Zombie Ultima

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 11, 2010

Confession time, here. My secret shame. I’ve been playing… Lord of Ultima. I don’t know why. I guess I’ve always been a strategy game fan, especially the more “builder” oriented ones, and I’ve even been a developer on an indie “MMORTS” where we did something similar (but with much more interesting combat, IMO, and probably with a smaller budget than these guys…). So I have kind of an interest in these sorts of games. I’m too busy to invest much time (or, really, any money) into them. But I figured I could check it out. And I’ve been playing for a while.

I knew it wasn’t Ultima. I knew it had nothing to do with Ultima other than some names and a few scattered paragraphs where they tried to rebrand an otherwise generic game into an old and much-beloved franchise.  I signed up out of curiosity when it launched, and managed to build up a few cities, fend off some attacks, join up with a powerful alliance (in the top ten!) which has since been gutted, and even “leveled up” to the rank of emperor. I never invested much time (nor any money) into the thing, however, which is probably why it fell flat for me, and isn’t much more than a medieval SimCity for me.  But hey, I always liked SimCity. Why did I play this one instead of the zillions of others? Well, it was probably the name, “Ultima.” In spite of all I knew, I went willingly in the hope of seeing some glimmer of the past glory that was the game series.

In some monster shows featuring people getting turned into mindless zombies or bloodthirsty vampires, there’s usually a  protagonist who has trouble accepting that this creature wearing the form of former friend or family member isn’t really their loved one. There’s a turning point in the movie where they finally come to realize that the person they once knew and trusted is gone,  and that this monster only wears the form, or maybe also wields the memories as a weapon. Or, maybe, if a shadow of their old friend remains, it has only enough strength to become an ally to sacrifice itself to help the hero destroy the monster they had become.

For me, that moment came with the big updates. They decided to name the updates after the subtitles of the classic game series. “Serpent Isle.” “Ascension.” “Forge of Virtue.”

Yes. I’m not kidding, here. And while I knew better, there was this stupid little glimmer of hope that maybe, MAYBE these expansions would actually bring a little of Ultima’s history and flavor into this game. And maybe even a tiny bit of the old series’ gameplay? I mean, you send armies to these dungeons and against the boss monsters and stuff, maybe that could be expanded on, given a little bit more RPG flavor?

Yeah, right. Dumb. There was nothing like that, as far as I can tell. These were actually good updates, the latest adding whole new areas of advancement for veteran players to make attacking each others’ cities less predictable. If the game was called, “Massively Multiplayer Slow-Paced Medieval Domination Game” or something, it would be decent stuff. But I’d never have played it.

But for me, invoking the names of the old games of the series was really just a twist of the knife. An ugly reminder that Ultima – the real Ultima – was dead.  And this wasn’t even the undead shell of a husk of the old series – it was just some zombie with a nametag on it saying, “Hi, My Name Is: Ultima,” written in magic marker. The pointlessness of it hit me. I thought, “You are not worthy to wear that title.” The brief amusement I’d experienced playing it – before recognizing that I needed to invest more than just a few minutes a day and real cash to be able to participate as anything more than a slow-moving target for other players hit me – died.

Ultima is dead. If I want to enjoy a glimmer of its past glory, I just need to run Exult and run the REAL Serpent Isle. It may be almost twenty years old and I may have already played most of it already, but it’s still a far better experience than its fake modern spin-off.

Filed Under: Free Games, Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



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