All ye who enter be warned; here be spoilers.
Most game-based storytelling is facile at best. Be honest - we all know it’s true. But, not all – games do exist that stand on their own as examples of what the medium is capable of. Often, they’re no better than an average book or movie. Sometimes, thanks to their level of interaction, they’re incomparable. Irrespective, recognising them and learning from their strengths is important, as it’s the only way we’ll learn how to tell better stories.
Up until the half-baked (and too quickly shipped) Ultima VIII and Ultima IX, the Ultima series was arguably the RPG series by which all others were judged. Even Final Fantasy, for all its mechanical variability, doesn’t come close – where Final Fantasy has fundamentally become three different games developed by three different teams released under the same banner and linked by chocobos, Ultima was one of the few series that managed to maintain plot, playstyle, and character continuity while still completely revamping and extending the engine between releases.
Ultima VI was a watershed game for a variety of reasons. It introduced weight as a factor in inventory management, one of the first games to do so. It was the first Ultima to move to a 3D-isometric view, an extremely advanced feature for the time. It was the first Ultima (and one of the first RPGs generally) to move to an interface that could be mouse-controlled. And, it was the first Ultima to offer a single-sized map with no explicitly bounded loading areas, allowing the player to walk straight from the wilderness into town without any scaling.
For some quick context, the Ultima series was defined by three trilogies. The first three were known as The Age of Darkness and focused on the rise and fall of Mondain, his lover Minax, and their bastard lovechild Exodus. By and large, they were mainly characterised by the now extremely familiar “seek and slay the evil wizard” narrative. It was in the second trilogy, The Age of Enlightenment that things got interesting; Richard Garriott, frustrated with this simplistic approach to storytelling and uncomfortable with the ethical implications of encouraging gamers to steal food as a matter of course when playing, decided to go in a totally different direction. Ultima IV, in an extremely bold move, didn’t feature any classical antagonist at all – the primary enemy was your own lack of virtue. Garriott, in what can only be called an extremely ballsy move, decided to make a game in which the focus would be on the logical and philosophical importance of ethical actions within a civil society.
Ultima IV, released in 1985, broadly dealt with the achievement of eight virtues and becoming the Avatar, a spiritual leader and example to the world. It culminated with you recovering the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, a tome containing the answer to all questions. Ultima V, released in 1988, dealt with the ethical implications of how good intentions could be unintentionally turned to evil; extremist application of the eight virtues in the absence of the true king creates an oppressive society characterised by revolution and state-sponsored civil rights abuse. The game culminates with the rescue of the true king and collapse of the Underworld in which he was trapped. And, picking up right where Ultima V left off, Ultima VI (released in 1990) dealt with the unexpected consequences of positive actions – on returning to Britannia, you find a sudden increase in the number of gargoyles (a known monster from the previous games) streaming from the remains of the Underworld, waging war and taking over the eight shrines of virtue.
Doing what you do best, you gradually defeat the gargoyles, chasing them from each of the eight shrines and eventually fighting them back to their homeworld, a land on the other side of collapsing Underworld. On learning to converse with the gargoyles in their own land and their own language, you discover a confronting truth – your actions over the last two games have been the cause of the gargoyles’ migration. They’re not entering Britannia out of racial aggression, as previously believed, but out of desperation; by taking the Codex and collapsing the Underworld, you set off a chain of geological reactions that is gradually causing their world to collapse. In chasing your own self-actualisation and disrupting the natural state of the world, you’ve unknowingly been committing xenocide and dooming their race to extinction. Not only is it a hell of a punch given your own self-righteous beliefs by this point, it’s also a marvel of storytelling in games.
The most recent analogous series that’s offered such an embedded level of continuity between sequels is Mass Effect. However, think back – in 25 years, it’s hard to think of another series that’s not only held characters, geographies, and interaction systems largely consistent between three sequels, but has also made the continuity not just a side-line service for fans but the focus of the main plot.
Convincing and empathetic narrative in games is hard; while often longer than a typical novel, the information density is a lot lower. “Show, don’t tell” is the best mechanism for delivering stories, but in a medium characterised by (until recently) generally unconvincing character models and sophomoric concepts, that’s a lot easier said than done. The second Ultima trilogy nails it, not because it has more text (Lost Odyssey has it beat on that one), nor because it’s a more convincing world (Oblivion, natch), but because the negative consequences of your positive actions are so delayed and yet so pivotal. By the time they occur, the sudden feeling of remorse you experience is real – even though you thought you were doing the right thing (and, to your people you were), you realise that your own racial prejudices have meant the wholesale slaughter of equally sentient beings for no real reason. Those who you thought were mindless creatures since Ultima I were simply another race trying to get by. In the end, you realise that the universe is more than just your world, and that all actions have positive and negative consequences, even if they’re not immediately apparent.
Not bad for three games released over 20 years ago – it’s a scale of storytelling not often replicated in the medium. And, it’s worth remembering and learning from.
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Tags: continuity, gargoyle, mechanic, retro, trilogy
