I had no idea, that's awesome.
Ultima is all about virtue, what virtue means, and how to embody it. I can't really imagine a story like that these days. I'll always have a soft spot for Lord British, he's such a perfectly American American.
What's a shame is that these options got pared away as the games got bigger. I wanna say Ultima 7 was when the Avatar became canonically a blonde white guy no matter how you had played them before.
It would be incredible to have a modern game where your choices were about how to be virtuous and the conflict for the player was to try to figure out what virtue actually is. The most complex moral dilemma we get in games these days are just dialogue trees where you decide whether to be nice or an asshole.
The most complex moral dilemma we get in games these days are just dialogue trees where you decide whether to be nice or an asshole.
Most games that give you that option don't even have any consequences for those choices, either. It'll be like:
"Will you kill this person?"
"I will not"
"Oops, they died anyway"
I dunno. Pillars of eternity and tyranny have some pretty interesting stuff in them. They're modern right?
Tyranny was particularly amazing, there are a lot of very mixed choices to make and you can legalese your way out of a shitload of accountability. In fact
::: spoiler gameplay path You can legalese so fucking hard the literal avatar of justice/law turns on the evil empire and sides with you :::.
I think it manages to make playing someone stuck in the military bureaucracy of an evil empire trying to stay alive and torn between loyalties pretty interesting.
Hey i remember playing that game on the NES back when i was a kid, i fuckin loved it even if i didn't really understand shit because i was like 6 or 7
I'm always impressed at the devs who tried to make more story heavy games on older platforms. Similar vibe with the first couple Final Fantasy games and Romance of the Three Kingdoms on NES, it's neat to see turn based games in an era where that style of game was much less common.
It was made for total nerds so no surprises. Look at what Rust enthusiasts do right now - they live in 2100 already
ULTIMA is part of the WOKE agenda!