Ultima VI: The False Prophet, released by Origin Systems in 1990, is the sixth game in the Ultima role-playing video game series. It is the third and final game in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy. In Ultima VI, players return to Britannia, a land at war with a race of gargoyles from another world. The game’s story focuses on stopping a prophecy that could end the gargoyle race. Players must help defend Britannia from the gargoyles and uncover the secrets of both lands and their people.
Ultima VI improved the technology used in the Ultima series. The game world is larger, with a 1024×1024 tile map that connects smoothly and is to scale. Players can interact with the world more deeply by moving objects, exploring, and creating items. Graphics and sound were also improved, using new sound card and VGA graphics technology. The game’s interface became easier to use, with point-and-click icons.
Ultima VI was followed by Ultima VII: The Black Gate in 1992.
Plot
After Lord British regains power, the Avatar is captured and tied to an altar for sacrifices by red, demon-like creatures called gargoyles. Three of the Avatar's friends—Shamino, Dupre, and Iolo—appear suddenly, rescue the Avatar, and take a sacred text from the gargoyle priest.
The group escapes through a moongate to Castle Britannia, and three gargoyles chase them. The game begins with the player fighting the gargoyles in Lord British's throne room. After winning the battle, the Avatar discovers that the shrines of Virtue have been taken by the gargoyles and starts a journey to save Britannia from the invaders.
Later in the game, the Avatar learns that the gargoyles see the situation differently. They have their own system of virtues. The quest to defeat the gargoyles becomes a quest to find peace with them.
Gameplay
This game stopped using multiple scales. In earlier games, towns, castles, and dungeons were shown as single symbols on the world map. When players entered these places, the map would expand to show a detailed sub-map. In Ultima VI, the entire game uses one scale. Towns and other locations are connected smoothly to the main map. Dungeons are now viewed from the same angle as the rest of the game, unlike Ultima I-V, which used a first-person view. The game kept the same tile system and screen layout as the three previous games. However, it used a more colorful and detailed angled map view. It also showed pictures of characters during conversations. These changes made use of new VGA graphics cards for computers.
Development
The Ultima series began on the Apple II computer, and all games up to that point were mainly made for that platform. However, by 1990, the market for 8-bit computers in the United States had nearly ended, so the first game without an Apple II version was released. At the same time, the games had become too complex for 8-bit hardware. Origin tried to make an Apple II version of Ultima VI but stopped because it was too difficult. A version for the more powerful 16-bit Apple IIGS was planned and possibly started, but it was never released, even though the packaging and manual mentioned the machine. The game was later released for the Commodore 64, but some features were removed, including character portraits, horses, working gems, and simplified quests.
Major changes in Ultima VI made it different from earlier games. These changes were influenced by Origin’s 1988 game, Times of Lore, and FTL Games’ 1987 game, Dungeon Master. One change was the game world design, where towns and castles were no longer shown as icons on the map. Instead, everything on the map was displayed on a single 1024×1024 tile map, except for dungeons and smaller outdoor areas. The view of underground caves and dungeons also changed from first-person to an overhead, angled perspective, like the rest of the game. Another change was the addition of real-time elements. Richard Garriott created a new point-and-click interface with ten icons, inspired by Times of Lore. He later said he wished he had thought of this earlier.
The movement and combat systems in the game were created by 25-year-old programmer Herman Miller from Boston, who had previously worked on the IBM versions of Ultima V and Times of Lore. The conversation system, which allowed players to interact with characters, was developed by 26-year-old Chinese programmer Cheryl Chen. She created a programming language called UCS (Ultima VI Conversation System) for the game. Unlike earlier games, conversations with townspeople were no longer limited in length.
Ultima VI was one of the first major PC games designed for systems with VGA graphics and a mouse, even though the Amiga was a popular gaming computer at the time. The game supported sound cards for music, which were not common when it was released. Other sounds, like sword clashes or explosions, were played through the PC speaker. The Amiga version was based on the PC version but was too slow to play without an accelerator card on early Amiga models.
A version of the game for Fujitsu’s FM Towns platform was made for the Japanese market. This CD-ROM version included full English and Japanese voice acting. Remarkably, the voice actors were people based on the characters, such as Richard Garriott as Lord British and Greg Dykes as Dupre. Some actors could not be reached, so substitutes were used.
The game came with a cloth map of Britannia and a Moonstone made from black glass. Improved versions of the Ultima VI engine were later used for the Worlds of Ultima spin-off series.
Origin sold a deluxe edition of Ultima VI by mail order for $69.95, the same price as the retail version. These copies were autographed by Lord British and included an audio interview, game hints, and a higher-quality Moonstone.
The DOS version of Ultima VI may have sound and speed issues on modern computers but can run reliably in a DOSBox environment. Several open-source projects, such as Nuvie and xU4, aim to recreate the Ultima VI engine, similar to the goals of Exult.
Reception
In 1990, the game sold fewer than 100,000 copies in the United States.
Scorpia of Computer Gaming World in 1990 said she had mixed feelings about Ultima VI because of changes to the user interface, graphics, and gameplay. For example, the switch to a single scale for the game world made travel and exploration take longer, quests offered small rewards, and the game slowed down when many characters appeared on screen. However, she appreciated the "solid story" that completed the second trilogy, the absence of unnecessary outdoor battles, and improved dialogue for non-player characters. She concluded that Ultima VI "is a very good game." In 1993, Scorpia criticized parts of the middle section of the game and the quest to find a pirate map, but still said it was "definitely worth your time."
Dragon magazine gave the MS-DOS version of Ultima VI a 5 out of 5 star rating, but only 3 out of 5 stars for the Super NES version. Editors of Strategy Plus named Ultima VI the best role-playing game of 1990. However, Editor-in-Chief Brian Walker wrote that the role-playing game genre needed improvement, comparing it to wargames that had become too similar to paper-based systems. He said the genre had become unoriginal and repetitive, and noted that Ultima VI reached the limits of traditional role-playing game design by offering advanced graphics and a consistent world.
The One magazine gave the Amiga version of Ultima VI an overall score of 91%. It criticized the need for frequent disk swapping during gameplay and the requirement to decompress the game onto four floppy disks to start playing, which also had to be repeated if a player created a new character. The magazine noted that Ultima VI was not fast and required two disk drives to play smoothly. However, it praised the game’s large scale, gameplay, and design, saying no other role-playing game matched Ultima VI’s depth or realistic atmosphere.
Computer Gaming World nominated Ultima VI for its 1990 "Role-Playing Game of the Year" award, which was won by Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula. The magazine highlighted Ultima VI’s "interesting and important story, excellent graphics, and incredible detail." In 1992, the magazine added Ultima VI to its Hall of Fame for games highly rated by readers over time. In 1996, the magazine ranked Ultima VI as the 44th best game of all time, noting that it "reached new levels of realism with defined objects in the game world" and "presented a strong message about the dangers of prejudice."
Fan remakes
A fan-created version of the game Ultima VI, called The U6 Project (also known as Archon), was released on July 5, 2010. It uses the Dungeon Siege engine. Another remake of Ultima VI uses the Exult engine and includes graphics from Ultima VII. Ultima 6 Online is a massively multiplayer online version of Ultima VI.