I still remember playing my first western RPG. Despite the name of the article, it wasn’t Ultima IV. I’m too young for that. It was Fable, an action RPG focused in choosing between good or evil, something that was a feature in every big AAA RPG at the time. It was an interesting game for a kid raised on console JRPGs, as I could feel more like I was roleplaying, since I could make real moral choices, just like tabletop RPGs. Fable wasn’t a very good game, though. It was average, at best. The moral system looked pretty good to me at the time I played (I was so evil I got horns), but it really wasn’t very deep.

Soon after Fable, I stopped playing videogames for years and got into other stuff. Some years later, I bought a good GPU for my computer and picked up where I stopped. I played most of Bioware games and I was marvelled by the fact that I could choose how the story plays, something I never did in old JRPGs. The story was better than Fable and it really looked like my actions mattered. Not much time after, I started digging older or indie RPGs and started to perceive more nuanced ways of telling a story and making games reactive than those the AAA games were using. Eventually, I played Ultima IV and it rocked my world.

Ultima IV is a 1985 CRPG developed by Origin Systems, lead by the famous Richard Garriot. He says that after receiving enraged letters from parents complaining that his games were all about unethical morals like stealing (which was almost required for beating games like Ultima II, due to poor game design) and killing innocents (required for finishing Ultima I, as you have to kill an innocent clown and steal his keys to finish the game), he decided to make a different game. Instead of “go kill the evil bad guy”, he made a reflexive game in which morals deemed by himself as important were the core of the experience. Therefore, the main objective of Ultima IV was not to slay the *insert stupid name here* and save the world, but to be enlightened in all eight virtues, read the Codex of Wisdom and become the Avatar, the embodiment of the virtues. Basically, the new Jesus in the land.

The eight virtues were honesty, compassion, valor, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality and humility. Each virtue had a town and a class that were made at its image. The character creation process was unique for its time. You would answer different questions and, based in which virtues you deemed more important, you would get a different class and start the game in a different location (just outside of the town that were correlate to the virtue you “chose”). The system wasn’t perfect, but it was a roleplaying achievement at the time.

What makes Ultima IV so memorable is that it is the game which has the best morality system I’ve ever played. That’s because the morality is intertwined with the gameplay. If you run from a battle, for example, you lose valor. The game doesn’t say “you lost 2 valor points”, you just lose it. If you give money to beggars, you get invisible compassion points. If you do ambiguous stuff like killing non-evil enemies, for example, you might lose and gain points at the same time. The whole system is hidden, but active through the whole game. You have to research about the virtues in the game towns to understand them and act accordingly. When you reach a certain number of points, get to know the location of the shrine and the mantra, you can medidate and get enlightened in that virtue.

When I played Ultima IV, I thought that when you had already reached avatarhood, you could be an asshole and nothing would happen because you already were enlightened. I was plain wrong. The first thing I did as soon as I was enlightened in valor was to run away from battles, because the random encounters were really annoying. So I ran for the first time and I lost the goddamn virtue and had to raise it again and repeat the process. The game finishes in a super hard megadungeon in which you can’t run from any battle, or you’ll reach the Codex of Wisdom in the end and will be rejected. Yeah, I guess I learned the true meaning of valor.

This kind of game mechanic made morality something important in Ultima IV, really affecting the way you played the game. In a big share of today’s AAA RPGs, on the other side, morality and choices are stuff that happens in dialogue. Bioware games are the best example, as you can either be good or bad (it doesn’t make a difference if you call it Paragon and Renegade, Bioware), but that is mostly chosen only by dialogue. The fights and all the rest of the gameplay will be mostly the same. Fable was better at this aspect, but then again, it was very simple and all the morality concept was kind a of caricature of good vs evil (and it had a very boring story).

Someone might even complain that Ultima IV didn’t let you finish the game if you were evil and that’s true, but it did let you play it the way you want it. You can attack or steal from anybody and the game will go on. Sure, you won’t finish it, but you can play exploring and being evil all you like. In most modern RPGs, you can’t even attack anybody that isn’t clearly a foe. This freedom of choice in gameplay was really spectacular for its time and it still is today, as it is largely forgotten.

Ultima IV was a gem of its time and one of the best RPGs ever. It was a game in which morality really mattered. It’s a shame the AAA industry moved away from this kind of game in the 2000s, choosing cinema-like narrative for all its games and largely ignoring what happens outside the dialogues. Because of this, Ultima IV is a game to be remembered.