Akalabeth: World of Doom and Ultima I-VI Retrospectives

Richard Garriott’s Ultima series has obviously made a big impression on the editors at Zero1Gaming, as they’ve taken it upon themselves to crank out a retrospective feature for many if not all of the titles in the franchise. At the moment, Akalabeth: World of Doom, Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress, Ultima III: Exodos, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, and Ultima VI: The False Prophet are all available, with more to come. A few choice snippets:

Possibly the most noteworthy feature of the game is the first-person perspective used for navigating the dungeons. While not the first game to do so, Akalabeth gained much attention for its use of this feature as it was rare for the time. While later Ultima games eschewed this approach for constant isometric perspective, Akalabeth set the tone for many of the early games in the series and, most notably, set the precedent for two of the series’ spin offs Ultima Underworld I & II.

The game also demonstrated a distinct wry sense of humour on Garriott’s part. As well as the previously mentioned greeting, this is in evidence on the boot prompt for the game. It asks if you are ready to start and if you answer ‘˜no’ it exclaims ‘˜Then Leave and Begone!’, which always makes me chuckle.

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Upon release, Exodus boasted revolutionary visuals, being the first RPG to display animated characters. This alone was enough to turn heads and, in the inspirational spirit of the series, is credited as being a significant direct influence on none other than the first Final Fantasy game. Not a bad start.

Oh, and yes that’s right I said characters, plural. Ultima III was the first in the series to introduce a party mechanic. While somewhat different to the way the party system manifested in later games and go on to become a staple of the game, Exodus’ take on the mechanic at least can be highlighted as the starting point of this aspect. It must also be pointed out this was something new and exciting at the time and certainly a big change for the thus-far solo protagonist Ultima series.

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Whatever opinion a player has, it cannot be denied that Ultima VI was, to coin a tired cliché, a game changer. Visually the game bears little similarity to previous iterations, with most of the core components completely overhauled. It is around this aspect of the game that the vast majority of the controversy centered.

The biggest difference was the move away from a multi-layer environment system, where dungeons, towns and other areas were represented as an icon on the world map and entry into them would open up an expanded separate area to represent them. In the new format the game world was rendered in full scale, with all areas integrated into one another. Entry into a village or dungeon now proceeded as part of the standard world, with no separation of the two. This also removed the disparity in perspective and scale between the world map exploration and the dungeon delving. The whole game was now navigated from a single top-down, pseudo-isometric perspective, removing the first-person perspective used for dungeon segments previously. This, in principle gave the world a much more organic feel; giving more weight to the sense of a living, breathing game world than had ever been seen before. In addition, it can be seen as the first true example of a singular, sandbox game world for the Ultima series and set the trend for the future of the series. Along with this was the inclusion of action buttons along the bottom of the screen, which allowed greater accessibility for gameplay and was something of a precursor to the modern-day MMO button layouts of today. Think World of Warcraft set the standard for RPG HUD layout? Take some time to examine Ultima Online and the preceding Ultima titles for a few familiar sights. The False Prophet and its successors had a big hand in what you see today.