We have long anticipated Ultima VI Project since we played Lazarus 3 years ago, calling it one of the best games ever made. Ultima VI: False Prophet, back when it was released in 1990, felt like the first big budget Ultima Origin developed, stretching the everyday PCs players had to a crawl; Similar to today’s Crysis (or yesterday’s Strike Commander), It featured state-of-the-art graphics and for the first time, a 1:1 scale of town to over-world eliminating combat transition screens and relinquishing the menial controls of companions during combat. Ultima VI was obviously a technological marvel at the time following the revolutionary formula of Ultima IV, but it never registered in my childhood’s memory as one of those games that stood a chance as a trophy in my personal favorites hall of fame, which fond moments to be occasionally fed upon like some nectar of the nether region of deep thoughts. It was essentially overshadowed by the menacing Guardian of the the near-perfect pinnacle that was Ultima VII, the revolutionary virtue / conversation / NPC scheduling system of Ultima IV, and the dark and sinuous ShadowLords and Lord Blackthorn of the much improved Ultima V. But thinking back, Ultima VI was amazing in its own way, following IV’s footstep in not having a “kill foozle” end goal and in turn gives the player a genuine plot twist, turning the good vs evil tale into a misunderstanding between two nations with a peaceful resolution, a satisfying and culminating conclusion to the Avatar trilogy. Though we obviously don’t speak for everyone, its unfair treatment back in times now finally gets a second chance, and in a new light we can experience the merits of Ultima VI in a totally new, modernized light.
If one has played Lazarus, one can’t help but to compare U6P (Ultima VI Project) to Lazarus, even though the two games are built by totally different teams. Team Archon, the mind behind U6P, started 9 years ago around relatively the same time Lazarus did. The two teams later formed Project Britannia in order to share some of their resources — for example the staff from U6P actually designed the ingenious boat-sailing system which was in Lazarus and U6P later on retained a few of Lazarus’ Staff, and even now they are continuing to improve upon the backbone Lazarus is built on so new players to the series can experience a better Britannia. So readers who aren’t familiar with Ultimas and Dungeon Siege mods and Lazarus should first read our largely inappropriately-titled Lazarus review written last year.
So how is U6P compared to Lazarus? The first answer is that it is a much improved Ultima — featuring a much needed compendium and journal keeping track of all the important conversations and quests during the journey that was missing from Lazarus. There are considerably more side quests and optional things to do and the game felt a lot longer — aside from story, it is also due to much heavier combat sections and non-linear ginormous dungeons which sole purpose are to drown the player in despair. The newly added mob rules inherited from earlier Ultimas (the number of critters during encounters being proportional to the size of your party) is an “improvement” over Lazarus but we didn’t particularly enjoyed it not even back in Ultima IV — it makes combat painfully long as your party gets bigger, discouraging the player from forming a big party in the first place until he’s at least powerful enough to take on extra critters. It isn’t even nearly half as bad here as in Ultima IV and thankfully this feature can be turned off so we did it halfway through the game. Re-spawning monsters and very difficult-to-navigate dungeons sometimes make it stressful to trod through the undergrounds — though there are in-game maps to help the player which can be conveniently accessed right along with the Britannia Cloth Map in the Avatar’s backpack (another new feature since Lazarus) — crucial maps are often placed at various locations that are sometimes in the vicinity of the destination, making the player fight off the urge to implode with the sense of frustration, replaced newly by the twisted sense of morbid accomplishment that they had gone through a twisted inferno and survived, no doubt a cruel joke from the sinister mind of U6P’s Dungeon Master; thankfully this will probably be changed in later versions of the game with more conveniently-placed maps. Players who are into hack-and-slash would find this a plus but to us… well, Ultima was never really about the combat, if we wanted that we would be playing Dungeon Siege. So if we had to give a near-perfect score to U6P, we would take tiny bit of it off due to the intense dungeon-crawling and combat sections. But thank god that U6P development team is very prompt in helping anyone who gets lost, not only can one search for directions on forums and there are always a member or two on the chat that is more-than-willing to lend a hand. If U6P stumbled a bit with overwhelmingly difficult dungeon designs, the excellent customer service totally makes up for it And considering that you are getting this game for free, what more can you ask for?
Of course there are some problems inherently with the Dungeon Siege engines that both Lazarus and U6P shared, like how the DS engine deals with height, once you are used to modern games like Dragon Age, you wished you could control your party with arrow keys.. when you are climbing towers or multi-level structures, even roofs of town will sometimes get in the way and block your view obstructing where you could click, the results of that is that you would have to nudge your camera a lot, sometimes it is like playing a FPS in reverse (since you are controlling the camera with arrow keys). The DS engine also annoying reshuffles your backpack every time you open it, which makes any means of attempting to be an organized person near-impossible, but to get around that one could designate a party member for food, weapons, key items and so forth, making one’s life infinitely easier. And at times the game would run into exception errors and forces you to kill it and restart. But if one saves often enough, these occasions are less problematic than enemy ambushes. We ran into more bugs here in U6P than we did in Lazarus, but it isn’t entirely fair to compare it. For we played the 1.20 version of Lazarus 2 years after its release but we pretty much nabbed the 1.0 version of U6P on release day (From what we heard the 1.0 of U6P was much more playable than the 1.0 of Lazarus). But like I said earlier, the team is still working hard (even after their long 9 years on this project) to improve the game as we speak and I am sure the official 1.01 patch will no doubt fix most of the bugs we encountered, and none of them stopping you from finishing the game.
Just like the original Ultimas, the realistic character schedules can get annoying sometimes. Some shopkeepers only work a few hours a day (I want their work schedule!) and they will refuse to do business with you when they are walking leisurely next to what their goods, nor do they mention their store hours, doesn’t matter you are trying to purchase that magic shield to save the world, or destroy it; this is the time when the pickpocket spell comes in handy. For those goody-two-shoes Avatars who refuse to resort to crime (even though crime pays and it is just as easy to get a dent in your Karma lifting a fork in the kitchen accidentally), thankfully it is pretty easy to get a room in town and if you want to wait a few hours you can also press on the x10 button to get time flowing — which reminds us of the Ultima IV days when we kept pressing the space bar. If there was a wish-list we would write to Santa Claus that we want to be able to wake people up at night like in the Witcher, and track quests to certain individuals on a map so we didn’t have to look all over town for someone we could never find.
Done with the bad and on with the good — U6P does deserve a lot of praises. While the central storyline stays true to the original U6 — tons of side quests are added, some provide side stories that expand the main plot which fill in the holes of the original game. The structure of the main plot is also more streamlined, restricting the player from being able to teleport everywhere from the start like the original, forcing them to visit each location on foot first, and prohibiting sea-faring before they freed the mainland shrines. The Trinsic siege sequence is especially epic, and seeing the balloon hovers to the air literally brings tears to my eyes. Just like Lazarus missing the carpet travel, there are things here as well taken out from the original game because of the limitation of the DS engine — for example riding horses or traveling everywhere with the balloon. Another improvement made over Lazarus is that not only can you now play the female avatar like in U7, your companions and townsfolk will react differently based on your gender. Though there are no in-game romances, you could pay a few gypsies for a few hours of jolly good fun, and female Avatars would have to brave the journey with Dupre hitting on her all the time. If anything, Britannia felt a lot more alive in U6P than it was in the original.
Like Lazarus, U6P also gives the player a choice of being evil, in addition to the option of casting Armageddon and wiping everyone off the planet. But unlike Lazarus which gave the player an easy choice to go the other path, finding the path of evil in U6P is more like an Easter egg, a secret if you would call it that, and stumbling upon it is infinitely more satisfying and rewarding. And the path of the damned is darker and more sinister than what you could ever imagine in a video game — it’s worse than butchering those helpless children; more like strangling one’s mother with the entrails of one’s own eviscerated father (ahem… who said we had normal childhoods?). Of course the standard ending is quite satisfying, if not quite as enlightening as the evil one. It offers a short glimpse into the plot of Ultima VII, which was missing from the original U6.
The game still looks really good in today’s standard even though running on a more-than-a-decade-old engine, it does push DS to its limit, doing things that original DS developers probably never dreamed of — of course it doesn’t look as good as newer games like Dragon Age or the Witcher all the way zoomed-in, but from a zoomed-out isometric perspective which you most likely will be playing most of these types of games from, it looks very modern, gorgeously so — this is the Britannia you have always dreamed of ever since you played Ultima IV when it came out in 85, down to the tiniest details.
Like the original U6 and Lazarus, U6P features very beautiful character portrait art, unique for each character. It’s too bad that quite a number of NPCs have missing portraits for the current version of U6P, and in place of it a silhouette letting the player’s imagination fill in. It is understandable because of the lack of artists in the U6P team and not being a commercial product it would be hard to fill those spots, and the daunting number of unique NPCs in the game world makes it difficult. But personally we would have preferred the decision to choose some existing portraits and utilizing them as generic portraits to be shared between characters who are without them; sure you may see the same face across towns but it would make a more streamlined experience. Still, with the top-notch dialogue and writing, the missing portraits don’t really hurt the experience. It is a shame that sometimes that’s so much text to read that, one may tend to skip over some information. Thankfully the journal is there to remind you of everything that you have done.
Music, while sparse, is hauntingly appropriate, and just like in Lazarus, they are remixed tunes from earlier Ultimas and will definitely fuel the nostalgia of the players just from hearing their distant echoes. Usually the appropriate tune plays when the player is near important location like shrines, moongates, dungeons… etc. We listened to the Lazarus soundtrack for a long time after we finished the game. Hopefully team Archon would do the same and create a download-able soundtrack for us to enjoy in the car making those unbearablely long commute hours a little bit more colorful.
Without a second thought, Ultima VI Project is undoubtedly a total recommendation. It is a creation of love by fans who had grown up loving the series, and no doubt it will bring a lot of other fans back to their fond childhood memories; and for the newcomers they have a chance to experience a very new and improved one-of-the-best-RPGS-of-all-times with a modernized gameplay system and with a much better told story of epic proportions. Just like Lazarus, U6P isn’t perfect and has its own flaws, with some crashing issues and much-too intensive dungeon crawling and combat for the non-hack-n-slash-fans, but it is entirely worth getting through the hurdles just to experience the elegant writing and excellently told story and explore the hidden gems of the beautiful and immersive environment of Britannia. If you haven’t done it yet, don’t hesitate and go to Project Britannia and download the game today. Be warned: hours will fly by and you would have neglected your loved ones, your children may starve to death, but you just can’t get away from this game.
