Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is a role-playing video game designed by Richard Garriott, published and released in 1985 by Origin Systems for the Apple II, and the fourth installment in the Ultima series.¹²² It is the first game of the series’ “Age of Enlightenment” trilogy, marking a shift away from the dungeon-crawling, monster-slaying focus of its predecessors toward a quest centered on moral self-improvement.¹² In place of a villain to defeat, the player must master eight virtues and prove worthy of becoming the Avatar, the moral exemplar of the realm of Britannia.¹²⁸

Background and development

Garriott began work on Ultima IV almost immediately after Ultima III shipped, again starting from the previous game’s code base and designing and coding virtually all of it himself on his Apple II.² The game spent roughly two years in continuous development, an almost unprecedented span at the time; originally slated for Christmas 1984, it required a final dash to reach release in time for Christmas 1985.² Development took place after Origin Systems relocated from Houston to North Andover, Massachusetts, late in 1983 so that Robert Garriott’s wife Marcy could continue her work for Bell Labs.² Around this period Origin signed a distribution deal with Electronic Arts, becoming one of its earliest “Affiliated Labels,” which gave the small company a presence in mass-market chains such as Toys “R” Us and Sears.²

The change in direction grew out of fan mail Garriott began receiving once Ultima III was published under his own company’s name, feedback that earlier publishers had never forwarded to him.²⁷ Players wrote in to admit that, when the going got difficult, they bribed or stole rather than earned gold, and that many killed shopkeepers to loot their wares with impunity.⁷ Garriott concluded that his games’ mechanics implicitly encouraged such behavior, and resolved to make his next game reward conduct rather than conquest.⁷ The shift coincided with a period in which parent groups and evangelical organizations were campaigning against Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop role-playing, a phenomenon visible to the Texas-based Garriott; the organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons was among those that wrote to him.⁸¹² Garriott has said that in earlier games he was “just trying to bring everything I thought was cool to bear,” and that only after Ultima III did he resolve to expunge obvious references to others’ work and invent his own world.⁷

Setting and story

The game is set in the world of Sosaria, now united and renamed Britannia under the gentle rule of Lord British, in an age of peace following the destruction of the Triad of Evil that ended the Ages of Darkness.¹²¹⁵ The realm enjoys prosperity but lacks a role model embodying the Eight Virtues? of Compassion, Honesty, Honor, Humility, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, and Valor; the people need a paragon called the Avatar.¹²⁵ The player again takes the part of the Stranger, but the goal is no longer to defeat a villain — instead a virtuous life must be led.¹²⁸

Together with as many as seven companions, the Stranger masters the eight virtues by talking with the people, meditating at shrines, and setting a good example, then recovers a number of artifacts and the Key of Three Parts.¹² The party descends into the depths of the Abyss to recover the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, which poses a series of questions on the virtues before confirming the Stranger as the Avatar.¹²

Gameplay

Ultima IV opens not with the usual rolling of attributes but with a parable: an afternoon reverie that draws the player through a shimmering blue portal into the game world.⁵ The sequence culminates in a gypsy fortune teller who poses a series of ethical dilemmas designed to determine not a class or race but what kind of person the player is, weighing which of the eight virtues matter most.⁵⁷ The answers assign a character class and a starting location — a player favoring Compassion becomes a Bard beginning at Britain, one favoring Honor a Paladin at Trinsic, and so on across the eight virtues.⁵¹⁷ The player’s avatar is always a human, eliminating the stock fantasy races of dwarves and elves to reinforce the idea that the player is playing themselves.⁷

Garriott coined the game’s use of the word “avatar,” a Sanskrit term for a deity’s human incarnation, to name the player-character, insisting that the figure in Britannia be the player’s own self rather than a rolled-up puppet.⁷ He has explained that he wanted players to identify with the character and feel responsible for its deeds, the better to convey a theme of personal and social responsibility.⁵⁷ To that end he deliberately rejected both random dice rolls and free point-assignment in favor of the gypsy’s questions.⁵

Progress is governed by an invisible tracking of the player’s conduct: giving gold to beggars raises Compassion, while looting citizens’ homes or robbing shops lowers Honesty, and fleeing non-evil creatures or sparing them in combat affects Justice and Valor.⁸¹³¹⁴ Worshipping at shrines bolsters individual virtues, and the player must achieve enlightenment in all eight.⁷¹³ The quest also requires collecting eight runes, learning eight mantras, recovering colored stones from dungeons, and assembling the items needed to open the final dungeon, the Stygian Abyss, at the bottom of which lies the Codex.¹³¹⁴

Magic uses a reagent system in which the player mixes earthy ingredients — eight reagents such as ginseng and sulphurous ash — to prepare up to twenty-six spells, one for each letter of the alphabet.¹³ Travel options include foot, ship, and moongates, portals that appear in varying locations according to the phase of the moon and warp the party elsewhere.¹⁵ The world map measures 256 by 256 tiles, sixteen times the size of Ultima III‘s 64-by-64-tile world, with a full parser-based conversation engine for interactive dialog and dungeons containing “rooms” that open onto a tactical map.²¹² The total party size was expanded to eight.¹²

Ports and availability

The original Apple II version was the basis for all others.¹² Ultima IV was released in 1985 for the Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and Atari 8-bit, with the 8-bit ports sharing much program code by virtue of their common MOS 6502 processors.¹² Ports for the Amiga and Atari ST with enhanced graphics followed in 1988, and console versions for the NES and Sega Master System appeared in 1990.¹²¹⁹ The NES port, by FCI, restyled characters and environments in a Final Fantasy-like manner with a new soundtrack by Seiji Toda, simplified the keyword-based dialog, and removed the need to pre-mix spell reagents.¹⁴ The Master System port redrew the tile graphics and rendered dungeons in a top-down rather than first-person view.¹³ The game later became available digitally through GOG.com, maintained under Electronic Arts’ copyright.¹⁶

Reception and legacy

Ultima IV is widely credited with reshaping the role-playing genre.⁸ The retrospective ranking by 1UP.com placed it 31st in its “Essential 100,” arguing that if Wizardry? established the role-playing game as a genre, Ultima IV “ushered in the shape of RPGs as we know them today”.⁸ The same account traces a line from Garriott’s shift in focus — from combat toward the hero’s behavior and interaction with non-player characters — to the more narrative style of later games, naming BioWare’s branching dialogue and morality systems among its descendants.⁸ The introduction of a morality system has been described as likely gaming’s very first.¹⁴ The Ultima series as a whole proved an influence on Japanese role-playing games, with old-school titles citing it as a major inspiration.²¹