Ultima VI: The False Prophet (ADOVG)

Preamble: This isn't a review. It doesn't contain critical analysis, just the subjective opinions of one person. The intent is to remember the games I've come across in my life and share the nostalgia, nothing more. And some of those games I didn't play in great depth.

Ultima VI: The False Prophet is a game I wish I'd come into contact with *before* playing Ultima VII. Once you play Ultima VII it's hard to go back to the U6 engine. Coming up later this week we have BioWare's Icewind Dale, and Rune.

Ultima VI: The False Prophet

Developer: Origin Systems
Platform: PC
Release Year: 1990
(No rating today, it wouldn't be fair to rate a game I barely played)



I didn't play a lot of this game but it is an important part of the wider series and worth mentioning.

Basic Plot

The game begins with The Avatar being captured by some demonic looking creatures called Gargoyles. He is saved by his companions and whisked away to Britannia. The Avatar learns that the Gargoyles have captured each of the shrines. What starts out as a quest to free the shrines from the Gargoyles becomes a quest for peace as he begins to see their motives and how it looks from their point of view.

The story is a lot about race relations and tolerance, and also unforeseen consequences (caused by the events that took place in the previous Ultima games).



Gameplay

Ultima VI is a top down role playing game.

This game as the first to lift the visuals and perspective out of the traditional stick-man like 2D perspective to a top down animated view of the world. I played Ultima VII first before this game, and in many respects it is a more primitive version of that engine.

You take control of a party of heroes in the world of Britannia. Each character has their own inventory and character abilities. One thing which really made this game and Ultima VII stand out is that there is one continuous game world - there is no "loading" between levels.

Gameplay mostly involves exlporing, fighting monsters, and as is pretty common in all Ultima games there is a lot of dialogue. This might seem like a negative at first, but the characters and the story are very rich; something that makes it very engrossing.

The game world was extremely detailed; there were individual interactable items everywhere; even beds, baskets, plates, the detail was well beyond anything else at the time.

Positives

I like the complexity of the game, and the story is very good.

Negatives

Perhaps due to playing the games in a backwards order I found this game unapproachable. It was too old and clumsy for me to get in to at the time. I also found it very hard, I wandered into a shrine which had been captured by the Gargoyles early on in my game and was quickly slaughtered.

Memorable Moments

As a side note, there were two other games produced using the Ultima VI engine, both under the title of "Worlds of Ultima". One, that I played, was "Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire". Additionally there was another called "Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams".

"The mind is willing but the flesh is weak."