Silellak said:
...at least, according to a classroom full of 19 year olds:
http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/09/unplayable.html
Here's a sampling of posts from the forum I set up to facilitate out-of-class discussion of the game:
I've been very confused throughout the entire experience. I've honestly sat here for hours trying to figure out what to do and it just isn't making much sense to me right now.
When I start a game I like to do it all on my own, but it's been impossible to do so with Ultima. I've asked friends for help, looked up FAQs/walkthroughs, and even searched for Let's Play Ultima 4 on youtube and am still uncertain as to how to get further in this game.
Yeah, I still have no idea what the main goal is. I suppose it's to basically find out what the purpose of the Ankh is. But I see no way of furthering that goal.
I tried for awhile without any walkthroughs to get the full gamer experience sort thing and within the hour I gave up because of a combination of bad controls and a hard to get into story for me at least. It reminded me of a bad runescape.
i dont quite understand the concept of the game. i believe my main confusion is the controls and how it displays what you have done and how you moved. im not used to rpg's and i dont like them to much. i hope to find out how to move forward,but so far no luck.
How the hell do I get out of here after I die?
I had supplied them with the Book of Mystic Wisdom and the History of Britannia, both in PDF form, but not a single student bothered to read them. "I thought that was just stuff they put in the box with the game," said one student. "Yes," I replied, "They put it in there because they expected you to read it." "Wow," he responded.
Ultima IV is unplayable to a modern audience and the article perfectly explains why.
Ultima catered to a completely different skill and knowledge set- not that new gamers/players don't have the ability to learn (are they learning animals?)- and required that you understand something above the previous games in the Ultima series and the mechanics of early 90s era gaming in general.
I started gaming at an early age (roughly 6-7 years old on a Commodore 64 and then a basic Windows 3.1 PC with the old Apogee games) and quickly built up the physical dexterity (fast typing, mouse skills) and mental acumen to play computer games. In the very earliest years I played side-scrollers like Duke Nukem and Hocus Pocus, later it was games like Pagan Ultima VIII (I lived in a country where gaming was not yet entrenched) and Wing Commander.
The average person playing games today will have been introduced to them via the medium of the Playstation (mid-90s release) or XBox (not to mention possibly early NES or Sega Megadrive systems but that's likely rare as we get older) and will have neither the patience nor the necessary skills to play older PC games.
Take for example the old console generation titles such as those developed for Sega- Battle Toads. Battle Toads was a game which was not meant to be finished by any but the most dedicated (read- obsessive) players. This is the paradigm of most console gaming. Console games are easily consumable but not meant to be consumed as totalities. Players play them until they get bored with a certain amount of content and move on, only fans of the series and more hardcore players ever finish them.
PC games, cRPGs etc have always been designed from both a mechanical and story perspective to be consumed as a holistic experience. Of course this depends on the genre but in terms of the RPG it is designed to be played from beginning to end; unlike most console games. As PC games are ported to console and vice versa we find the console mindset continues to exist and is even more prevalent than in the old days (see recent stats on Mass Effect 2 completion rates released by Bioware)- players do not finish games, least of all on the console.
So enter Ultima IV and the modern generation of gamers. These are gamers who have been brought up on games designed not to be finsihed, but consumed and discarded quickly; they have not experienced the mechanics of early era games-
and to make another quick point:
Older games often included content in manuals because of space constraints of old pcs. This made the manuals and extras included in the box (cloth maps in lieu of in-game maps) required reading to complete the game. Nowadays with dvds holding so much data the in-box goodies have become superfluous kitsch with no application to the game.
So because they do not understand the way the mechanics work; understand how the manuals/maps worked for old games; understand games which are made to be played for 100s of hours over a long period of time by a niche market of people (and let's face it we were always a niche market in the early days) they see the games as unplayable.
