Why did the Avatar of Virtue screw up everything s/he touched?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 2, 2014

I was amused by PC Gamer’s article by Richard Cobbett, “Ultima: The Legacy of the Avatar.” (Hat tip to RPGWatch for the link). He doesn’t present anything all that new, although he does drive home the idea that the Avatar’s efforts to save Britannia ultimately led to its doom. Actually, not even saving Britannia. Just trying to be a nice guy and exemplify virtues in Ultima IV. It sets off a number of escalating, horrible events.

It all starts going wrong with Ultima V, which was a brilliant bit of storytelling for its day. Flash forward a couple hundred years, and see what has happened to what was once a system of ideals. Now, they’ve been mandated, regulated, and the “spirit of the law” has become completely lost or corrupted. What was once a beautiful and noble has become a system to enslave the people. Then in Ultima VI you learn that your actions of the past doomed an entire underground race and brought them up to the surface to war against humanity. Oh, and all those daemons / balrons you battled in the earlier games? They were just Gargoyles, really, and you assumed incorrectly that they were just pure evil. Okay, maybe we’ll say the ones you killed were evil and aggressive, but still…

And then in Ultima VII, you find an entire cult has been formed that has subverted the virtues for their own nefarious ends. And it is led by a shadowy extra-dimensional being who is really your evil twin created when you … wait for it…  completed the Quest of the Avatar in Ultima IV. And of course, he’s causing all kinda of harm and destruction. Although the original storyline was supposed to be that the Shadowlords were actually the “dark half” of the Avatar, and the Guardian was actually their essences combined after the Avatar banishes them in Ultima V. (I like this explanation better).

Although in my view, Lord British (the character) is more to blame than the Avatar for this stuff. It was his failure to perform due diligence when he set the Avatar out on the quest in the first place. 🙂 Typical of government, he’s completely blindsided by the Law of Unintended Consequences, and just acts stupid when the repercussions hit.

But I want to take a different tack for a minute. This is something that makes me pause and reflect a little bit as an RPG developer. Richard Garriott sort of famously re-built the technology for each Ultima from scratch. This is why Serpent Isle was “Ultima VII part 2” not “Ultima VIII” Based on my understanding of his development process (which is derived mainly from a few interviews and having read Shay Addams “Complete Book of Ultima” a zillion times), the storyline was mainly generated from scratch each time. I really doubt they thought beyond the next game in the series as they were developing each game.  And, especially in the last installment of the series, the storyline often changed – sometimes radically – during development.

My personal belief is that Richard Garriott had already done the “save the world” story three times with new characters – the Girlfriend of the Big Bad, and the Computer-Child of the Big Bad – in Ultima I – III. Ultima IV was a departure from that, and a much celebrated one at that. From that point further, however, there was the problem of putting the world back in peril so the Avatar was needed. But then there’s also the concern about how that world ever lasted past five generations without the Avatar’s help, because it’s constantly in peril (well, every 200 years or so).

The natural answer, when starting anew with an old property, is to build the new peril off of what has already come before. In other words, instead of a brand-new earth-shattering event, it’s more of a revision or evolution of a peril that had come before. Since the games left very few “loose ends” at the end of each one, a new game had to tug some new ones loose to be tied into the narrative.

Garriott was also very careful to make each installment a stand-alone game. So while he could pull story and world elements from one game to the next, he couldn’t leave major plot threads hanging, or depend on the audience to have played the previous games. But – a good chunk of his audience had played the previous games, and so he couldn’t just start over completely from scratch and ignore what had happened before.

The result of this is that much of the Avatar’s hard work from the previous game was undone or subverted for the next game(s). It wasn’t a plan going forward. It was just the result of trying not to have a totally new Disaster of the Year befalling the world. I believe the Guardian was created to be a major recurring villain that might be defeated rather than destroyed for a while.

At one point, the plan was to abandon Britannia and have all the new games after The Black Gate happen in different worlds. I guess this was a viable alternative – instead of Britannia suffering new world-shattering disasters with each installment, the series could be about the Avatar racing to a different place to stop The Guardian or whomever from doing their Great Evil upon another world. I wonder if this plan wasn’t partly in place and experimented with in the Worlds of Ultima games (based on the Ultima VI engine). But for the fans, Ultima meant Britannia as much as it meant the Avatar. While we permitted some excursions by our world-hopping alter ego, we wanted the same world, only different.

And so, accidentally I suppose, everything the Avatar had done to make the world a better place had to be undone, retroactively if necessary.

Is there a lesson here for RPG developers? There sure are a lot more of us these days than in the old days. There aren’t many of us who’ve had to make a series nearly as long-lived as the Ultima series, though, and have had to keep going back to the well of ideas to make a sequel “the same but different.”

I know in my case, while a LOT has changed between Frayed Knights game 1 and game 2, I’ve had a pretty good idea of where the entire game was going since day 1 (I even stupidly believed for a while that I could fit it all inside one game). I also deliberately didn’t have my heroes saving the entire world. Or even the kingdom (that comes later). I figure their goals could get bigger with each game, but couldn’t really get smaller. That way I’m not backed into the corner of having had them save the universe and then… NOW WHAT?

But we’re not always in situations where we can plan for sequels. I don’t know if Jeff Vogel planned out an entire series for Nethergate, but I’m sure he considered the option while it was in development. If the game had turned out to outsell his previous titles, I guarantee we would have had at least a Nethergate 2 and Nethergate 3.  But… it didn’t, and so the game stands alone with only a major update (an expanded edition).

Stuff to think about, I s’pose.

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



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