Watching Noah Antwiller almost cry on his review of Ultima 9, I was actually really moved Options

[Wounded Ronin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym6PBz7tKO4

So that's part 3 of Noah Antwiller's review of Ultima 9. I hadn't played Ultima 9 and had no idea how bad it was. I was very entertained and basically ended up listening to him for like 2 hours today in the background while I worked on other stuff.

The bottom line is in this, the part 3, he almost cries because he recounts how Ultima had been part of his childhood and how profoundly disappointed he'd been by Ultima 9 pissing all over it.

I know that Richard Garriot has long since moved on; last I heard he was into space flight or something. But Noah's thing is so heartfelt I kind of wish that Garriot would see it.

Well, I guess now I know why Noah seems like a pretty angry guy.

For fear of not sounding sufficiently ruggedly masculine and stoic, I felt a bit like I wanted to give him a hug.

[Wounded Ronin]

So, I've been thinking about this overnight. Besides for humanizing (for me) people who get extremely upset over a disappointing game (i.e. in the case of Noah it's tied up with his childhood memories of his brother), it has caused me to consider the philosophy outlined in the Ultima games and what if any implications there are for Garriot's changing world view based on the discordant natures of Ultima 8 and 9. After all, Garriot obviously put a lot of love and thought into the Ultima series up till 8 and 9, including a lot of development on his philosophy of virtue.

I will cite Steve Pavlina's essay, "The Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live", to summarize the ethics of Ultima.

After I reached adulthood and began seriously pondering the question of how to live, the first major stopping point was essentially where Aristotle left off. In my early and mid-20s, I spent a lot of time working on living virtuously. I saw living the best possible life as becoming a person of virtue: to live with honor, integrity, courage, compassion, etc. I listed out the virtues I wanted to attain and even set about inventing exercises to help myself develop them. Benjamin Franklin did something very similar, as I read in his autobiography, and each week he chose to focus on one particular virtue in order to develop his character.

Oddly, there was a particular computer game I absolutely fell in love with during this time — Ultima IV. To date I would have to say it is still my favorite game of all time. In this role-playing game you are the Avatar, a seeker of truth, and your goal is not to destroy some enemy but rather to attain what is called the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. In order to achieve this goal, you must develop your character in the eight virtues. All of these virtues derive from the eight possible combinations of truth, love, and courage as follows:

Truth = Honesty
Love = Compassion
Courage = Valor
Truth + Love = Justice
Truth + Courage = Honor
Love + Courage = Sacrifice
Truth + Love + Courage = Spirituality
The absence of Truth, Love, and Courage is Pride, the opposite of which is Humility.

I found this system of virtues absolutely brilliant, especially coming from a game. Years later when I finally met Richard Garriott, designer of the Ultima series, at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3), I asked him how he came up with this system and how he ended up choosing these virtues. He told me it started with brainstorming a long list and noticing patterns in how the virtues related to each other.

As strange as it is that I got these insights from a game, I still think of living virtuously in much the same way today, where these eight virtues come about through the overlapping sets of truth, love, and courage. For the combination of all three virtues though, I feel that “integrity” is a better fit than “spirituality.” Ultima V went on to explore the opposite of these, the vices which can be derived from falsehood, hatred, and cowardice. Unfortunately I feel the Ultima series really went downhill since then and completely lost its soul — I would have loved to have seen the virtue idea taken even farther.

So there you have it, Ultima punks Aristotle.


Anyway, seeing as Ultima 8 basically puts you into a gothic world of nightmare and forces you to more or less do morally questionable things, I wonder if Garriot had changed his ideas about the virtues articulated in the earlier games. Did he get depressed and nihilistic because of EA and not just care anymore? Did he, in his older age, formulate some objection to the concept of these virtues, believing instead that some form of pragmatism was the best way to have a positive impact on the world?

Or, having spent a huge chunk of his life thinking of Ultima, was he simply ready to move on? Maybe he was tired of working on something that represented an earlier stage of his life and just wanted to wrap it up, except the wrap-up was basically compromised by EA. I think I'd read elsewhere that The Guardian basically came to represent EA in the Ultima games.

(I remember the days when EA released quality games, like Strike Fleet and SEAL Team).

Or did Garriot finally achieve some kind of great non-dualistic breakthrough in his philosophy and ethics? After all many so-called mystical religions, as well as Western philosophers writing about dialectics, and even (at least according to Joseph Campbell) some of the Arthurian legends deal with non-dualism. Maybe in the end Garriot decided focusing on dualism (virtue and vice) was ultimately limited; that by thinking in this way you hit an eventual immovable ethical or philosophical road block that can only be overcome through nondualism, which explains the ending to Ultima 9.

A final note, I just looked up Richard Garriot on Wikipedia and found out that his current project is an Ultima game. "Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtue". Hmm, interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_the...orsaken_Virtues

EDIT:

Ah hah: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portal...saken-virtues-0

[Blade]

Ultima IX wasn't a bad game.
In the US, it was released in a horrible state, but here in Europe it was released fully patched and was complete and stable.

It had great dungeons, with nice puzzles, a pretty good combat and magic system, and the exploration aspect was there as well. The story was a bit simple, but if you consider it as a standalone game, it's not worse than most CRPG stories.

If you consider it as a part of the Ultima saga, the real problem it had was that it broke the continuity in several places, and that it wasn't as rich as Ultima 7. But I think it mostly troubled people because it was buggy, because it wasn't Ultima 7 and because of nostalgia.

The first three Ultima aren't very complex and interesting games. Many people forget that in the first you went to space to save some space princess. They were mostly about killing monsters for a very very very long time until you got enough XP to get to the next stage of the game.
Ultima 4 brought the Virtues. They're interesting, but their impact on gameplay was just that instead of killing monsters for XP, you killed them for "Valor" and that you had to do a few other repetitive tasks in order to max the virtues.

Ultima 5 started to bring a serious backstory, with meaningful interactions with NPC and stuff like that. Ultima 6 pushed it further, and Ultima 7 came with a breathing, living world that few games since then have been able to handle so well. These three had quite good stories, and quite complex themes.

Ultima 8 didn't have such a bad story, it just discarded many of the "living world" aspects of U7, as well as the openness, turning it into an "action-RPG", and that's the reason why it was badly received by the fans (that and the horrible jumping sections, that were fixed by a patch that came far too late).

So I still think that Ultima 8 and Ultima 9 didn't deserve all the criticism they got. They were solid and fun games, and to accuse them of lacking depth compared to Ultima 1 to 5 is misplaced nostalgia. Yes, they weren't as deep as Ultima 7, but nobody has ever been able to top this one anyway.

[Wounded Ronin]

Ultima IX wasn't a bad game.
In the US, it was released in a horrible state, but here in Europe it was released fully patched and was complete and stable.

It had great dungeons, with nice puzzles, a pretty good combat and magic system, and the exploration aspect was there as well. The story was a bit simple, but if you consider it as a standalone game, it's not worse than most CRPG stories.

If you consider it as a part of the Ultima saga, the real problem it had was that it broke the continuity in several places, and that it wasn't as rich as Ultima 7. But I think it mostly troubled people because it was buggy, because it wasn't Ultima 7 and because of nostalgia.

The first three Ultima aren't very complex and interesting games. Many people forget that in the first you went to space to save some space princess. They were mostly about killing monsters for a very very very long time until you got enough XP to get to the next stage of the game.
Ultima 4 brought the Virtues. They're interesting, but their impact on gameplay was just that instead of killing monsters for XP, you killed them for "Valor" and that you had to do a few other repetitive tasks in order to max the virtues.

Ultima 5 started to bring a serious backstory, with meaningful interactions with NPC and stuff like that. Ultima 6 pushed it further, and Ultima 7 came with a breathing, living world that few games since then have been able to handle so well. These three had quite good stories, and quite complex themes.

Ultima 8 didn't have such a bad story, it just discarded many of the "living world" aspects of U7, as well as the openness, turning it into an "action-RPG", and that's the reason why it was badly received by the fans (that and the horrible jumping sections, that were fixed by a patch that came far too late).

So I still think that Ultima 8 and Ultima 9 didn't deserve all the criticism they got. They were solid and fun games, and to accuse them of lacking depth compared to Ultima 1 to 5 is misplaced nostalgia. Yes, they weren't as deep as Ultima 7, but nobody has ever been able to top this one anyway.

You made me buy Ultima 7 on gog.com! I haven't played it before.

[Wounded Ronin]

So I started Ultima 7 and over the course of the week have played for less than an hour.

Can anyone help me out with a couple gameplay points?
1.) How do I access other characters' inventory? I can only figure out how to bring up the Paper Doll for The Avatar and not for Iolo.
2.) Iolo is now complaining that he's hungry. How do I feed him?

Thanks in advance!

I set the Avatar's name to CHUCK NORRIS, which is awesome. When characters talk to him they call him CHUCK NORRIS in capital letters which his just perfect.

[Blade]

I hope you'll enjoy it. Knowing you, I think you will.

1. I don't remember, but it can definitely be done.
2. IIRC you can use a food on him (double click on the food, and then click on Iolo). I think he'll automatically eat if you put the food in his inventory, but I'm not sure. You can also sit at a table in a restaurant, and all your party will order food (and wine).