In this review, we ready our weapons in the 16-Bit DOS game Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. We find out how well this RPG game plays.
This game was released in 1987 and is the first in a very long series.
We actually have a small amount of experience with this franchise, though mostly with one spinoff game. We first played Ultima Underworld – The Stygian Abyss. That game wound up getting quite the great score from us. After that, we played Ultima Underworld II – Labrynith of Worlds. That game wound up getting a barely passable score. So, we thought we’d try a game in the main series to see how it plays.
You basically appear in the lands of Sosaria as the avatar. You are quested by various kings to perform certain tasks. That was, well, as far as I could get in terms of storyline.
When you start the game, you play as a small number of different races. You can pick from Human, Elf, Dwarf, or Bobbit. After that, you can select a gender, then a class. There are four classes to choose from: Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and Thief. After that, you will appear near the city of Britain in the overworld.
There are at least three types of locations in the overworld. The first location type of note is the castle. There aren’t that many, but each castle features a King. You can offer your service if you have no gold (which is likely the case). At that point, you can receive a quest to fulfill. The alternative is that you can pay a penance to the king. In exchange, you’ll get valuable hits. These castles can also offer various services as well.
The second location is the village. Like castles, villages offer a variety of services. There is the pubs where you can buy a drink and gossip. There is also the food store and groceries. These services are vital as you will need food to service. There are also a variety of dealers that you can buy and sell items from. Generally, these items are items you can equip.
A third location type is the dungeon. These areas are packed with treasure, enemies, and even various traps (force fields were the only traps I could find).
As you travel over the overworld, you’ll use food for every space you go over. So, while having nearly 100 units of food sounds fantastic, you’ll burn through that food quickly (hence why any value under 100 appears red). Also, while you travel, you can come across a number of different enemies. To attack, use “A”, then the direction of the attack (this took me a few deaths to figure out as I was mashing “A” wondering if I’ll ever do any damage).
Assuming you survive, you’ll get some much needed money and experience.
The next question after a fight or two is probably going to be, “OK, how do I recover hits in this game anyway?” Besides buying health from the king, the other way to restore hit points is head straight for a dungeon. That is extremely counter-intuitive, but bear with me on this one for a moment.
When you enter a dungeon, you’ll probably encounter enemies. If you kill an enemy – any enemy – then you’ll recover hit points once you reach the surface again (assuming you survive the encounter of course). This, of course, is a rather strange way to restore hit points, but that’s apparently how this game operates. If there is a limit in hit points, I couldn’t find it. The more enemies you take out in a single run in a dungeon, the more points you recover.
After a while, you’ll probably want to better defend yourself with better equipment. After you buy some armour, weapons, or other equipment, you’ll probably be like me and ask, “OK, how do I equip these things anyway?”
After browsing around a large amount of documentation online (which only apparently showed half the answers half the time, then brute forcing nearly half of my entire keyboard, I finally figured it out. It turns out, you need to tap “R” for “ready weapon”. After that, you need to hit “W” for weapon or “A” for armour. There are other items, though I never got a chance to figure those out if they are any different. After that, the game will finally relinquish a reasonably helpful menu that permits you to “ready” an item. Otherwise, you are fighting without weapons or armour. In a game like this, you need every bit of help you can get, that’s for sure.
You might think that, after a while, the game will start getting easier. After all, you are gaining hits finally, figured out how to equip some good weapons or armour, and developed a small pool of cash. Well, as it turned out, at least for me, that isn’t the case. Levelling up will give you a boost in stats which probably help, but dungeons just bombard you with more enemies. Oh, you recovered yourself all the way to 200 hit points? Not any more. You slew 3 rats, 5 bats, 6 rogues, and 2 skeleton enemies. Nice, but we’ll sick a 7th rogue to finish off those last 12 hit points before you can make it back to the ladder to reach the surface.
When you die, which you will do a lot of, you will “attempt” to “resurrect”. This means that you lose all your gold, but automatically go back to 99 hits and 99 food. It’s not quite square one, but its darn close. Oh, by the way, that great sword you armed yourself with? It disappeared while you were fighting those enemies. So, yes, save for the experience points you earned, you are back to square one.
If you levelled up, that just means you are going to get hit harder with enemies on the first level or two in the dungeon. Heaven forbid you even think about dungeon level 3. That gelatinous cube you were quested to kill will probably instantly kill you in the process. I know you grinded up to 300 hit points in the process for the last hour, but, yoink! You’re dead again.
Oh yeah, before I forget, we also loaded up the outside of the dungeon with dragon turtles and pirate ships. So, the second you surface, they’ll take shots at you at a safe distance, effectively shaving off 90% of all the hit points you worked hard to build up while in the dungeon. Yeah, eventually, you are going to die again, your efforts just delay the inevitable.
The only other insight I gleaned from the experience is that “Z” will show you your stats. You can see all of your stats and how they are gradually improving for what it’s worth.
So, for me, the first big problem is the UI. I have had my share of difficult to understand interfaces from the DOS era for years. Even knowing some of the more painful ones, this ranks up there with difficult to understand. I thought that maybe I could find a built-in help function, but if there is, I couldn’t find it. Just figuring out basic things took a lot of trial and error. This along dials up the steepness of the learning curve to 11. This is even before you figure out any actions that require even a hint of complexity (equipping items is one of them). Even with extensive online research (which did help), I still found myself quite confused about it all.
This isn’t even touching how hard it was to figure out what you even needed to do. I did figure out how to get quests from kings. Apparently, you can get hints from pubs, not that I could do anything except buy a few drinks from them. Figuring out goals otherwise just felt like a pursuit not worth trying given how many other difficulties there are to be had.
Then there is the difficulty curve. This game starts off as difficult and just gets harder from there. I did spend quite a bit of time trying to build up my character through gaining experience points and grinding up hit points, but it seemed like the game just ratcheted up the difficulty by throwing larger and larger hoards of enemies at me after. No matter what I did, it seemed that the game just found ways of pushing me back. This really only lead to frustration in the end.
Probably the only positive in this is that the game seems quite expansive. There are plenty of areas to explore. I know because after you die, you randomly resurrect in a different location. As it turns out, in this game, in order to see the world, you just have to die over and over again. Death is the perfect form of travel to see the world weirdly enough.
Generally speaking, this is probably one of the least fun experiences I’ve had with an RPG in a long time. It wound up being an experience on a similar level as Dragon Warrior II. In that game, however, at least I felt like I was making real progress. In this game, I felt like I was stuck at the beginning while the game eventually found me and shoved me in a locker before laughing it’s way off into the distance. This over top of the ridiculously steep learning curve. Good luck cracking the interface without any kind of assistance, you’re going to need it.
Graphically speaking, this game is quite mediocre. One way to think of this game is the fact that Might and Magic: Book One – Secret of the Inner Sanctum was released in the same year on the same system. It also sported first person perspective action. At least there were walls o some sort and even panel textures. In this game, you get bare wireframe art in the dungeons that is only comparable to Atari games from the 70s. The overworld and towns are mildly better with the top down perspective, but only moderately so. So, in the end, the graphics are actually quite mediocre for a game of its time.
The audio isn’t much better. All you get is a few beeps and boops here and there. There’s no real music that I noticed. It might have improved with some simple sounds when you open chests and coffins (“U” for unlock for chests and “O” for open for coffins if you are wondering). As it stands now, this game could use improvement as far as I’m concerned.
Overall, I was 1 for 2 on this franchise so far. I liked one game and disliked another. I was hoping for a better game, but wound up being disappointed. The games learning curve is really steep and really bad. The difficulty isn’t much better as it as barely approachable. With no real way of learning the system outside of researching third party documentation for hours on end, the design leaves quite a bit to be desired. The graphics are mediocre and the audio needs improvement. So, for me, a game to pass on.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Obtained 2,698 experience points. Completed no quests.
General gameplay: 11/25
Replay value: 3/10
Graphics: 6/10
Audio: 2/5
Overall rating: 44%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
