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''Ultima VI: The False Prophet'', released by
Origin Systems Origin Systems, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Austin, Texas. It was founded on March 3, 1983, by Richard Garriott and his brother Robert Garriott, Robert. Origin is best known for their groundbreaking work in multiple genres ...
in
1990 File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of Humankind, humanity on Earth, Astroph ...
, is the sixth part in the
role-playing video game A role-playing video game (commonly referred to as simply a role-playing game or RPG, as well as a computer role-playing game or CRPG) is a video game genre where the player controls the actions of a character (or several party members) immers ...
series of '' Ultima''. It is the third and final game in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy. ''Ultima VI'' sees the player return to Britannia, at war with a race of
gargoyle In architecture, and specifically Gothic architecture, a gargoyle () is a carved or formed grotesque with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building, thereby preventing it from running down masonry walls ...
s from another land, struggling to stop a prophecy from ending their race. The player must help defend Britannia against these gargoyles, and ultimately discover the secrets about both lands and its peoples. ''Ultima VI'' continues to advance the technology of the Ultima series. The game world is larger, with a 1024x1024
tile map A tile-based video game is a type of video or video game where the playing area consists of small square (or, much less often, rectangular, parallelogram, or hexagonal) graphic images referred to as ''tiles'' laid out in a grid. That the screen ...
seamlessly connected and to scale. World interactivity is further increased with object manipulation, movement, and crafting. Graphics and sound are likewise advanced with the use of new
sound card A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term ''sound card'' is also applied to external audio i ...
technology and
VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can no ...
graphics cards, and the user interface is streamlined with the use of point-and-click icons. ''Ultima VI'' was followed by '' Ultima VII: The Black Gate'' in 1992.


Plot

Some years after Lord British has returned to power, the
Avatar Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearanc ...
is captured and tied on a sacrificial altar, about to be sacrificed by red demon-like creatures, the
gargoyle In architecture, and specifically Gothic architecture, a gargoyle () is a carved or formed grotesque with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building, thereby preventing it from running down masonry walls ...
s. Three of the Avatar's companions, Shamino, Dupre and Iolo, suddenly appear, save the Avatar and collect the sacred text the gargoyle priest was holding. The Avatar's party flees through a moongate to Castle Britannia, and three of the gargoyles follow. The game begins with the player fighting the gargoyles in Lord British's throne room. After the battle, the Avatar learns that the shrines of Virtue were captured by the gargoyles and he embarks on a quest to rescue Britannia from the invaders. It is only later in the game that the Avatar learns that the whole situation looks rather different from the point of view of the gargoyles – indeed, they even have their own system of
virtues Virtue ( la, virtus) is moral excellence. A virtue is a trait or quality that is deemed to be morally good and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being. In other words, it is a behavior that shows high moral standard ...
. The quest for victory over the gargoyles now turns into a quest for peace with them.


Gameplay

This game ended the use of multiple scales; in earlier games a town, castle, or dungeon would be represented as a single symbol on the world map, which then expanded into a full sub-map when entering the structure. In ''Ultima VI'', the whole game uses a single scale, with towns and other places seamlessly integrated into the main map; dungeons are now also viewed from the same perspective as the rest of the game, rather than the first-person perspective used by ''Ultima I-V''. The game kept the basic tile system and screen layout of the three preceding parts, but altered the look into a much more colourful and detailed
oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) * Oblique angle, in geometry *Oblique triangle, in geometry *Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...
view, to take full advantage of the newly released
VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can no ...
graphics cards for PCs.
Non-player character A non-player character (NPC), or non-playable character, is any character in a game that is not controlled by a player. The term originated in traditional tabletop role-playing games where it applies to characters controlled by the gamemaster o ...
s had their portraits shown when talked to, something that would not have been feasible on the classic 8-bit
Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...
.


Development

The development of the ''Ultima'' series originated on the
Apple II series The Apple II series (trademarked with square brackets as "Apple ] ''" and rendered on later models as "Apple //") is a family of home computers, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primaril ...
and every game thus far had been developed primarily on that platform, but by 1990 the market for
8-bit computer In computer architecture, 8-bit integers or other data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet). Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers or data buses o ...
s in the US had nearly evaporated, so there was no Apple II version for the first time. In any case, the games were starting to outgrow the capabilities of 8-bit hardware. Origin reportedly attempted an Apple II port of ''Ultima VI'', but gave up after deciding it was impossible. A port for the more capable 16-bit
Apple IIGS The Apple IIGS (styled as II), the fifth and most powerful of the Apple II family, is a 16-bit personal computer produced by Apple Computer. While featuring the Macintosh look and feel, and resolution and color similar to the Amiga and Atari ST ...
had been planned, and rumored to have been started, but was never released (despite mentions of the machine on the box packaging and manual). The game was ported to the
Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...
, although not without trimming considerable elements including aesthetics (no portraits), but also gameplay (no horses, no working gems, reduced NPC dialogs, simplified quests, etc.). Some major changes were made that distinguished ''Ultima VI'' from earlier ''Ultima'' games. Several of these changes were influenced by Origin's 1988
action role-playing game An action role-playing game (often abbreviated action RPG or ARPG) is a subgenre of video games that combines core elements from both the action game and role-playing genre. Definition The games emphasize real-time combat where the player h ...
, ''
Times of Lore ''Times of Lore'' is a 1988 action role-playing game that was developed and published by Origin Systems for several platforms, including PC, Commodore 64/ 128, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Apple II, NES, and Amiga. Plot The game's story ...
'', created by Chris Roberts,''
Computer Gaming World ''Computer Gaming World'' (CGW) was an American computer game magazine published between 1981 and 2006. One of the few magazines of the era to survive the video game crash of 1983, it was sold to Ziff Davis in 1993. It expanded greatly through ...
'', issue 68 (February 1990), pages 34 & 38
and
FTL Games FTL Games (Faster Than Light) was the video game development division of Software Heaven Inc. FTL created several popular video games in the 1980s. Despite the company's small size, FTL products were consistently number-one sellers and received t ...
's 1987 RPG '' Dungeon Master''. One such change was the world design, where no longer would towns and castles be represented by icons on the
overworld An overworld (sometimes referred to as a hub world) is, in a broad sense, commonly an area within a video game that interconnects all its levels or locations. They are mostly common in role-playing games, though this does not exclude other vide ...
map, but where everything in the game world is represented on the same 1024x1024
tile map A tile-based video game is a type of video or video game where the playing area consists of small square (or, much less often, rectangular, parallelogram, or hexagonal) graphic images referred to as ''tiles'' laid out in a grid. That the screen ...
, except for dungeons and smaller outdoor maps. The caverns and dungeons beneath the land were also no longer represented in first-person view, but changed to an overhead, oblique isometric view, like the rest of the game. Another such change was the incorporation of some real-time elements.
Richard Garriott Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux (''né'' Garriott; born July 4, 1961) is an American video game developer, entrepreneur and private astronaut. Although both his parents were American, he maintains dual British and American citizenship by birth. ...
also based the game's new icon-based
point and click Point and click are the actions of a computer user moving a pointer to a certain location on a screen (''pointing'') and then pressing a button on a mouse, usually the left button (''click''), or other pointing device. An example of point and cli ...
interface on ''Times of Lore'', streamlining the commands into ten icons. Garriott expressed annoyance at not having thought of it sooner, realizing that "it was clearly the way to have gone" for earlier games. The software routines that governed every element of movement and combat was developed by 25 year-old
Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
programmer Herman Miller, who previously wrote the IBM conversions of '' Ultima V'' and ''Times of Lore''. The conversation system, the means by which the player talks with characters, was developed by 26 year-old
Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
programmer Cheryl Chen, who developed her own programming language for the game called UCS (''Ultima VI'' conversation system). Conversations with townspeople were no longer restricted in terms of length, compared to the limitations of earlier ''Ultima'' games. It was one of the first major PC games directly targeted to PC systems equipped with VGA graphics and a mouse, when the big gaming computer was still the
Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
. The game supported
sound card A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term ''sound card'' is also applied to external audio i ...
s for music as well, which were not yet common when it was released. Other sound effects, such as the clashing of swords, magical zaps, or explosions, were still played through the
PC speaker A PC speaker is a loudspeaker built into some IBM PC compatible computers. The first IBM Personal Computer, model 5150, employed a standard 2.25 inch magnetic driven (dynamic) speaker. More recent computers use a tiny moving-iron or pie ...
. The Amiga version was itself ported from the PC and due to a lack of reprogramming it was very slow and generally considered unplayable without accelerator card on a first- or second-generation Amiga. A port of the game for
FM Towns The is a Japanese personal computer, built by Fujitsu from February 1989 to the summer of 1997. It started as a proprietary PC variant intended for multimedia applications and PC games, but later became more compatible with IBM PC compatibles. ...
platform was made primarily for
Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
ese market. This CD-ROM-based version included full speech in both
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and
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. Remarkably, in this particular version voice acting was recorded at Origin, mostly by the people the characters were based on (with
Richard Garriott Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux (''né'' Garriott; born July 4, 1961) is an American video game developer, entrepreneur and private astronaut. Although both his parents were American, he maintains dual British and American citizenship by birth. ...
as Lord British, Greg Dykes as Dupre, etc.), though not all personnel could be reached at the time of recording, so some substitutes were used. The game came with a cloth map of Britannia and a Moonstone made from a black colored bit of glass. Slightly improved versions of the ''Ultima VI'' engine were also used for the '' Worlds of Ultima'' spin-off series. Origin produced a
deluxe edition The terms special edition, limited edition, and variants such as deluxe edition, or collector's edition, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as books, prints, r ...
of ''Ultima VI'' for sale by mail order at the same $69.95 price as the retail version. Lord British autographed the copies, which contained an audio interview with him, game hints, and higher-quality moonstone. The
DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
version of ''Ultima VI'' may have sound and speed problems when running on modern computers and operating systems. However, it can run reliably in a
DOSBox DOSBox is a free and open-source emulator which runs software for MS-DOS compatible disk operating systems—primarily video games. It was first released in 2002, when DOS technology was becoming obsolete. Its adoption for running DOS games i ...
environment. Several open-source
remake A remake is a film, television series, video game, song or similar form of entertainment that is based upon and retells the story of an earlier production in the same medium—e.g., a "new version of an existing film". A remake tells the same ...
projects exist; Nuvie and xU4 aim to recreate the ''Ultima VI engine'' in a manner similar to the goals of Exult.


Reception

In 1990, the game had sold under 100,000 copies in the United States. Scorpia of ''
Computer Gaming World ''Computer Gaming World'' (CGW) was an American computer game magazine published between 1981 and 2006. One of the few magazines of the era to survive the video game crash of 1983, it was sold to Ziff Davis in 1993. It expanded greatly through ...
'' in 1990 stated that she "had some profound, mixed feelings about" ''Ultima VI'' because of the changes to the user interface, graphics, and gameplay. The change to a single scale for the world, for example, greatly increased travel and exploration time; long quests had small rewards; and performance became sluggish with many characters on screen. She liked, however, the "''solid'' story" that elegantly concluded the second trilogy, lack of pointless outdoor encounters, and improved NPC dialogues, and concluded that ''Ultima VI'' "is a very good game". In 1993, Scorpia criticized the middle of the game and the hunt for the pirate map, but stated that it was "definitely worth your time". ''
Dragon A dragon is a reptilian legendary creature that appears in the folklore of many cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but dragons in western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as ...
'' gave the MS-DOS version 5 out of 5 stars, but only 3 out of 5 stars for the Super NES version. The editors of '' Strategy Plus'' named ''Ultima VI'' the best role-playing game of 1990. However, Editor-in-Chief Brian Walker wrote at the time, "If any genre is in need of a shake up, this is surely it. Like wargames, role-playing games are suffering from too literal conversions of the pen and paper systems." He argued that the genre had become bland and repetitive, and remarked that "''Ultima VI'' took role-playing as far it could go within these sualparameters, offering as it did, brilliant graphics and a consistent world." ''
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'' gave the Amiga version of ''Ultima VI'' an overall score of 91%, criticising the amount of disk swapping throughout the game, and that and to begin the game "you have to decompact the game to four spare floppies", further frustrated by the fact that this process needs to be repeated if the player creates a new character. ''The One'' furthermore states that "''Ultima VI'' is not a fast game by any means and the frequent disk accessing and swapping makes two drives a necessity", but goes on to say that "given ''Ultima VI's'' incredible scale and scope it's a miracle that it made it onto the Amiga at all." ''The One'' praises ''Ultima VI's'' size, gameplay, and design, expressing that "There's no other RPG that comes within a mile of matching ''Ultima VI's'' huge depth and amazingly real atmosphere." ''Computer Gaming World'' nominated ''Ultima VI'' for its 1990 "Role-Playing Game of the Year" award, which went to '' Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula''. The magazine highlighted ''Ultima VI''s "interesting and important story, dynamite graphics ... and incredible detail". In 1992, ''Computer Gaming World'' added ''Ultima VI'' to the magazine's Hall of Fame for games that readers highly rated over time. In 1996 the magazine ranked it as the 44th best game of all time, stating that ''Ultima VI'' "hit new heights in virtuality with the defined objects in the game world" and "also presented a brilliant treatise on the danger of prejudice".


Fan remakes

A
fan-made Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works (fiction, fan fiction and review literature), ...
recreation of ''Ultima VI'' using the '' Dungeon Siege'' engine, The U6 Project (aka Archon), was released on 5 July 2010. Another remake project uses the Exult engine, using graphics from ''
Ultima VII ''Ultima VII: The Black Gate'' is the seventh installment of the ''Ultima (series), Ultima series'' of role-playing video games, released on April 16, 1992. In it the player returns as The Avatar, a would-be paragon of moral virtue who faces down ...
''. ''Ultima 6 Online'' is an MMO version of ''Ultima VI''.


References


External links

* *
''Ultima VI: The False Prophet''
at the Codex of Ultima Wisdom wiki {{Authority control 1990 video games Amiga games Atari ST games Commodore 64 games DOS games FM Towns games Games commercially released with DOSBox Immersive sims NEC PC-9801 games Open-world video games Role-playing video games ScummVM-supported games Sharp X68000 games Single-player video games Super Nintendo Entertainment System games Ultima (series) Video game sequels Video games developed in the United States Video games featuring protagonists of selectable gender Video games produced by Warren Spector Video games scored by David R. Watson Video games with oblique graphics