Screenshot of the day: Ultima III redux

Here we are again with Ultima III, this time in the Commodore 64 version -- which I prefer for its simple and elegant color palette. I don't know why one's avatar has such a big head, but it's a minor point.

Again we see designer Richard Garriott's narrative instincts on display. Explaining what's going on here requires a bit of background information. What you see in this screenshot is the castle of 'Exodus,' the demonic villain whose destruction is your final goal in the game. (Why this particular demonic villain is named after a book of the Old Testament, I couldn't say.) That castle is the very last location you will visit in the game, and in order to have any chance of surviving your assault upon it, you must have high-level characters with special weapons and a full complement of powerful spells. The characters displayed on the right of the screen, having just been created ten minutes before the screenshot was taken ("L: 01" means they are first level), most assuredly don't qualify. And even if they did qualify, they couldn't get there from this location. You need a ship to cross water, and there is no ship to be seen here.

This scenario -- a band of ill-qualified novice adventurers staring across an impassable ocean at their final goal, ominously framed by cascading lava -- is possible because of Ultima III's 'moongate' system. Moongates are portals which appear only at certain locations and only when the phases of the two moons (represented here by the numbers at the top of the screen) are in the correct configurations. If you enter one moongate and are feeling adventurous you might stumble through several of them and end up in a number of locations in the gameworld which can be reached no other way. Some moongate locations are placed for convenience -- they exist in an accessible spot from where you can teleport to other places. Some are placed in order to gain you access to some important location, like a town or a dungeon necessary for the furtherance of your quest. This moongate serves neither purpose. It is, to borrow Oscar Wilde's phrase again, quite useless.

There is no purpose served by coming here. You cannot get to Exodus's castle this way, and even if you could, chances are you are unprepared to deal with what lies inside. The only function this scene serves is a narrative one: foreshadowing. Laconically, in a way totally native to the videogame medium and borrowing nothing from novels or movies, Ultima III powerfully stokes your anticipation. I wish I could convey the awe I felt on that night in 1985 when, as a 10-year-old boy, I peered over my older brother's shoulder and gazed upon this forbidden place I knew we would eventually have to conquer.

Quite useless -- except that it created one of the most indelible memories in my years of playing games.

Comments

[Tim]

Another game that did similar foreshadowing was Dragon Quest 1. The final dungeon is visible right from the beginning of the game. It's across a seemingly small ocean from the first town, but of course you can't actually get there until the very end of the game. Since Dragon Quest was heavily inspired by Ultima and Wizardry I wonder if they got the idea from U3.

[Gordon Cameron]

I'm pretty ignorant of JRPGs and didn't play Dragon Quest, so I didn't know about that. Thanks for pointing that out. The hinting of distant, yet-to-be-explored locales is a powerful technique for maintaining the player's interest and it's interesting what ways were developed to do this in an era of limited technology. Using geographical proximity combined with a temporarily impassible barrier is certainly one way. Physical maps boxed with the game, or player dialogue, are of course others.