For me Ultima IV was deeper in some ways than Skyrim is for all of its excellent gameplay, stunning visuals and character enhancements. In Ultima IV I really felt close to the characters who joined me because I quested and spent time upping stats just to become worthy enough for them coming on board, and once they finally agreed I did my best to kit them out in order to protect them against the dangers I was leading them towards. I bloody hated it when they died (i'd reload), and guys like Iolo the Bard were with me for most of the time I was playing. That sort of connection is pretty difficult to endow in a real person, especially from 8-bit icons plopping their way round an 8-bit landscape, and it's a real tribute to the thought that went into Ultima IV.
Also the world of Britannia was probably on a par with Skyrim, in terms of size, the amount of towns, and the number of meaningful NPCs, and it was the first world I was happy to just spend time wandering through, as dangerous as it was.
I obtained Ultima IV on 2 double-sided 5'14" Floppy disks. One side was the program, one the cities and towns, one the dungeons, and I can't remember what the other side would've been. We'd buy single-sided floppies and use a leather hole-punch to stick another timing hole opposite the first near the centre of the disk. God knows how we knew to do this but it worked and made the discs double-sided.
I don't remember the first time I booted up Ultima IV, but I remember the firm hold it had on me. The title screen showed in-game graphic sprites (don't know if they were sprites or not) plopping around in and out of the city icons around a lake, while live gargoyles strained to escape their bounds in the top corners of the screen.
Next was character creation which was decided by answering a number of moral questions posed in text form by a gypsy met along the road in 'real life'. This was unique and more fun for me than assigning values to stats.
Ultima IV was the first game I remember playing which used my own sense of imagination to draw me in by beginning in the real world and then, after working out where my moral compass lay, sending me from there through a moongate to the mystical world of Britannia which was full of medieval towns with names like Skara Brae, Yew, and Moonglow. The runic element was fantastic and I deciphered the alphabet to aid me in my questing. The game also came with a cloth map which I got when I bought it secondhand shortly after discovering it.
I really knew none of the rules of this world and learned through trial and error that saying (typing) 'heal' to someone was saying Hello to them. I figured out the 'join' command to ask someone to join my party, and I learned to pick out keywords of their responses to encourage them to reveal more to me. I discovered that there were secret passageways inside castles that I would push through walls to get to, so spent hours and hours and hours quite happily pushing against every wall in a town or castle to sneak into somewhere I wasn't necessarily supposed to be. I'd already been playing the game for a long time, months i'd guess before I discovered quite by accident that there were these secrets. So locations that I was pretty familiar with suddenly gained a new and exciting dimension. The most common secret places were treasuries, the doors of which were locked but hidden passages could sometimes get you in to raid the chests inside. Although in saying this you had to be pretty careful because some treasure chests were possessed and would attack if you tried to open them haha.
The premise of Ultima IV was that I was trying to become the Avatar: a morally upright hero of the people, questing to attain enlightenment in 8 virtues -Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, honor, Sacrifice, Spirituality and Humility to prove myself worthy to descend into the Stygian Abyss and locate the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.
I'd gain standing in these virtues in different ways for example the Herb/ingredients trader was a blind woman who you could pay whatever you wanted for her wares but of course if you short changed her, your Honesty stat would go down. If you showed promise in any of these virtues, and if you found the right person, they'd join your party bolstering your attack force against the numerous monsters and enemies lurking all over Britannia.
The game was full of hotkeys which I learnt by pressing every key on the keyboard of my Atari 800XL and writing down what they did...'e' for 'enter' a town, dungeon or shrine, 'k' for 'klimb' a ladder, 'c' for 'cast' a spell...that sort of thing.
Original Ultima IV reference card
Combat was turn-based, could be pulled off by melee, ranged and magical hits, and I had as many hits per turn as members of my party. Movement was per person per square so I could flank my enemies (slowly) or run away (also slowly)...I did this quite a lot.
I could travel by foot, horse, boat, I even found a hot air balloon, and on both boat and Balloon i'd be continually casting spells to change the wind direction in my favour.
Then there were the Dungeons which shifted the view from top-down to first-person frames. I was never very good at these so tended to stay out of them if I could. Ultima IV was the first game I saw that had fog of war, and hidden views around corners, so you really had to pop your head out to see how many skeletons were waiting for you.
The morning birds chirping outside my bedroom drew me back into the dumb real world, so after living inside Ultima IV all night while hunched awkwardly over my 10 inch black and white TV, my backbones would crick as I sat up straight, saved the game and went to sleep until mum yelled at me that it was lunchtime.
Sadly I never got to the Stygian Abyss because I could never work out how to gain enlightenment in one of the virtues...I think it was Sacrifice. So yes after all of that, and one the deepest game experiences of my life I never beat Ultima IV...did you?
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