Ultima IV: Won!

It turns out I entered the abyss just a bit prematurely. I was afraid I might have - the shrine at Cove told me I'd need to learn a Word of Passage and a Pure Axiom in order to enter the codex chamber, but at the time, it was pretty vague about what that even meant.

The rune visions spelled INFINITY, which is indeed a word, but not, it turns out, the Word of Passage, and my notes from Cove's conversations suggest that this is probably intended to be the Pure Axiom. But I have no clues at all regarding the Word of Passage!

For the second time, the first being instruction on how to harvest mandrake, I need spoilers. The thread of clues that I'm missing begins in Skara Brae.

 

Way back when I was first visiting Skara Brae, I had truthfully answered "no."

So teach me then!

Turns out that the game isn't checking for truthfulness, and you need to answer "yes" in order for the clue train to proceed.

This would not have been clear to me at the time, but you must ask him about "word" - he sends you to visit Zair in Paws to learn more.

I Blink to Paws and find him at the bar.

Back to Cove.

And one last tour around Britain's castles.

That's two syllables, buddy.

 

The secret word of passage is dog-Latin gibberish! Amor, Veritas, and, uh, Cor. The order isn't stated, but given that the principles have consistently been in the order of Truth, Love, and Courage, it seems logical that the word is VERAMOCOR.

I load my last quicksave - I've got one and there's no way I'm making myself go through the pirate fight and eight level dungeon again - and offer the word of passage.

Then there is a test - each correct answer draws a line on the screen.

Some questions are straightforward.

Some are unintuitive

And some philosophical.

Not quite done!

"Love" and "Courage" both make sense, though!

I give my answer.

That's the end! It's taken me two months and almost thirty posts to reach it - this is by far the longest game I've covered yet, and I suspect it would be even if I didn't exhaustively explore every corner of the world and each dungeon. As is, Ultima IV took twice as long as the next-longest game, Phantasie, and its overworld is the equivalent of being four Ultima III's wide and four Ultima III's tall.

I'm going to have to be a bit of a contrarian when it comes to my final evaluation - I'm not completely sold on the things it's often praised for. The iconic virtue system doesn't really color the moment-to-moment gameplay all that much, and while Ultima IV has been praised for advancing the genre past the murder and theft that its predecessors were rife with, that seems to be more of a quirk of Ultimas I-III than anything else! It's not as if Wizardry lets you attack Boltac and lift his gear, even if you play an "evil" party.

I suppose Ultima's actual legacy in this regard is in giving you the freedom to be a scoundrel. Earlier Ultimas required it to an extent, but IV maintains this freedom and then asks you to use it responsibly or face the consequences. And we see a lot more of this approach in the years to come.

None of that hurt my enjoyment of the game, per se, so before I get any more critical, let me get this out of the way.

GAB rating: Good

Ultima IV has, by far, the best open world design I've seen in any game yet, and it's no wonder that this is often seen as the template for so many open world CRPGs to come. The geography is diverse and interesting, feels logical and lived-in, and was fun to explore and map out even when I didn't discover anything useful. I enjoyed wandering from town to town, speaking to the citizens, gathering clues, and piecing together Ultima IV's puzzle. Progress is genuinely non-linear, and adventure narratives developed in an organic feeling way. Dialog is rather good, considering the game's scope and the system's limitations. A month in, I thought I might be awarding it a harpoon in the end.

Unfortunately, Ultima IV overstood its welcome by another month. This is partly on me for pushing myself to map out every corner of the map and every room of each dungeon, but it would have been overlong anyway. Combat is tedious and there's far too much of it, especially in dungeons, where I spent most of that second month. Fighting suffers from the worst user experience I've seen since Temple of Apshai (granted, both CRPG Addict and Wargaming Scribe have tolerated much worse). Characters are constantly getting in each others' way, bumping into a wall/monster/comrade or just entering an invalid keystroke costs you the turn, querying your own MP costs you the turn, and attempting to cast a spell you do not have the MP for wastes both the spell and your turn. Getting everyone to leave a room is always a pain, and in the dungeons, you enter and exit rooms so much.

This is offset by something that would otherwise be a major flaw in itself - combat is comically skewed in your favor, even without stat optimization. A level 4 mage, who would be a weak melee fighter in any other series, can fight off multiple dragons with a leather sling and then heal all of the burns and scratches with a few cheap spells. The engine allows for some interesting tactical options, but there's no need for any of it when any character can just tank any monster! There's almost no reason to use melee weapons either.

I'm sure much of this tedium is alleviated when, as multiple commenters suggested, I keep my party small, which can be done late in the game by allowing your dead weight characters (such as Katrina and Geoffrey) to die and not resurrecting them. But I dislike using strategies that make me feel like I'm doing the designer's job for them, at least on first-time playthroughs. On a similar note, much of the dungeons can be bypassed by simply using teleport magic and peering gems to find the colored stone, grabbing it, and teleporting out, but I also dislike strategies that bypass parts of the game that were meant to be played and experienced, and some of the dungeon layouts, set pieces, and puzzles are quite cleverly designed.

Were I to design a rebalance patch for Ultima IV, I'd make a few changes. I'd make the combat much more punishing, but also make the encounter rooms not reset when you leave, so that you don't have to keep fighting the same fights over and over again - and on the flipside, would make it less viable to farm gold in the same room over and over again. And whenever you have an encounter, whether it's in an encounter room or not, only the front four living party members would participate - others could be tagged in when someone falls.

Then there's a host of smaller but still significant complaints. Mixing reagents is boring and unnecessary. Some of the crucial clues needed to finish the game are unfairly obscure (and in a few cases bugged). The virtue of Compassion really doesn't feel like it can be elevated in an organic way - I think it would have been better if allowing "evil" enemies like orcs and rogues to flee raised it a little since neutral enemies are so rare. The codex quiz at the end of the final dungeon cruelly sends you back to its very beginning if you get anything wrong and some of the questions have a very tenuous connection to the correct answers, but then the correct answers are merely the list of virtues and principles in their canonical order. Poison is very annoying at any part of the game. Power scaling, though free of the mechanical weirdness that characterized the series since Akalabeth, is too gradual; the only difference I could tell between a level 2 character and a level 8 character is the amount of HP, which doesn't matter that much with healing being as cheap as it is.

Ultima IV is indeed a visionary title, a landmark not just of the series, but to computer games at large. All of its faults can't keep it out of my ivory deck - a first for Ultima - but they do keep me from giving it a harpoon too.