The CRPG Addict is easily one of the best — perhaps the best — old-school gaming blogger on the Internet. Not only does he ably chronicle the history of computer role-playing games from the inception of the genre, but he does so with wit, an engaging writing style, and an attention to detail that is unparalleled. (Seriously…he has found some phenomenally early examples of CRPGs, which surprise by fact of their very existence.)

And he has finally, in his more-or-less chronological procession through the CRPG space, started his playthrough of Ultima 6, which I (and many others, it would seem) have been long-anticipating and looking forward to.

He actually begins by pointing out — and perhaps criticizing — something that I and a few others have expended no small amount of breath and pixels pointing out:

The Ultima series is rightfully famous for re-inventing the game engine and magic system between numbered titles, but it also re-invented its stories, too. Hardly any aspect of the world holds up to scrutiny between any two games. IV and V are the closest, but in general, the game manuals engage in a rampage of retconning between titles.

He then goes on to list a few choice examples from Ultima 6 and its documentation. And, indeed, he doesn’t touch on anywhere near the total number of examples one could pull from Ultima 6, for these are truly legion. He concludes — mostly — his examination of this issue thusly:

What’s particularly startling about many of these retcons is that they’re utterly unnecessary. Who in the world came up with “gargoyles” as the best name for this other civilization? The word carries all kinds of baggage in existing lore, and it’s always been tied to creatures who spent at least part of their time as stone. That’s how Ultima V had them. Why create all kinds of confusion between gargoyles and daemons? A bolder choice would be to just leave them as daemons but, through this game, show that they’re a lot more complex than the “always chaotic evil” creatures of the previous games. It would have allowed the game to explore themes of absolute good and absolute evil so common in CRPGs.

Then there’s the Avatar. Not only is it unnecessary to make him the hero of the first three games, as if the Sosarians and Britannians are so inept they always need outside help to solve their problems, but I honestly think the series should have abandoned the concept after Ultima IV. In that game, it worked perfectly. The creators were making a meta-commentary on the very nature of playing role-playing games. The Avatar was clearly meant to be the player himself or herself, warped into the land through the “moongate” of his or her computer screen, represented as a literal avatar in the game window. Ultima IV was a game that invited the player to act in a way that was more courageous, more virtuous, more adventurous than in the real world. At the end of the game, when you’re manifestly returned to your real life, you’re invited to “live as an example to thine own people”–to apply the lesson of the seven virtues to the real world. It was brilliant. They should have left it alone.

Already in Ultima V, though, they were weakening the concept. In that game, the Avatar is clearly not you, but some guy who lives alone in his single-family house of a precise layout. But fine, you rationalize, all that is just a metaphor for where you actually do live. By Ultima VI, you have some weird picture of a pole-dancing centaur girl on your wall, you’re inescapably a white male with long brown hair.

Which, in turn, leads to what just might be the most epic image captioning I’ve seen this year:

“To be looking like a hippie. To be rectifying this.”

He then moves on to discuss the actual gameplay experience, offering this refreshing opinion:

If I have misgivings about the game world, though, I have none about the gameplay experience. The interface for the Ultima series has always been state-of-the-art (at least when it comes to a top-down view). Ultima V had one of the best game engines I’ve ever played, and yet Ultima VI manages to improve upon it. The game uses both a mouse and keyboard, but in a comfortably redundant way so you can choose what works best for you. The world is still tile-based, but movement around it is quick enough that it feels fluid (having the characters face the direction they’re moving helps with this illusion). The paper-doll inventory is extremely easy to use. You can LOOK at any object or person to get more information, and interact with a lot of the objects. The multiple keyboard commands from the previous games have been consolidated into about a dozen (LOOK does both looking and searching; USE handles opening, jimmying, and other actions).

A lot of people — myself excluded, just to put that out there — have expressed serious misgivings about the Ultima 6 interface. In particular, the small viewport and the paged nature of the inventory system seem to irk and cause issues for many people. You’ll find almost no such objections here, apart from one:

In total, I think it’s one of the best interfaces ever designed for a CRPG. If it lacks some of the graphic sophistication of more modern games, it more than makes up for it with the ability to interact with objects and NPCs in ways that we no longer see. My only real complaints are that the game window is just a little too small, which makes it all the more infuriating when night falls. This is one of the few games in which trying to accomplish something in darkness is about as realistic as it is in real life, and the game mechanic actually encourages you to just go to bed.

The Addict goes on to praise the actual gameplay experience, the smootheness of the walking animations and the almost limitless interactivity of the world. In particular, he notes that many object interactions in the game have no point whatsoever…which of course is the point. The design philosophy behind Ultima 6’s world, building off of an idea established in Ultima 5 was that if you could see it, you could interact with it. And yes, there were limits to this — furniture, for the most part, was static, for example — but in general, Ultima 6 delivered on this philosophy. It is a design philosophy that is sadly absent from most of the CRPG space today.

He concludes the article by going through Ultima 6’s introductory sequence, and he notes a couple of places in which he feels it stumbles. Taken together, the introduction to the game and the aforementioned comments about the game’s design and world make for a very lengthy, image-laden read, and it’s easy to see why the Addict opted not to play further into the game. As such, I’m quite looking forward to his next outing…and I wonder just how much luck he’ll have in making his way to Cove, since doing so requires passing by the occupied Shrine of Compassion.

Also, I learned something: apparently the red highlighting of keywords in NPC dialogue can be turned off. I’m going to have to try that (not like I don’t have most of the keywords memorized anyhow).