And so it was that in 1982, the Richard Garriott released his latest project to the world. A follow up to the critically and commercially acclaimed Ultima I, Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress was bigger than its predecessor in almost every way. Grander in scale, more ambitious in story elements and more complex in gaming terms, Ultima II was certainly evidence of a drive to progress from Garriott.
The thing is, thought, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better (stop sniggering at the back!). Ultima II, while unmistakably an Ultima game is something of an aberration in the series, regarded for many years as the black sheep of the Ultima family, at least until VIII arrived many years later (more on that in later reviews).
Now that’s a cool box – mad, but cool
Firstly, the game world is vastly different to that of the other games. Despite Ultima I being set in the fully realised world of Sosaria, Ultima II sees the player spanning Earth, thought various points in time. Subsequent games in the series return to Sosaria and later the unified land of Britannia, so the divergence into the ‘real’ world of Earth sets Ultima II apart from its siblings. There are a number of reasons for this decision, however. Firstly and most simply, the story, where Minax (the lover of the previous game’s antagonist) decides the best way to get her revenge is to enact bloody genocide on your home dimension, dictates that the story must focus on earth rather than Sosaria. Not an unreasonable design choice all told. The second reason is that Garriott almost certainly did not have an elaborate continuity planned out at this early stage and was basically designing the games on an individual basis, with a loose narrative association linking each one. Indeed, most of the continuity running through the Ultima series is essentially a retcon; a reinterpretation of the fairly basic storylines in the early games in the context of later, more sophisticated games further down the line. At this point Garriott can hardly be expected to have believed he was starting on a series that would encapsulate over 9 canonical games, so narrative and setting inconsistency is hardly surprising.
Indeed, the decision to set the game across the whole planet, the entire solar system and in differing time periods speaks of Garriott’s ambitiousness for the game. The thing is, that ambitiousness works as something of a double-edged sword. While the world was vast, especially when compared to previous games and contemporary titles, the sheer size of the world meant that everything was very spread out and could often be frustrating to navigate and keep track of. When an individual sub quest has you trekking from an American bar on Earth all the way to Jupiter and back as sequential steps in the quest chain, things can begin to get very protracted.
The rather unique game map
This feeling of the game being spread too thin and being overly complex was exacerbated by the fact that the storyline challenges and quests were, if we’re being generous, obtuse. There were often little or no real indications of what you had to do at any given point in a quest chain or who to talk to, much less where you might have to go to do so. Several aspects, such as retrieving a ring from an old man or obtaining the Quicksword are basically left completely un-mentioned barring a couple of easily-missed one liners. Hell, to get the ring off the old man you have to use an, at the time, undocumented keyboard command.
No big deal though right? You can just look up the walkthrough online, simple! Ok, you just go ahead and try. Yeah, this was 1982, good luck with that!
The whole game speaks of a man, again, testing his boundaries, whose ambition and creativity rather dramatically outstripped his technical abilities and, indeed, the technology available at the time.
While Ultima II has a great many technical and design flaws, it is important to remember the context it was conceived in. The industry as a whole was a very different one to the behemoth it is today. Populated almost entirely by individual or small-group enthusiast developers, it was a fledgling industry and basically every game was breaking new ground in some way or another. Imagine a group of people running a marathon in the dark with just a small flashlight to guide the way and you have a semblance of an appropriate metaphor. People had no guide from which to work, no precedent to set them on the right track and so games like Ultima II were an inevitable consequence. Grand and ambitious, but flawed, not through negligence or incompetence, but down to the fact the person making it was literally making it up as he went along.
The game looked pretty much the same as Ultima I
In Ultima II can be seen the prototypes of the Ultima games proper; the grand, epic world environments, the concept of large-scale quests and the multitude of optional side-quests. Yes, the implementation of those aspects was flawed, but the fact is they were there and Richard Garriott built upon them as he went.
If the Ultima series charted the development and growth of the classic Fantasy RPG, then Ultima II represents its early teenage years, complete with growing pains, awkwardness and search for a purpose. Yes, it’s a bit daft, but weren’t we all at that age?
Next up in the Ultima Series Retrospective: Ultima III: Exodus, where things start to get more familiar and weirder, all at the same time.
© 2013 – 2015, zero1gaming.com. All rights reserved. On republishing this article your must provide a link to this original post
Paul Izod is a lifelong gamer. Since he was old enough to tap at his Dad's PC's keyboard he's been a gamer. Dedicated and often opinionated, you can be sure he'll always have something interesting to say about the subject at hand. Find him on Twitter at or or email him at
•
