Ultima VIII: Pagan

Ultima VIII started out with some promise, considering it was among the first video games to feature digital voice-overs. Unfortunately, its interest factor soon waned when it became obvious that the makers did not know how to keep players interested without making their game unreasonably complicated. But alas, I am getting a little ahead of myself here. In order to understand Ultima VIII, you have to go back to another time, when software came on crude little devices called floppy discs, and computer clock speeds were measured in the tens of megahertz. While the specifications on these machines have improved out of sight, the return on our investments seems to grow more and more minimal. One of the last video games to be released on floppy disc, Ultima VIII firmly follows Origin Games' tradition of releasing the game first, followed by expansion packs that offer new missions or additional samples of people reciting the characters' dialogue. The fact that it could easily be modified in order to reduce the amount of time the player spends aimlessly wandering also helped.

The first major problem with Ultima VIII was that it demanded specifications that many complained were unreasonable. In one walk-through, the writer prophetically asked if we would need whatever Intel decided to call the 80686 chip in order to play Ultima IX. This was long before the era of graphics accelerator cards, or even VESA-level graphics in games, but for some weird reason, Ultima VIII was subject to frequent slowdowns even on an 80486 clocked at 66 megahertz, with what was then a whopping sixty-four megabytes of RAM. Frequent slowdowns on what was then the most powerful computer available to the home user is a sign of one thing only: code bloat. Given that the original DOOM and even the original Quake ran just fine on such a machine, Ultima VIII smacks of buggy, under-optimised coding. The following year, Origin was reduced to nothing more than a subsidiary of the insidious Electronic Arts company.

Not helping matters any was the fact that the interface did not lend itself well to adventure or puzzle-solving. The isometric perspective had been used to great effect in Syndicate and later Syndicate Wars, but it only gets in the way during Ultima VIII. Combat is difficult at best to control, the spell interface is convoluted beyond belief, and puzzles are just plain ludicrous. Dooming the game was the number of water traps with moving platforms, which constantly forced the player to restart from their last savegame. At least two walk-through writers described water traps in this game as "way overused", and one even went so far as to say that they would have preferred a shorter game to one with this many water traps in it. Yes, that is what I think of whenever I complain that a shorter game is preferable to one that feels rigged. While I enjoyed the story of the world of Pagan and how the magical powers derived from the four Titans worked, the gameplay was so difficult that only boredom could motivate me to stick with it long enough to finish the game. And let us just say that the reward for finishing the game was insufficient considering the effort.

Which brings me to the plot. Not having played any of the other Ultima games, I will not go into the deeper mythology. Suffice to say that you play a long-running hero of the Ultima series called the Avatar. A rather evil being known as the Guardian has basically captured you and, in an introduction that managed to impress quite a number of people, banishes you to a world called Pagan. When you land on the beach of the one island on this fabled world, nobody knows of your importance, and you must work to find a means to go home. Meeting a mage, you ask about the possibility of leaving the planet, and thus begin a long series of quests to master the disciplines of worship for three of the four Titans. Along the way, you learn of three other deities whose powers derived from emotions, and ruled over the world of Pagan until the Guardian installed the Titans, effectively destroying them. They tell you of a fifth element that you can use in order to put down the Titans and open the doorway back to your homeworld, and thus the quest to strip the Titans of power really begins.

It is a unique, even innovative plot, and one that stands above the usual find-great-magical-item plot of other roleplaying games. Sadly, the concept was buried under a poor interface and a gameplay that made the game seem more like a chore. If I were rating it, I would give it a five for the graphical and audio elements. Otherwise, I would not bother with it.