"My U-4-ic first love in RPG's. Britannia rules!"

Ultima IV is my first love in computer RPG's. Although this disbars me from grandiose statements along the lines of ''It changed how people looked at RPG's forever,'' it certainly went in a new direction, combining excitement with a nice message. I remember going to a friend's house(well, he was a friend some of the time, and we were both good at math and liked computers, so people at school lumped us together even after a few tiffs) while in middle school and seeing him play this game. Even though I didn't see what the story was about and didn't get much chance to play, I bugged my parents for a month afterwards until they got it for me. I had actually pestered them for Bard's Tale II as well, which also made a strong impression but turned out not to be quite as deep.

Many people enjoyed Ultima III even though it was about building up your characters to an invincible level, and the final Ultima confrontations had always been a bit bizarre. Ultima IV is much more glib; it dismisses the altered map from Ultima III(defeating Exodus rearranged the whole outerworld) which allowed it to retain the places and names that had a ring in Ultima III. Ultima IV is more complex than III in many ways; twice the number of character slots, and over double the outerworld size. The indoor locations are one fourth as big as in Ultima III but they are in a better proportion with the outside world here and have much less white-space, and there are more of them. In this case, less is more convenient, more meaningfully detailed, and more separate places to explore. But Ultima IV would present the most original plot of any computer game for a while. I still think it's the best twist ever; it's not clearly obvious, but it's sensible.

Although there's plenty of combat and exploring, Ultima IV is largely about being a real ''good guy.'' Several years after buying the game, when my family's Macintosh became more used than our Apple, I read an interview in a book with Richard Garriot(Lord British,) the creator of Ultima, where he mentioned that in many games, including Ultima I-III, you were apparently the good guy but ran around killing everything in your way, and the best way to improve a character was to rob from towns you were trying to save from evil. So Ultima IV seeks to change all that; the nicest feature is that Lord British will resurrect you until you win, putting less emphasis on pumping yourself up. The land has been relatively peaceful, with towns insulated from any monsters that appear, and people no longer need to focus on a great evil. Your object is to become an Avatar, the embodiment of the Eight Virtues(Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, Spirituality, and Humility) so that you may approach and unlock the secrets of the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom in a secluded dungeon. Armed with this knowledge, society will take another step towards Utopia. Or at least until you disappear to your own world, setting the stage for the crisis that precipitates Ultima V. This sort of thing requires continual nonviolent actions and prying for information, and you must interact extensively with and even possibly recruit some of the people you're trying to help. Of course you can, after saving your game, let off steam and kill a bunch of people in a town including guards before you quit(great way to blow off steam,) but the general principle is clear.

In this sort of game there's always the risk of virtue being shoved down a player's throat, but I rarely find this to be the case. There's enough to do in the meantime while practicing to be Mr. Swell that, the occasional mumbo-jumbo NPC dialog bordering on New-Age nonsense aside, the game is an exciting experience that makes it easy and fun to consider moral questions. Most of the time, though, nonsense makes way for genuine fantasy. My first surprise on buying the game was that the peripherals were wonderful. I saw a strange, neat coin that looks like a huge token for a psychedelic bus, a beautiful cloth map with most important locations, and a manual(''History of Britannia'') that gave generously illustrated anecdotes with each bit of practical information and which I actually read before booting up(doubly good as it raised anticipation further;) for instance, it would describe some spells without the given reagents you needed to mix to make them, although it would allow you to guess. The manual in general did a great job of leading me on and was very easy and fun to read--the only gripe being that I found out they'd copied the Britannian glyphs right from Tolkein when I finally got around to reading his stuff in college(I was able to decode everything.) These sorts of things are typical of the care Origin put into Ultima IV, and it seems suitable that a game about virtue should be fair to its players.

The player controls are restricted to the keyboard, and they work out fine most of the time. Of course there are going to be stretches(Z for Ztats is one I grew to like, but I for ignite torch is bothersome and occurs when I involuntarily forget to use the arrows) and there is a spell for each letter of the alphabet with some obvious jokes that only work--and are only used--sparingly(Y=Up, Z=Down, the reasons ''lost in antiquity'') but more seriously the computer makes you travel much slower than chasing monsters, which can lead to a potentially annoying combat system.

DRIVIN' YOU COMBAT-TY

If there is one thing that would stop an intense session of Ultima IV, it would be how combat bogs the game down. When you're off on your own you only have a few monsters to fight, but the farther you get in the game, the more you'll need companions, if only for a few fights in dungeon rooms where the monsters are fixed. Combat is rather annoying for the veteran player as, although it is fought on a grid and it's pretty easy to see where to fire(missile weapons are a must,) things will often be slowed by one fleeing monster who refuses to line up with you as you only have the four regular directions to fire. You can also lose turns for pressing an invalid key or action. You can get swept into several combats as well. If you are traveling over rough terrain, you may not be able to progress with a move, but monsters always are able to. I turned lukewarm to Ultima for a whole week after collecting my whole ragged band and losing enthusiasm for the constant drawn-out combats, but they are really quite nice when scaled down(i.e. fewer than ten participants.) Once you get very good you may want to have a lot of teleport spells on hand to navigate tough terrain. Fortunately there is a way to use combat to build up quickly and then forget about it; you may have to take several times re-starting, but it's enjoyable to refine your character and rather quick to build him up to the maximum level eight once you've solved enough quests.

Aside from combat there is another nuisance where you have to type the same command a few times in a row in several game-critical locations. It's a virtue-related thing where you're supposed to concentrate, but if you're close to Avatarhood any slip will force you to back-track considerably. There's another ''so close'' annoyance--you can't save in a dungeon, which has stopped many people from solving the game as the Codex is(surprise) at the bottom of a very tough one, and you must answer questions exactly to pass. But overall the controls evolve throughout the game. You can't quite use all of them in the beginning, because you haven't found the proper items. And just having keys that you have to earn the right to use engenders anticipation. There's only one other gripe I want to dispatch quickly before moving on to the good stuff.

STUPID U-BOATS

The second most cumbersome part of the game is finding a boat. It is not strictly necessary to finish the game, as there is actually an even more confusing albeit creative way to get around this, but if any aspect comes close to being unpardonable, it is finding sea travel. You can't buy a boat, so you will probably have to wait for a random pirate boat to approach you. On the realistic side, there are winds that affect how fast your boat can travel in any direction, and your boat takes damage as you're attacked--you can drown in the middle of the ocean.

VIRTUAL VIRTUE

Oh no, I hear you groan. He brought up virtue again. Well, if you must, quibble a little further as I mention that you can't directly choose your character's class--it's based on your answers to certain moral questions. For instance, you are asked if, given an uncounted purse of gold coins to deliver, you would stop to give one to a beggar or keep the trust you were given. With eight classes there are twenty-eight possible questions which are all thought-provoking. The nomad in the caravan explains that there are no wrong answers and although that is not strictly true in a cutthroat sense(starting as a shepherd is best reserved as a challenge for people replaying the game) this method of choosing a class is far above computer-simulated dice-rolling or the earlier Ultimas where you just assign a bunch of numbers. And the classes bring up more imagery than usual, too, while still fitting the appropriate virtue--mage, bard, fighter, druid, tinker, paladin, ranger and shepherd.

This eliminates a good deal of cheating(i.e. creating twenty characters, pooling their gold to one, and zapping the other nineteen.) But what do you expect from a game about virtue? The eight characters that may join your party always start with the same data, so all that is hard-coded, but it's fairly easy to guide yourself into a chosen profession. The whole thing's so fun that you don't mind re-starting.

But what, concretely, are you expected to do in Ultima IV? There are, in fact, quests for enlightenment in each virtue; you must achieve that at a shrine, which requires a rune to enter and a mantra to use it properly once it's discovered. Later you must find special items in a dungeon or at sea, which may lead you to the dungeon where the Codex is housed. It's rather nice that solving a quest gets experience for your leader, so on replay you won't have to fight all the time to improve. In addition each of the eight towns specializes in a virtue and holds one person who will join your party unless they are the same profession as you. This caused me a bit of consternation during my first game. My friend had gained a fellow called Iolo in his party and I wanted someone with a cool name like that. I started out as a bard(Iolo's profession) and even though he was the first one I stumbled on I couldn't get him to join. There were enough other quests to improve your party as well. Finding Nightshade and Mandrake, two reagents for spells(you mixed spells before using them in combat) mentioned in the manual but not sold in stores, is implied.

Eventually you must find out how the virtues and their quests relate to each other. On an oversimplified level that means finding more items and using them correctly and talking to everyone as dialogs are interesting but ultimately easily defined, but the game even manages to use concepts like color blending(red+yellow=orange) effectively to describe how this all work together. The three castles, each encompassing a set of virtues, hold part of a clue to this. For the first time in the series you can feel like you have a friendly home base. Lord British's castle is close to the town of Britain and holds Lord British, who heals you for free, and Hawkwind the Seer, who tells you how well you're doing in all the virtues. You also feel as though the base is defending something complex; three castles report to Lord British and are inter-related with the eight towns as well. But of course there are hidden locations apart from the more formulated part of the game that balance it well and even a few well-placed blips in the octo-symmetry of the game.

Ultima IV provokes a general amount of discussion and puzzles for anyone interested in ethics. The game certainly has humor in the town conversations to balance out the questions that are a bit blunt(''Dost thou cheat?''/''Art thou perfect?'') There is a cursed ghost that appears after you sleep in an inn, a few drunks in seedy villages who may even attack you, one NPC trying to quit smoking who tells you not to start, and Chuckles the Jester recites the Boy Scout's Law. You can even be a real jerk and talk to Hawkwind; he's blistering! One time I actually got into an argument with my quasi-friend about how you should answer a certain question in a town(''Art thou the Avatar?'' I said I was and lost an eighth in humility. But I was, and I didn't lose an eighth in honesty when I retried and said no.) He got me again when I declined a magic weapon in Wizard's Crown because it seemed like the generally virtuous thing to do. I walked away valiantly commenting(he was bigger than I) that he needed a lesson in humility. He called me a Paladin. Things were never the same after.

WHEREIN ART MAKES VIRTUE MORE PALATABLE

I've seen Ultima IV's game icons for newer computers, but the old stuff is still good. The screen is well laid out, with characters/hit points/status in the upper right and your last few commands below, leaving plenty of space for the overland. Origin did well to keep the classic, basic icons(mountains, towns, forest and grassland--the combinations of green-heavy vegetations available give the game a nature-like feel offset well by white hills and blue water) and your ship turning each direction is sharp and real. NPC's also have entertaining motions, and towns show the steady improvement seen through the previous Ultima games. The different professions star, with the druid's twisty staff, shepherd's crook and tinker's banging hammer, but you'll also see many more peacetime icons; singing bards, jesters, beggars and children are prominent, and I particularly enjoy the seahorses and a ghost that appears. The dungeons seem blocky in the corridors, with monsters looking like they were almost written in GR, but in fact the dungeon rooms, which go back to tile-based view, turn out quite well and use some rare or new icons(Zorns, Balrons and Reapers, the three toughest monsters, are almost scary,) to good effect. You also have special dungeon monsters such as the little gremlins, much cuter if you kill them before they take any food, who create a distinct below-ground flavor with the diamond tiling.

There's not much sound on the Apple other than random glubbing and a long hum when you cast a spell; although my friend showed me the game on the Commodore, where there was nice background music, there were only basic noises for combat. It was a cruel blow to admit that the Commodore had something over the Apple, but I justified it by saying this game was about virtue and being considerate, and the Apple, in making less noise than the Commodore, was more considerate to the rest of my family who did not appreciate this game or my long hours playing it. Even with sound toggles, there was less temptation.

Ultima IV is not perfect, but very little of its strong first impression wore off. There are some flaws and gross breaches of reality that will become apparent after you play for a while. I've mentioned that you can force-feed your player virtue--this is not surprising as virtue is something that can't really be understood in the real world, much less with 64K of memory, and it's funny to think of the beggar you gave 5000 gold pieces remaining poor, or that blood bank always needing your blood, but more seriously you get sucked too often into combats you must win, after which you get the same treasure for multiple dragons as you do for one skeleton. Fortunately, many such inconsistencies were fixed in Ultima V.

I remember trying to kill Lord British(you can't) most vividly from when my friend exposed me to Ultima, but what's beneath the surface is even better than what hooked me. Despite our differences, I'm eternally grateful my old classmate showed me Ultima IV. This game gave me hours of fun play when I was younger; after I'd finished knocking about and fighting stuff, I got down to solving quests, and although I was unable to get past the last puzzle, largely acknowledged to be annoying. Armed with a walkthrough on a freeware version over a decade later, I found so much of the game memorable that I was able to track everything down and, although I actually goofed twice on the final dungeon, see the ending. It was worthwhile, and I expect I will do it again--maybe even as a shepherd! I don't always have time for a newer, larger RPG, but Ultima IV has enough pace and complexity for me to barrel through it. I won't have to putter around much as I've taken most of the puzzles to heart, and having to improve my virtue as well as hit points affords something to think about while I'm bulking up. It's the closest I've found to a fantasy coming-of-age series(my favorite genre) such as Narnia or Prydain.

EIGHT VIRTUES:
--original game idea is pulled off spectacularly, and it's a clear step up from Ultima III
--sophisticated town interactions with many memorable characters, with all sorts of cool names
--''Being a good guy'' is a theme without being didactic
--dungeon rooms are a lot of fun
--thematic puzzles give the game a pleasing symmetry, and your actions relate to the virtues
--easy to get into quickly and forgiving even when you die
--there's a lot to do to start and many new places to discover
--graphics look great, lots of animation

CRUEL BRITANNIA:
--can't save except outdoors
--the final puzzle
--the game's too exacting once you become an Avatar(shrines and fights are tedious)
--getting and steering a ship is a bit too random
--monsters chase you down, leading to awkward combat, especially if your party is full
--the ''secret code'' was disillusioning when I found out it was from ''The Hobbit''
--shepherds are useless as characters
--moongate transport is an occasional hassle(yeah, I'm reaching)
--no background music on the Apple version

MY ULTIMA-TUM:

Even if you don't want to buy the Ultima Collection on eBay for less price than this game originally cost, consider picking it up as freeware on the internet. Origin made it freeware to promote the Ultima Collection, and it is a legitimate piece of gaming history. (Insert joke about how you can't put a price on virtue here.)

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/08/00, Updated 01/31/02