, yet shut it was and I was out of luck.

Blundering back up the road to try and find one that was open, I was waylaid by another band of brigands. Spark exploded in a shower of gore while I desperately tried to double-click on Cate so that I could activate the combat AI. I misclicked. Cate started a conversation with Sentri while Shamino’s head was hacked from his shoulders. Frantically hammering “Bye!”, she then watched as Iolo had three feet of solid steel rammed down his gullet and stood there impotently while the two robbers slowly beat her to death with the flats of their swords. It seems pacifism isn’t a viable strategy when facing Ultima VII’s criminal element.

But as we’ve seen even death is no release for the Avatar and Cate woke up hale and hearty back in the Fellowship stronghold, her companions – whom she’d last seen watering the grass of Britannia with their various vital fluids – mysteriously restored to her side. Everyone has a good chuckle. Ho ho ho, Avatar! You do get yourself into some hilarious scrapes! Don’t worry about bad guys mashing you into a bloody paste, we’ll be right along to scrape your remains off of the road and you’ll be wrestling with the unwieldy movement system again in no time!

This, as far as I am concerned, is the last straw. I’m not having fun with Ultima any more. I don’t want to load it up because I know it’ll mean another episode like the time I spent five minutes trying to drop a dagger on the floor (no, Avatar, not there! That’s too far away! And that’s too close! And there? Iolo’s standing there, so no dice!) It’s been an interesting experience, but I am now very much aware that while the rich, textured world of Ultima is a lost relic from a bygone age, so is the gameplay. I enjoyed talking to all the characters, I enjoyed the creepy overtones of the Fellowship and the way they were set up as a pervasive influence in British society, and I even enjoyed some of the in-jokes like the Kilrathi fighter and the Hoe of Destruction. But the barriers the game puts between me and the pursuit of these promising plot threads are just too damn finicky and frustrating, and I can’t be bothered any more. I can certainly see why Ultima gets put on so many RPG Best Of lists – it does things with its world that no modern games even attempt, and exploring it is a refreshing change from the visit-four-areas-and-then-the-final-area trope of the Bioware games. However, based on my experience of playing the damn thing the Best Of list is where it should stay. Like Dwarf Fortress, like innumerable Paradox games, Ultima VII is fun to read about because of the variety/emergent detail its huge world allows – but like Dwarf Fortress, and like innumerable Paradox games, when the time comes to actually play the damn thing I wilt like a whole multitude of thous before the stupidly fiddly and unintuitive UI that detail demands.

So farewell, Britannia. You were beguiling and mysterious to start with, but the sheer amount of red tape the average visitor has to deal with really discourages tourism. I’m sorry to leave you in the hands of the insane dictator that is Lord British, but Cate is going off to find a more interesting and far more rewarding line of work, like invading a third-world country or something.

The post Ultima VII Odyssey: Post-Mortem. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After consulting a walkthrough to find out just where the hell I should be looking for this storeroom, Cate eventually finds the entrance concealed behind a secret door activated by a hidden lever – a hidden lever in a game where pretty much everything can be interacted with in some way. I’ve heard that the designers of Ultima VII loved hiding secrets behind the curious isometric viewpoint they’ve chosen to portray the game, but I wasn’t expecting them to secrete plot-critical items (a spellbook) inside a hidden object puzzle. There is definitely something to be said for the last two decades of progress in this regard.

After wandering through the castle’s secret passages for a while Cate comes across the secret dungeon where political prisoners are locked up by Lord British. This man, for example, has been imprisoned for stealing an apple from the Royal Orchards to feed his starving family – and even he is so brainwashed by British’s regime that he’s convinced Dear Leader has no idea he’s up here and that he’d reverse this travesty of justice if only he knew about it. Really? A man who had a life-sized statue of himself installed as the centrepiece to Britain’s museum? Honestly, it’s like a peasant in the gulag asking Stalin for clemency.

Cate eventually locates the storeroom and spends a tedious ten minutes hunting through all the junk items in her backpack to try to uncover the key. After this I vow to keep my party inventory in slightly better order and dump all the pointless documents I’ve been given on Spark and – with some misgivings – hand off the party’s food supplies to Iolo. With the aid of some more bags to further organise things I should be able to cut inventory-rummaging times down to a mere minute or two of battling the horrible UI. Cate swipes a pretty natty pair of magic boots and a new shield, and then leaves the castle to try and find this boat Lord British said he’d given her. It is at this point that I realise I have no idea where the docks are. Perhaps this sign post will have answers?

Oh, thanks very much, Origin. Writing all the signs in this bizarre fantasy rune-language may be thematically consistent but it’s not particularly helpful. Cate finds a number of things whilst blundering around Britain trying to find the docks: a museum with a Cate exhibit, a very bad injoke referencing the Wing Commander series (also by Origin) and this lecherous piano player called Shamino, who promptly attaches himself to the party. And when she does finally locate the docks, the shipwright she’s supposed to isn’t even there since it’s late evening by this point and he’s buggered off to do something far more interesting than wait around for errant PCs.

Taking a cue from the shipwright, Cate also heads off to do something more interesting. I have her wait around on the road outside Britain and then, when an hapless wayfarer happens along, I activate the combat AI for Iolo, Shamino and Spark.

The wayfarer is dead less than two seconds later without Cate even having to lift a finger – and to think I was worried that combat in this game would be overly complex! After stripping the corpse of his shiny chainmail armour Cate continues on down the road to hunt for some more victi- I mean, “bandits”. Unfortunately her life of crime comes to a premature end; the blood-crazed pack of NPC characters is let off the leash once again but before they can make contact the screen flashes red once, twice, and then fades to black. Guess I should probably have looked up how to get the Avatar to fight rather than having my party do everything for me. Oh well, I suppose that’s the end of Cate’s story. Nothing more to see he-

Wait a minute, she’s still alive? And not only that, she’s been abducted and taken to Minoc by the very people she was hunting: the foul murderers Elizabeth and Abraham! Oh, they say they found her bleeding out on the road and brought her here to recuperate, but this is just a ploy meant to lull her into a false sense of security. The moment her back is turned she’ll find herself staked out on the floor and cut into parts just like that poor blacksmith. As and when Cate finds Elizabeth and Abraham she’s going to have to pre-emptively do unto others before she’s done unto herself.

The post Ultima VII Odyssey: Stand And Deliver! appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Never have I been so disappointed on entering a building as I was when Cate went inside the National Branch. Rather than a bank filled with all sorts of stealable valuables, it turns out instead to be Scientology Central where the head of the Fellowship, Batlin, lives.

Talking to him is predictably boring, but Cate does get one useful bit of information: Elizabeth and Abraham, two cultists – can I call them cultists yet? – who deal with the organisation’s money and who were up to entirely unsuspicious activities in Trinsic the night before the murder, have passed through Britain en route to somewhere else called Minoc. Next stop Minoc then, I guess.

But of course Cate isn’t going to leave Britain without visiting some of the tacky tourist traps every capital city sets up to part the unwary visitor from their cash. This fake plastic castle, for example, which is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see in the Medieval quarter of your favourite run-down theme park.

Cate chats to some of the staff, who are either paid actors or else are doing an astonishingly good job of impersonating a startlingly inbred family of servants. Communism always seems like such a good idea until you actually meet the proletariat, after which the petit bourgeoisie suddenly doesn’t seem that bad. There’s also a few bright-red gargoyles who seem to function as this subhuman caste of untouchables, proving that Britannia is in fact an awful imperialist dystopia.

And at its head Cate finds the culprit; the cause of the all the land’s woes; the Richard Garriott self-insert himself: Lord British.

British proceeds to vomit forth so much exposition. A new island has risen to the south, magic is failing, moongates no longer work yadda yadda yadda. He recommends that Cate mingle with the proles in order to find out the cause of these unexplained phenomena, Lord British apparently being too good to do it himself. He also gives Cate a boat, much in the same way a corrupt Russian oil oligarch would give his favourite dog a yacht. But I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s talk about the horrible Mary-Sue fantasy that is Ultima’s backstory instead.

Lord British, Iolo and the rest of the ruling class aren’t Britannia natives. They travelled to Britannia years ago along with the Avatar, found they had acquired superpowers – i.e. magic – and then promptly took the place over. They all seemed to acquire astonishing longevity to boot; it’s been two hundred years in Britannia time since Cate last visited and everyone is still alive, although some of this little band of would-be kings seem to age faster than others. Lord British in particular hasn’t aged a day, making him in effect the immortal god-king of Britannia. So you’ve got this situation where a group of white men from an advanced civilization travelled to a backwards, superstitious land and used their advanced knowledge and innate betterness to set themselves up as gods. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Wait no, I mean this:

Eurgh. I can only hope that Lord British and the rest of his cronies get the gruesome comeuppance they so richly deserve. Happily he has left plans for ending his reign just lying around his castle, so hopefully I’ll get to put them into effect at some point.

Lord British’s dickishness does not stop at third-world dictatorship; not by a long shot. He tells Cate he has a cache of her old equipment hidden somewhere in his fake Disney World castle, but that Cate has to find it herself as part of a “game”. I then spend the next half hour dragging Cate around the castle in an increasingly desperate and frustrated attempt to find this secret storeroom. Ha ha ha, Lord British! You’re such a hoot! Hope you’ll still be smiling when the peasant’s revolution storms these flimsy fibreglass ramparts and sticks your head on a spike over the gate.

Just before I give up and shut the game down in disgust, Cate meets the first likeable character in Britannia so far.

Two decades later and her work is not yet done.

The post Ultima VII Odyssey: The Revolution Starts Here. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After being harangued by the Voice of God for taking the wrong exit out of Trinsic, I get Cate’s map of Britannia out to try and find out where she should be going. The map isn’t immediately helpful but, operating on the assumptions that the big built up area is Britain, that it’s reachable without having to get on a boat, and that Trinsic doesn’t appear to be in the middle of the desert, I conclude that she is currently somewhere to the south of Britain and that she should start heading northwards. This is a skill called orienteering long thought lost in this age of dynamic map markers and fast travel.

Unfortunately by the time I’ve figured this out the sun has started to set, and unlike most games I discover that you cannot see a goddamn thing at nighttime in Ultima VII. To make matters worse Iolo and Spark are both constantly complaining that they’re hungry. After some fiddling I manage to get Iolo’s inventory open to see if he’s got any food on him.

MOTHER OF GOD. Those are the creepiest eyes I have ever seen. Or maybe it’s just the way I have the two equipment screens arranged so that he appears to be making a squicky come-hither expression at Cate. Whatever. The inventory system in Ultima VII is quite comically bad in that it functions exactly like a real bag: fill it with too much stuff and you have to go digging through it to uncover whatever’s languishing at the bottom. After some preliminary excavations Iolo turns out to have some mutton and a loaf of bread, while Spark is carting around some grapes and sausages. I shove the meat-based products down their gullets before heading to the local inn to stock up on provisions. The innkeeper sells food as expected but attempts to gouge me horribly on the local delicacy. Cate does not fall for her ploy and instead buy fives legs of mutton at three gold each. We’re on a budget here, people.

Sadly she is unable to avoid forking out twenty more gold pieces for a room for the night as I don’t really want her to be blundering around in the dark with only a creepy old man and a street urchin for company, and I also want to see what the shops of Trinsic have to offer now that Cate’s actually got some money to spend. Iolo promises to watch Cate while she sleeps, which does no favours for his creepiness factor. In the morning I am somewhat dismayed to learn that the shops sell equipment which is no better than what Cate & co. stole from the various houses around Trinsic. It seems there’s nothing else to spend my vast fortune on except more combat training. That is, until I talk to the stablekeeper.

Who sells me a horse. A horse. It’s barely quicker than walking but who cares, I’m on a horse. This is travelling in style.

Leaving Trinsic from the north gate this time, and the Voice seems pleased. “YES, AVATAR, THAT IS THE PROPER DIRECTION!” it booms. You just wait till I find you, pushy narrator guy. We’ll see if you can still offer patronising commentary with a dagger rammed down your gullet. A couple of minutes hard riding brings Cate to what I assume is Britain from the way a very tinny rendition of “Rule Brittania” starts playing as soon as she enters the city limits.

Iolo and Spark immediately start grumbling that they’re hungry again after going all of six hours without food. Honestly, they’re worse than my cats; I’m starting to dislike the game for lumbering me with an old man and a small child as my first companions. Cate shows them some tough love by keeping a tight grip on the party’s food supply, and the group starts casting around in search of the two murderers from Trinsic. First stop, something called the “National Branch”. Sounds like a bank. If we don’t find the murderers in here we can at least rob the place, I guess.

Everyone remember where we parked!

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For a game set in a pastoral medieval fantasy idyll Ultima VII sure doesn’t pull any punches. Cate the Avatar travels to Britannia from our world (long story, best not to think about how stupid it is) and immediately upon popping out of the dimensional portal is accosted by some guy called Iolo, who apparently knows her of old. Iolo is talking to a cringing, cap-wringing peasant about a gruesome murder that has taken place in the stables. Ha, “gruesome”. This is a 1992 game and everything is so clean and pleasant! What could possibly qualify as gruesome in a place like thi-

Oh.

I have to say I wasn’t exactly expecting the game to start off with Cate being tasked by the town mayor of Trinsic to investigate a horrific ritual double murder – the guy staked out on the floor is Christopher, the town blacksmith, while a gargoyle called Inamo has been affixed to the back wall of the stables by way of a pitchfork inserted through his thorax. The only clue to be found at the crime scene is a key lying next to the body. Since he’s a massive cock the mayor won’t even give Cate the password to leave the town until she turns up some evidence as to who did it. This involves wandering around town talking to all and sundry about their names, occupations, Trinsic, dismembered corpses and the weather.

Sarcasm aside, this is actually a fairly neat way of letting the player learn the game in a safe environment — there is nothing which threatens them in Trinsic, and they cannot leave until they’ve completed the murder investigation, so they’re free to wander around getting to grips with the control system (and boy does it need some grip) and getting their first introduction to the game world. Cate visits shops and inns, does a little combat training, and then goes into the church-like structure in the centre of town.

Which is where she finds the first hint that Ultima VII might actually deviate from the usual RPG plot tropes we’ve become accustomed to after thirteen years of Bioware games. The church is the local headquarters of an organisation called the Fellowship. On the surface they’ve got this pleasant, saccharine façade, but also they have this definite creepy, Scientology-esque cult undertone. The Fellowship seems to be very, very entrenched in Brittania society with many of the ordinary townsfolk also being members — including Christopher, the murder victim. All of a sudden the ritual nature of the killing is starting to make a lot more sense, especially since the one useful piece of information Cate gets out of the Fellowship representatives is that Christopher had a falling out with the Fellowship shortly before his death.

Long story short, Cate solves the mystery of who did it by talking to the blacksmith’s son, who says he had a dream about a man with a hook for a hand and a gargoyle without wings fleeing the scene.  Dreams apparently having the same provenence as CCTV evidence in Britannia, Cate makes her report to the mayor, who continues in his cockitude by asking Cate a bunch of copy protection questions that I’d normally have to sift through the manual for. Happily GoG have thoughtfully included a .pdf file with the game download that has all the answers, and the mayor rewards Cate with one! hundred! gold pieces. I’m not sure if it’s the currency inflation seen so often in modern games, but that doesn’t seem like a very large quantity of money. The mayor promises another one! hundred! gold pieces (yippee) once she’s tracked down the murderers (who have fled to Britain, the capital city) and gives her the password she needs to get past the guards and out of this rural hell-hole.

I suppose it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Cate’s meanderings around Trinsic allowed her to steal literally everything that wasn’t nailed down without any complaints from the townsfolk, with the sole exception being when she tried to pilfer a cake from one of the houses. A disembodied voice boomed out “THOU SHOULD NOT BE DOING THAT, AVATAR!” Cate ate the cake anyway. Now, as Cate attempts to leave Trinsic by the south gate the same disembodied voice speaks once again.

“THOU ART GOING THE WRONG WAY, AVATAR!”

I hate backseat drivers.

The post Ultima VII Odyssey: Whodunnit? appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is the beginning of (hopefully) a series of posts that detail my experiences with an RPG I have often heard praised but never played: Ultima VII.

One of the hazards of playing older games is that you tend to run into paleolithic design elements that have, for better or worse, disappeared as games have become increasingly streamlined and user-friendly. To our modern gamer sensibilities, coddled as they are by elaborate in-game tutorials that hold our hands as they teach us to play the game — often infuriatingly integrated into the first half-hour of the campaign so that we are unable to avoid them — these design elements can often seem bizarre and unreasonable. We are no longer expected to Read The Manual; instead, a game should set the barrier to entry as low as it can in order to include as many people as possible. And if that results in the loss of some nuance and complexity from the overall design of the game, then so be it.

As a result, carrying out the videogame equivalent of archaeology can end up being a rather trying experience for any would-be Joneses.  Not only do they have to learn the game in the same way as a contemporary player, but they’re also operating under a completely different paradigm. Games have moved on since then and anyone climbing into the time machine is likely to suffer from culture shock. Getting over that shock can be pretty difficult, sometimes. For some people it’s insurmountable and can lead to them wondering why on earth game X is regarded as such a classic. For the rest of us, it’s something we learn to live with.

I like to think that for someone whose family didn’t even own a PC until 1996 (my parents preferred Acorn computers for some reason), I have a reasonably high tolerance for games released before then. Back around 2003-04 I was suffering from a distinct lack of money combined with abundant free time, and so I resorted to trawling abandonware sites for my gaming kicks. I experienced the cliff-like difficulty of Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space, the sprawling complexity of Emperor of Fading Suns, the incredibly primitive Windows graphics of Pirates! Gold, and in each of these cases I managed to make it past their various gameplay foibles to uncover the classic lurking beneath. I even got into Darklands for a time, a game with a stat screen that looks like a multinational corporation’s end of year financial return. I mention all this as a way as emphasising that when it comes to old games I’m fairly accomplished at putting up with hundred-plus page manuals, crappy UIs and dated control mechanisms. But in that two year period I never experienced anything like Ultima VII.

Ah, Ultima VII. It’s a game I have oft heard mentioned as one of the great classics of the RPG genre, but which Home of the Underdogs¹ didn’t have in its database at the time I was carrying out my little expedition into gaming’s past. I always thought this was a shame, since a sprawling open world RPG with an insane level of interactivity is the sort of thing that would have been right up my alley. I mean just listen to this:

The gameworld of both games is renowned for its interactivity: virtually everything not nailed to the ground (and not excessively heavy) can be moved, taken, or interacted with in some fashion. It is possible, for instance, to bake bread, to forge weapons, to milk cows, to play musical instruments, and even to change a baby’s swaddling. The Avatar and his companions will complain of hunger pains and severe thirst, and will even die if these matters are not attended to eventually. If they come across a disgusting or gruesome scene, they may groan and vomit; strong alcoholic beverages may also induce vomiting.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to play an RPG that let me change a baby’s nappy for no reason other than “Because I can”. So I was very happy when Good Old Games announced last year that they’d acquired the rights to some of the old Origin Software games; games which you could not find for love nor money on abandonware sites back in the day. They started out with Privateer and some of the earlier Ultima games, but I knew that if I waited long enough Ultima VII would crop up on their store page somewhere. And at the end of November my patience was rewarded.

It’s only now that I’ve gotten around to playing it, though, and after dabbling in it for thirty minutes I have discovered something that none of the glowing, nostalgia-laden reviews ever bothered to mention: Ultima VII features the control system from Hell. It’s the sort of control system that would count as revolutionary design when the game was released two decades ago, but since nobody bothered to continue the revolution it’s faded into history as one of gaming’s bizarre curios. The problem isn’t that Ultima VII has a bad UI with confusing buttons like so many older games. No, the problem is that Ultima VII doesn’t have a UI at all.

Everything in Ultima VII can be done via the mouse. Right clicking once moves the Avatar one pace. Right clicking twice causes the Avatar to path to the point where you clicked. Right clicking and dragging (what) moves the Avatar towards the mouse pointer. Left clicking examines an object. Double left clicking interacts with it. Left clicking and dragging picks the item up. Dropping the item on the Avatar moves it to their inventory. Since there’s no UI, how is the inventory accessed? Well, you double left click on the Avatar and a stats screen will pop up through which the inventory can be opened.

But wait. That’s an awful lot of actions to load onto a two-button interface. What if the Avatar is standing next to a door they want to open (by double left clicking) and the player accidentally clicks on the Avatar instead? The stats screen pops open and my blood pressure starts to rise. Same goes for when one of the companions who is constantly trailing the avatar — or even a random passer-by — wanders too close to whatever you’re trying to interact with. Trying to remember all the commands in-game is more than a little confusing, especially when the mouse pointer features no context-sensitive icons and isn’t all that discerning about what it thinks you want to click on. And I haven’t even gotten to the point of having to fight a combat yet, when I’ll have to do all this stuff under pressure. If Origin hadn’t included keyboard shortcuts for some of the actions I think this mouse-based control system would have been like that giant icy wall in HBO’s A Game Of Thrones — dauntingly huge and nigh-on impossible to scale. As it is I think it’s going to take a good couple of hours to get used to a control system that might as well have come from Mars².

The good news is that the rest of the game seems to be exactly as advertised — vast, organic and utterly at the player’s mercy. I spent a few minutes last night just marvelling at the fact that every single NPC had about a dozen conversation topics with unique dialogue for all of them. There’s even a hilariously primitive dynamic weather system which is nonetheless impressive for 1992.  So it looks like Ultima VII may be well worth spending an hour or two clambering over this wall for. I just wish it wasn’t there in the first place, is all.

1. Experimental footnote system go! I could write a whole post about Home of the Underdogs, but these days it’s a sad shadow of its former self. Good Old Games is doing a very good job of offering many of the games that used to be on HOTU’s database for bargain prices, and if you really want to dip your toe into the legal grey area that is the abandonware scene then Abandonia is probably your best shot.
2. If nothing else it’s a good window into what goes on in the head of a non-gamer when they try to play an FPS or a strategy game for the first time, and I promise I’ll be more patient with those people from now on.

The post Ultima VII Odyssey: The Wall. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.