Lazarus: An Ultima Fan’s Ultimate Wet Dream

I was a little late to this game last year when I discovered it, after that I probably lived like a zombie for the following 2 weeks because I found every waking moment to play it. I pretty much went out of my way to make every gamer I knew install Lazarus, and I was active on the online forum and even wrote a walkthru for it. I felt like a WOW addict minus the WOW part. But to me good things have to end and I have to get back to my life (which is why I stay away from MMO, because they’re not inclined to give players a proper  closure).

Am I actually going to talk about the game? Well, not quite yet.

If you have not heard of Ultima at all then this article is certainly not for you.  But for those who grew up with the series, like I did, Lazarus would bring back a lot of memories, framing those nostalgia in a modernized system leaving everything that was old and broken in the past and becoming a masterpiece painted with some kind of inhuman virtuoso that leaves those who experience it awestruck. If the original Ultima V was a Leonardo da Vinci painting, Lazarus was Michelangelo Buonarroti taking the Last Super from Da Vinci, painting on top of it one of his best work, the Last Judgement, resulting in a a conglomeration piece that could literally blind God with awe.

I don’t believe I could give a game higher praise, I can’t, the bar has been raised.

Actually going to talk about the game now.

For you to understand Ultima V, you have to have played Ultima IV, in which the Avatar trilogy began, this was before avatar (the word) was widely used in MMORPG, as the character you control. The word was lifted from Hinduism, in which they are supreme beings, instruments of gods. In Ultima IV, the avatar the player controls goes through a quest to become the Avatar, a perfect moral being (Thus the game is called Quest of the Avatar).  Ultima IV didn’t contain any last bosses though it did have a last dungeon that would take you at least 8 hours to go through, without any ability to save and at the end make you answer a series of questions and if you answered wrongly you would have to start over again (you probably will kill yourself instead). It does sound like I am criticizing the game now but mind you this was 1985 and that was the pinnacle of game design. It is actually the pinnacle of game design even by today’s standard. Having Ultima IV as my first CRPG on my Apple 2E, was like feeding a dog Fillet Mignon just once and then canned horse meat for the next 3 years. In JRPG terms the closest equivalent would be playing Dragon Quest III on the Famicom as your first game. Everything else left a sour taste in my mouth.

Why that was the pinnacle of game design? Because it was non-linearity without it being an illusion, it was non-linearity being truthful from its core and staring you right at the face, taunting you with something that you longed for from every single direction, from places you didn’t even know existed. Ultima IV was simple in a complex way, you went about and gathered companions from the 8 towns, you asked around for the mantra (and how the conversation was superior to anything that exists today will spawn another term paper but I will leave that for later), you learned the virtue the town stood for, you unlocked the dungeon with the mantra, freed the shrine so you could then use the mantra again to pray so you could be told how virtuous you were (If I got anything wrong I apologize, it’s only been 24 years since) . Yes, everything came in 8, which worked especially well for superstitious Chinese people. After you have enamored yourself with virtue, and 10 years later people finally called it the Karma system and it was used over and over again in cRPGs after the advent of Baldur’s Gate, you would actually be ready to enter the Stygian Abyss to obtain the Codex and become the Avatar.

Now if you didn’t fall asleep when I said Ultima IV was non-linearity without it being an illusion, wouldn’t you ask, doesn’t Oblivion or any other sandbox clones give us the same thing? Nay and not so in many words. Because while the whole world was opened to us right from the start, Oblivion always told us where to go next and going anywhere else is pointless. If you stay in the main quest line you can’t really talk to B without visiting A first, in other words you are like a child hand-held across the street and towards your next destination, fully knowing that straying from your path is simply hazardous for your well-being. This is a lot like real life if you think about it. We go to high school, then college, and then work in corporate America, and if we are lucky we get to write about games on a website that is about girls,  things goes from a linear path with a major choice or two, you can choose to go to the mall in between for diversion but to get to B, you have to get to A. Ultima IV wasn’t like that. To get person D to reveal an item location to you without talking to person C first, you simply have to know that the item exists, and you could have gotten it from A, or B, or your real life friend. The brilliance of it lied in the free use of conversation keywords, which JRPGs failed to adopt in the next 25 years.

Which made Richard Garriott, the man that named himself a monarch in his own game, who sold the first Ultima in local supermarkets in a Ziploc bag, then later sold his soul to EA and worked for Koreans and went to space, simply a game design genius at that time (and I won’t compare him with Miyamoto) , and forever a personal hero and that guy that I want to be stranded with on an island (that is if I can’t pick a woman, or Ghenghis Khan, or Jesus). Which I regret last time being in Austin and missing the opportunity to visit his house, which became some kind of tourist attraction. To stop my self from digressing further…

This time I am actually going to talk about Ultima V.

The 2nd in the Avatar trilogy built on top of the first. The game felt more epic in scale, darker and more menacing with Lord British trapped in the Underworld and Blackthorn the usurper on the throne, and the Avatar is constantly caught between the political struggle of the Resistance and the Oppression, and all the while the 3 godlike Shadowlords plotted in the shadows against the Avatar. The goals are immediate and clear in this game. Defeat the Shadowlords, remove Blackthorn, and save Lord British. This time around virtue plays less of an important part even while the world are still affected by your action, in U4 you were unable to finish the game if you constantly ran from battle and lost your courage,  in U5 even if you pillaged and got caught, you lost your karma and were criticized by your companions and could even be attacked by guards on sight, but you were still the Avatar, and that was why I could not talk about Lazarus without talking about U5 and I could not talk about U5 without talking about U4.

And if you haven’t realized, I still have not talked about Lazarus yet. So actually going to do it now.

To sum it up, Lazarus was putting Ultima 5 in the context of Baldur’s Gate and telling the story like in Planescape Torment, it is retelling a classic tale in a modern voice.  Lazarus was fan-made, a mod that used the Dungeon Siege engine, headed by project director Ian “Tiberius” Frazier who later on was hired by a real company to work on Titan Quest (a Diablo clone). Lazarus could be downloaded for free here, and with a legitimate copy of Dungeon Siege which you can probably pick up for 5 bucks (follow my guide to install it), you can experience one of the best games ever made, built from the engine of one of the worst games ever made.

There were many things Team Lazarus built into the mod of the Dungeon Siege engine that made it Ultima, like Day and Night cycle, NPC’s activity scheduling, a new reagent based magic system, and  a totally new conversation system with original portrait artwork that resembled the later games in the series. The art was redrawn, the music remixed, new quests and stories written, Lazarus was created with LOVE, the kind that a mother will nurse her newborn babe with, or a god will shower his creation with, a blinding kind of unconditional love. Not much from Dungeon Siege really remained, aside from some of the generic 3D models, and a decent combat system that resembled Diablo.

Have you ever walked into a generic town in an RPG filled with cardboard characters with nothing to say and you wanted to hurry to the next spot that would advance the plot? This was not the case with Lazarus. In Lazarus, the shopkeeper that sells you reagent may have a cheating wife that leads to an assassination attempt, and a blacksmith may have a very interesting story to tell about the last customer that came in. You want to talk to everyone before moving on because it was a crime to the creators of this game if you didn’t. These attention to details were not all present in the original U5, but designed and written just for Lazarus. Not to mention, you can take the evil path and support the Resistance, Blackthorn, and leave Lord British stranded in the underworld, for good, just to get the evil ending. All of these features that were nonexistent in the original game, were added because this was what fans envisioned a perfect version of Ultima V would be, and thus a masterpiece was born.

If I talked more about the game I would simply waste your time from playing it. If you have finished Lazarus, be rejoiced that the remake of Ultima 6 by Team Archon is near release, though not built by people who worked on Lazarus, the 2 teams had shared their resources (Project Britannia) and the Ultima 6 project (also built atop Dungeon Siege) promised features that made it better than Lazarus (for example a journal system to keep track of the numerous side quests). They just released Milestone 6 and actively looking for testers. If new commercial games are no longer floating your boat, why not look in the past with a new set of eyes, made by those who actually do things not for making a profit, but out of love and passion.

To sum it up, Lazarus doesn’t feel like a plot written 20 years ago, it doesn’t play like a game built on top of a 10-year old engine, in fact you would die a happy man if you could find another game like this for the rest of your lives. Chances are that you won’t, you may find something close, but never quiet like this glorious masterpiece. So download and play it today, and support the effort people has put into these kind of projects, get ready for the final release of Ultima 6 Project,  and follow us on Twitter and stay tuned for our next exciting article.

Sources: Team Lazarus, Ultima 6 Project

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