All Time Bangers

a history of RPGs…

  • Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

    Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

    Released: Sep 16, 1985
    Version played: DOS (1987)

    I’m going to keep it real with you, I did not finish Ultima IV. I didn’t finish Ultimas I through III either, though I sampled them a little just for context. It didn’t seem worth writing about any up til now though, and I stuck with this one for much, much longer, because the seeds of something beautiful begin to sprout here.

    Ultima is like the total opposite of Wizardry in that Wizardry is perfect in an almost elemental sense. There’s nothing that needed to be added or removed. Wizardry is Wizardry and you can go on steam right now and buy a ten, fifty a hundred games that are still pretty much just Wizardry. Nothing is like Ultima.

    Richard Garriot’s ambition with these games so far outstrips the capability of the hardware at the time that the sheer fact that these even shipped is an absolute miracle. Ultima IV has a fully developed world full of named NPCs, a (less intense but still present) hunger and survival system, an entirely naturally occuring form of fast travel that requires understanding of the phases of the moon to decode, full party control in grid based combat, a vast bespoke open world replete with towns, shrines and dungeons, different forms of terrain that affect your navigation – and so on, and so forth, you get the idea. And I didn’t even mention the morality system that is the game’s entire raison d’etre.

    It’s utterly overwhelming. This game released the same year as Super Mario and Gradius. No wonder that to a certain type of kid this game was utterly life changing, it must have seemed like the absolute coolest work of art, utterly blowing open the possibilities of a scene that truly hadn’t exited the bleeps and bloops era yet in the cultural consciousness.

    And yet, as I pushed further and further into Ultima IV the true heart of its brilliance was none of that. Ultimately its systemic complexity was a massive timesink attached to the real star of the show, the dialogue system and quest design. Talking to NPCs, figuring out keywords, understanding how information from one NPC could give new context in another conversation, the way all these different – and ultimately extremely simple – prompts interlocked to provide a true and genuine sense of discovery was constantly enthralling. The actual bulk of the video game of Ultima IV, the exploration and combat, is this strange mix of far too simple and far too complex that it simultaneously overwhelms and bores me, but when take a route you heard about in town and find the pass to reach a new destination, and ask the innkeeper about the rumour you heard three towns over – the guy said ask around town – and the game responds back to your intuition with the next piece of the puzzle; it’s genuinely electric.

    But it’s also extremely funny to walk away from the most ambitious and complex game of 1985 going yeah this would have been better as a pure text adventure.

    One note before moving on: the story here is pretty good finally. I did not like the stories of Ultima I-III, if they can be called such things. But the juxtaposition of self serious fantasy with juvenille reference humour just isn’t my bag at all. I get why the games start like that, they are the passion projects of a literal teenage nerd making goofy games for other teenage nerds, and it certainly is more than a little silly to five years in suddenly say that Lord British, a stupid joke username you go by, is testing you to philosophically ponder the path to true virtue and enlightenment, but the more consistently sincere (yet still lighthearted and whimsical) tone is one that befits the adventure better.

    Interestingly enough this is not a contradiction that has ever gone away. They are spending perhaps billions of dollars to make the new Grand Theft Auto, the most realistic simulated recreation of American Urbanism that money can bye, crafted by a global army of artists working tirelessly for the better part of a decade and also the beer is still going to be called Pißwasser. Perhaps the only conclusion to draw from all this is despite the rapidly changing conditions of the medium’s production there is one constant that remains tragically true; games are usually made by gamers.

  • Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

    Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

    Released: Sep 01, 1981
    Version played: Digital Eclipse Remake (2024)

    On the very first floor of the very first Wizardry game, in a corridor shrouded in mystical darkness, there is a small room that is impossible to see from the outside. In that room is a grumpy Wizard, and he does not want to be interrupted. He demands you begone, and instantly teleports you back to town. In mechanical terms, this is a simple shortcut that lets you warp out near the elevator rather than journey the now unthreatening first floor. It could have been a simple warp point, the game has tons of them after all. But instead it’s a man. You can’t talk to him and find out what he’s doing down here. He always sends you away.

    Wizardry is basically perfect. The RPG emerges in digital form essentially fully formed, they are still making games that are just fucking Wizardry. But even beyond that, the amount of games and genres that share the core loop of tense exploration leading to difficult combat with the release of returning safely to town to upgrade and do it all over again are so numerous that it is not inaccurate to claim that Wizardry is video games. The sense of atmosphere as you take every step is overbearing and purely mechnical; it’s no wonder this game was such a sensation with wireframe graphics and no music whatsoever. And yet it is the Wizard in the cupboard that is the standout moment. It’s never dwelled on, never explained, and yet it is the seed that will flourish into something unimaginable at the time. Wizardry’s gameplay loop may be the bones of the genre, but this is the heart; anything could be down here.

    This is Shin Megami Tensei, this is Dungeon Meshi, this is Earthbound, this is Pokemon and this is Dark Souls. This is Planescape Torment, this is Binding of Isaac and this is Morrowind. This is why people play Dungeons and Dragons in real life, this is the worth of a good Dungeon Master, a moment of pure authorship that takes the experience beyond the mechanical. After this moment, you never know what could be on the next tile, and you’re never sure where the boundaries are.

    Unfortunately, Wizardry reserves these moments for its early floors. The first half of the game is somewhat of a test from Trebor, as you explore every crevice to find keys and statues that ultimately unlock the keys to the elevator that takes you down to Werdna’s lair. It is immensely satisfying to put the pieces together, to map out the dungeon physically and understand how information in one place grants you access to somewhere new on an entirely different floor. Wizardry is also Resident Evil, by the way, it really is every video game.

    After recieving the Blue Ribbon and delving down towards the endgame there is disappointingly little to discover. There are no more key items, and if you already know where to go then the spot where you unlock the Blue Ribbon is around 20 or so tiles from the final Boss Rush. The only thing to discover are dead ends, the only thing to do is fight, and the only rewards come from random drops. It is a disappointingly weak second half from a game that starts out so incredibly strong and satisfying, but I can forgive it since they were inventing RPGs after all and also the second half being full of reused content and nowhere near as intricate as the first half is a time honored tradition that the genre continus to honour til this very day. But those first few hours are genuinely a miracle, and this is a game I think everyone should play at least once. To see how complete it already is, how little has changed in over 40 years, and how totally engrossing it can be when you give yourself over to the dungeon.

    ,