Richard Cobbett, writing at PC Gamer, has published a lengthy missive on the legacy of the Avatar in the Ultima series. Which I think might actually be a refresh of something he had written previously, except this time with more references to Shroud of the Avatar worked in. (PC Gamer also published an “impressions” piece concerning Shroud recently, in which a comparison to the concept of “Skyrim Online” is used in a favourable way.)

Right out of the box, he articulates something very important about Ultima, something that most fans of the series should find agreeable:

There’s many reasons that Ultima is special, from the pants-on-head insanity of the early games to the sandbox nature of the world, where there was technically a plot to follow in a specific order, but no real penalty for deciding balls to it, finding a magic carpet or jumping into a moon-gate and simply getting lost in both the stories and, later on, the ability to do things like bake bread. At one point, albeit patched out, doing so with the blood of a murdered man and feeding it to his grieving son. Or hire a prostitute for a talking mouse. Or find a hundred ways to break the game systems over your knee for fun and profit.

Cobbett’s central thesis, however, is that if you actually consider the Ultima series as a whole — or, at least, treat Ultima 4 onward in this way — it becomes clear that the Avatar causes way more problems for Britannia than s/he ever really solves for it, and that each successive evil that is thrust upon Britannia is in fact in some way caused by the Avatar:

In the first place, damn near everything that goes wrong is entirely, literally, the Avatar’s fault. Never intentionally! There’s no arguing that. Canonically at least, everything he does is righteous and it’s not until Ultima VIII: Pagan that he’s forced into doing horrible things for the greater good – that being the theme of the game, which takes place on a dark realm from which he has to escape with urgency.

It’s true though. Initially, the Quest for the Avatar ends up with him simply taking a powerful artefact called the Codex Of Ultimate Wisdom, which turns out to destroy the gargoyle home and set up Ultima IV. It also however results in the creation of his nemesis, a godlike force of ultimate evil called The Guardian that conquers at least ten worlds while the Avatar is saving just the one, as well as creating no fewer than two evil religions as dark mirrors of his own. If we assume that the Avatar is also the Stranger From Another World who starred in Ultima I-III, Ultima V is also his fault, the Shadowlords and their brutal dictatorship having been spawned from shards left behind by his earlier monster hunting. Making things worse, by the time we get to Ultima IX, the Avatar ends up being responsible for not only the final destruction of the gargoyles’ new home, the entire land of Pagan (to the point that in an early version of Ultima IX’s story, the Guardian was able to torture Lord British just by showing him a clip-show of what his champion had gotten up to), and the ending is him nuking Britannia and leaving its surviving population as intergalactic refugees who survive the devastation at the cost of everything they love.

Earlier in the piece, though, Cobbett attempts to sidestep the matter of Ultima 9:

…let’s not speak of the final game, Ascension…

Now, sure…opinions about Ultima 9 are sharply divided. It is reviled and hated by a portion of the Ultima fandom; there’s no disputing this. Cobbett evidently is a member of this camp. Ultimately, though, this robs his essay of some of its potential. Because when he writes passages like this:

It’s just fascinating to me how the series that set out to hail the Avatar ultimately… not a pun, that word was inevitable at some point… became the case for the prosecution. But that’s just the start. To see what a failure the Avatar truly was, you just need to look at the point of the whole enterprise in the first place.

Ultima is not a story about perfection. That’s important. Lord British, despite being creator Richard Garriott’s author avatar, is regularly wrong, often pig-headed, and at times, damn near blind.

…what he’s writing about, whether he realizes it or not, is the plot of Ultima 9. Oh, sure, there’s that bit about the columns and the corrupted Virtues out in front of it, but the core of the story in Ascension is really that the Avatar has ultimately been a detriment to Britannia, precisely because he has been its crutch, and because his every action has triggered some other evil that has become manifest decades or centuries later. And Lord British, too, realizes that he has rested too long on his laurels and actively comes to Britannia’s aid himself. He realizes, belatedly, that he cannot rely on the Avatar anymore; that if he is to be king, he must be the first to act in defense of his realm.

I am not sure if Cobbett realizes that this is the message of Ultima 9; I suspect he may not, given his incorrect relation of its ending (quoted above). But there it is. There’s really nothing in Cobbett’s piece that should strike any Ultima fan as being a revelation, excepting those Ultima fans who have never completed Ultima 9 (or who have eschewed playing the game entirely).

Otherwise, though, it’s a good piece, and an enjoyable read.