"Thy Lord mistakenly believes he slew a dragon. Thou hast proof that thy lance felled the beast. When asked, dost thou: A) Honestly claim the kill and the prize? B) Humbly permit thy Lord his belief?"
Few game series have pulled off such a shift in focus, from defeating monsters, like
Exodus, to conducting oneself in a moral and ethical manner. I loved how each of the virtues was interpreted in
Ultima IV, from giving alms to the poor, to letting natural creatures escape from battle.
As Garriott pointed out: "If you fled from a weaker evil that would then prey on some other villager, that was cowardice. But there was no ill will to let a hungry bear live to go hunt rabbits instead of you."
What's fascinating, and troubling thematically, about
Ultima V was that everything good in
IV becomes corrupted through the antagonist Lord Blackthorn's scary absolutism. Blackthorne's Code of Virtue has draconian laws: "Thou shalt help those in need, or thou shalt suffer the same need."
"Thou shalt donate half of thy income to charity, or thou shalt have no income." "Thou shalt not lie, or thou shalt lose thy tongue." There's many lessons that seem all too familiar today with politicians espousing religious texts to justify what seems obviously inhumane.
"
Ultima V was a poke at what I had just created with
Ultima IV," Garriott stated. "It was a time when the 'Moral Majority,' who condemned video games regularly and called people like me 'the devil,' were constantly claiming to be faith healers and bilking people for money, while being caught with mistresses and begging for forgiveness.
I was so incensed with outrage by the hypocrisy created when a supposedly good philosophy is hijacked for personal gain or overrun by extremists and dogma. I have and continue to find that headlines, and especially things that give me a sense of moral outrage happening in the world around me, are the best sources of plot ideas for the games I work on."
Ultima V has many great plot moments and some shocking ones as well. Lord Blackthorn's arc, from trusted friend to the prime villain and then penitent exile, was a moving one. He also executed one of your party members, a sequence that was traumatising for me when I first played it.
"One of the main goals of the second trilogy of
Ultimas was to craft worthy villains," Garriott said of Blackthorne. "To that end they needed to have agency in the world."
Most game villains, he said, just "wait in the final level for you to come kill them," sitting patiently on their thrones while you min-max and level up by killing NPCs. "I wanted my new villains to be worthy of your hatred!"
"Thus, starting as a friend was good, killing a party member, even better. But in the end, I also wanted to show that I really do believe that redemption is possible for pretty much everyone. Not that punishment shouldn't fit the crime.
But, in a game, I wanted to be a bit 'lighter,' in the end," he said.
Gargoyle Ethics
1990's
Ultima VI: The False Prophet turned everything on its head again with the arrival of the seemingly devilish Gargoyles. Their nefarious intent seems all the more apparent when they try to sacrifice the Avatar on an altar. Fortunately, he's rescued by his companions. But, being an
Ultima game, there's much more to the situation than meets the eye. Deep commentary ensues in the game on ethics, race, and morality, especially when you see the events of the world from the Gargoyles' perspective.
"Sadly, I think
Ultima VI is a game that needs to come back out again right about
now," Garriott said. "Just as today, it was a time when affirmative action, and border issues and overseas... issues seemed to be at a peak. Oh, how history seems to repeat itself."
"What I tried to show was that racism is learned and
any of us, myself included, could be, likely have been, maybe still are, harboring some levels of bias or outright racism still within us. We all carry assumptions about things around us about what and how we perceive the world."
The war with the gargoyles upends expectations and biases, especially as the gargoyles have their own sets of virtues that differ from the Avatar. Players learn that the Avatar's past act of taking the Codex of Infinite Wisdom ruined the gargoyle world, resulting in catastrophic destruction. In their eyes, it's the
Avatar who is the villain.
"Far too many perpetual conflicts in the world are sustained generation after generation due to these deeply held beliefs and grudges that prevent any real progress from being made," Garriott said. "Honestly I don't know how we are going to solve this in the real world, but I think it's important to play out in a fictional world, so we think about it."
Evolution of the Avatar
One of the most interesting aspects about
Ultima is how much the moongates and planetary orbits play an important role. His father, Owen Garriott, was a NASA astronaut, and Richard Garriott himself flew aboard the International Space Station in 2008 as a private astronaut. I asked him about the role of space and stars for the series.
"Since reading
The Hobbit as my first bit of fantasy and being so astonished that the runes on the map could really be read
'stand by the grey stone…'," Garriott said, "I became a 'Tolkien style' reality crafter, desiring to create deep backstories and deep reality mechanics behind the worlds I crafted."
"The Ancients on earth realised that seasonal weather was predicted by the movements of the stars and sun and tides by the moon. So it's forgivable they would speculate about much more. I find it compelling to deliver on the truth of that speculation. We need systems to drive the spawns and movements of various system anyway, so why not expose them to the hardcore players who are willing to become the shamen of the new world, those willing to read the runes and study the stars!"
Just as the stars are in flux, Garriott has moved on from the
Ultima series to work on several other games. The latest,
Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, is considered a spiritual successor to the original series.
I asked Garriott about
Shroud, and what he learned from
Ultima in approaching the new game.
Garriott said that when he begins a new game, he usually asks himself two questions: "What is the compelling moral outrage happening in the world these days?" and "What is the technical area we hope to advance this game?"
In answer to the first question, for
Shroud of the Avatar, Garriott says: "Sadly we seem to have gone backwards in my book and tolerance and racism are back on the front burner again." As for the second: "For
SotA we are creating a "selective multiplayer," where the game can throttle from solo to MMO-like states, for storytelling and even offline play."
"Each new game faces new challenges. We toss out failed experiments of the past. Learn from great innovations of our competitors. Plus, of course there is new hardware to master," he said. I asked about some of those failed experiments. "Oh, so many failed experiments," he said.
Our most famous failed experiment was the virtual ecology attempt in
Ultima Online. We had a beautiful plan. Grass would spawn vegetable mass. Herbivores would come and eat it, they would come to steady state. We would spawn carnivores, they would come to steady state with the herbivores and vegetable growth. The team built beautiful code. It worked beautifully. It was a masterpiece! That was until, we invited in the players."
"As soon as players arrived, they killed
all of the herbivores and all of the carnivores as fast as we could spawn them," he said. "It didn't matter how fast we turned up the spawners, nothing existed unadulterated long enough for the system to play out in any way shape or form. Eventually the system was full ripped out of the game. No one ever even noticed the beautiful attempt at virtual ecology."
"
SotA has made far fewer
big failed systems," he said. Since the game is updated each month, players can weigh in with their thoughts, and Garriott's team can course-correct immediately.
"That's not to say everyone loves everything about
SotA, but we don't have big systems we have or plan to pull," he said. "We make constant slow refinements as we go."
The Quest Of The Avatar Is Forever
A lot has changed since the first
Ultima released in 1981 for the Apple II. But the message and themes of the series seem just as relevant as ever, especially with so much change happening politically and historically.
It seems our world could use a new band of heroes and avatars. Light-heartedly, I asked Garriott what his in-game character Lord British would say to the people of Earth in 2018.
"Democracy in the real world is under siege," wrote Garriott-as-British. "It has been in the past. But, we fought devastating world wars to fix it in the past. Today we have a lot more nukes and a lot more 1984-style mass control systems than we did back then."
"It might be a lot harder to fix now, if we let it get out of control. I believe we are at a very real and very important inflection point in history. I really hope that the European Union survives. I really hope that the independent democratic institutions of the United States survive."
"But, sadly, I think there is a real risk that we are going to see an era of global 'strongman' leaders who manage to concentrate power by making literal 'rubber stamp or get rubbed out' out of their other branches of governments, control their military and police to become enforcers against their populace and press. While I would like to think it could not happen in the USA, personally, I think it is already happening in the USA. In other countries, former enemies which we have suddenly become great friends with, these tactics are already very well evolved. Don't think it can't happen here. Because it is. Stay vigilant Avatars!"
(control scheme is initially awkward but you'll adapt fast).
