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Comments
$200 is half the price of the laptop I am typing this on.
That is not meant to be a positive comparison.
Ugh. I just could never do that. Buying a physical copy of a game is NOT that important to me.
It comes with (in addition to normal manuals and documentation and stuff) two books, a cloth map, and a pendant, was released in 1985 and is one of the most historically important videogames ever made. So yes, it does cost $200 for a boxed copy with all of the contents still undamaged.
But that is not an insignificant amount.
I know; that's why I put the price under "con."
Might ask for it for Christmas.
Uh, hey INUH.
I...er, have a question.
Would you happen to be, er, rich?
Not really, but I live with my parents ATM, so my income isn't tied down by food and stuff.
I am not rich, but it would not take me all that long to scrape together $200. (As little as four weeks, really.)
Especially if you actually save money.
Yeah, I have twice that on my debit card now and it's roughly my weekly income. It's really more of a question of "I really want to, but it would be kind of irresponsible and my parents would probably be pissed that I spent that much at once."
Yes, it is mostly the fact that... it's $200, which is not an insignificant amount for something that is not really necessary.
Dude
anyone who can afford to spend 200 bucks
on a video game
is not poor
Yeah.
I think I'll just get Ultima 5 physically for now (since I'll actually be wanting to reference the books contained in it when I play, and I'm almost done with 4). It only costs $50-60, since it's less historically important.
^I did not say I was poor. I said I wasn't rich.
It's called "Savings". It's a thing that exists.
Good.
I actually downloaded Ultima 4, 5 and 6 yesterday. Considering playing them, but... eh.
I get it if the graphics (or, really, lack thereof) turn you off, but for what it's worth, U4 at least is really good.
(I believe U6 has actual graphics, but I think it would probably be a really bad place to jump in to the series)
If you have consistent income and you really want it, I don't see any reason not to get it. Like you said, it's a piece of gaming history; if it matters that much to you, then I'd say it's a worthy purchase, and $200 is a pretty reasonable price from the perspective of it being something of an artifact or relic.
Obviously, not everyone is going to think along the same lines about it, so it really comes down to how much value you place upon it. If I had a free $2500 sitting around, I'd be buying a sharp Albion longsword. It has quite limited practical application in this day and age, if any, but I'd consider that sword a very worthy expenditure of $2500. But that's only because it matters to me; no doubt most of you would balk at that price for something as unnecessary as a sword.
It's both a combination of terrible graphics and forced roleplaying.
It sounds like about the right price to me, really. I mean, it's a sword. Those things are big, made of high-quality metal and have to be made well.
Yeah, but it's not that. It's that it's not necessary; that money would probably be better used put away in savings.
So it all depends on how much disposable money you have, I guess. If you have significant savings already, then go ahead; but otherwise, a sword is not nearly as useful to you as... many other things.
I get what you mean about the forced roleplaying, but the roleplaying is meant to convey something other than what the roleplaying in, say, Mass Effect, is meant to convey.
Also, a big part of it is that going against the virtues is often mechanically incentivized (free spell components, not having to give gold to beggars, and getting XP from nonevil animals), but sets you back in terms of actually completing the game.
Yeah, I get that. I wouldn't spend that much on a sword myself, but if I saw a sword with that price tag, it wouldn't surprise me.
Well, yeah, but... if I roleplay, I don't want to be forced into a role.
I usually end up playing something like this anyway, but I want to be able to play something else, otherwise I just end up feeling... dissatisfied.
For comparison's sake, you can get an awesome blunt longsword from Albion for about $500, which handles superbly and is by all accounts an excellent sword except that it has no edge (which is good, in this case, since it's specifically designed not to cut people to ribbons).
^^I know what you mean, but...yeah, I guess this is a matter of tastes.
To me, the core appeal of the game is the feeling that I'm legitimately undertaking a pilgrimage of self-improvement.
Also, remember that at the time, the idea that a videogame would ask you to roleplay was this new idea that nobody had ever really considered, and a lot of players likely didn't realize that you actually had to follow the virtues until shrines started kicking them out.
But... like I was saying yesterday, that sort of thing is the sort of thing I can appreciate, but it's the sort of thing I can appreciate... hearing about, not actually playing through, because it would be really annoying to play through for me.
Yeah, fair enough.
From what I hear, U5 is the one that creates an atmosphere of paranoia as you try to overthrow an Orwellian government that's written your moral lessons into its code of laws, and you have to try to gather information and stuff without knowing who might rat you out to the guards. You might like that better, and little enough happens in U4 that U5 might be a viable jumping-on point.
To be fair, forced roleplaying is a factor of most games, even though most games aren't of the "RPG" genre. Consider one simple difference between The Legend of Zelda and Grand Theft Auto; in the former, you cannot kill NPCs, but you can in the latter. This inherent difference isn't a factor of programming difficulty, since giving an NPC a killswitch via a HP value is easy. It's a difference born of the different sort of expression coming through each game -- The Legend of Zelda is a game series where you're Robin Hood, King Arthur and Peter Pan all at once, so you're the ultimate good guy. Of course you can't kill innocent NPCs. But Grand Theft Auto is a series about being an amoral, or at least grey-shaded element of the criminal underworld, where the average civilian is anything from an expendable tool to a nuisance.
Games already inform and/or enforce certain kinds of roleplaying through a variety of factors, but chief among them are the limitations (or lack thereof) built into the gameplay. You'll find that games that allow you to victimise NPCs, to use the above example, usually have an element of moral choice, amorality or even complete disregard for others. Games that lack that feature will almost always cast you as a hero.
So forced roleplaying is pretty much already a part of most games.
No, that's not what I mean by roleplaying.
In Ultima, you are given a blank slate of a character to play, and from there, you define who they are. But the game forces you into a certain role- you must be kind, forgiving, etc etc etc.
This is compared to other games featuring blank slates, such as Skyrim, where you can create your character, and then go on to be any person you want to be- not limited by the game into following a predefined path.
Not technically true. Your character is pretty well established as literally being you.
I mean, that's sort of a blank slate, but not really.
Nope; one of the virtues is justice.
It's literally defined as being whoever you want it to be. You can have it as you, but you can have it as... anyone.
This is because... if the character was most gamers, very few people would ever complete the game, I guess.
And Honour, Sacrifice, and Compassion. In particular, Justice is noted as being the trickiest one to embody; it is not vengeance. Justice is not hunting down those who did wrongs. In particular, it is noted that-
Well, it follows the same "rules" I outlined above. Ultima IV, from what I can gather, is themed around the knightly virtues. So even if the game doesn't make the situation abundantly clear, the idea is essentially to become the perfect knight. So it incentivises roleplaying by rewarding morally righteous actions, in line with its theme. And I think that's an approach that is well, well beyond its time. Many games have moral choices, but they tend to come in a binary format with clearly defined good and evil. Ultima IV looks to cut out the middleman by rewarding only the good options most significantly. And that's not necessarily appropriate for every game, but when the theme is the knightly virtues, I think it's brilliant.
After all, most fantasy games define knights by the armour they wear and the size of the swords they wield rather than anything to do with the chivalric code or the application of moral strength. And you could play Ultima IV that way, presumably, but I think it's very clever how the game only acknowledges success through the application of virtue. It cuts right to the heart of the matter in ways that most fantasy games never have.
And let's be honest; most games that allow for a degree of roleplaying are awful at it. They give some very dry, obvious choices and the like, perhaps a few different endings and leave it at that. Often, it's less a case of choosing to roleplay who you want and more a case of choosing which rewards you want, or which mechanics you want to turn towards a dominant strategy.
Practically, yes, but the game is very obviously assuming that it actually is the person sitting in front of the computer.
That's kind of part of the point; you're supposed to change your behavior from how you probably behaved in the first three games. Now that there's no world-destroying evil to overcome, immoral acts aren't justifiable.
It's not vengeance, but it's not forgiveness, either. It's...understanding what is and isn't evil, and acting accordingly.