Computer Graphics Memory Disk Space
Minimum 486/33 * VGA 4 MB 35 MB
Max/Rec 486/50 8 MB
Control: Both Mouse and Keyboard required
Sound: MPU-401, AdLib, Sound Blaster, Wave Blaster, Gravis Ultrasound
(with patch)
Notes: The game will run on a 386, Origin just doesn't recommend it.
Reviewed CD-ROM distribution version (game + speech pack):
486/66, 16 MB RAM, ATI Graphics Ultra Pro ISA,
Sound Blaster 1.0, Gravis Ultrasound,
MPU-401 w/Kurzweil 2000
Reviewer recommends: 486/66, 8 MB RAM, Sound Blaster compatible for
sounds, MIDI device for music, CD-ROM verison
I've been playing Ultima since before ULTIMA I, through the transition from Apple ][ to PC, through Worlds of Ultima, ULTIMA UNDERWORLD I and II, and all four pieces of ULTIMA VII. If I wanted to proclaim to other drivers "Yo, geek inside!" I might have a "Born to play Ultima" bumper sticker. So I'm a big Ultima fan and awaited PAGAN: ULTIMA VIII eagerly. On the other hand, I have big expectations...
To go along with these big expectations is a big review, because the game is, well, big.
The first thing we need to get out of the way is the configuration question - you can't play the game if you can't run it. At the last minute, Origin changed its recommendation from 386/33 to 486/33. Good news for those who can't afford a 486: it does work on a 386, and several people I know have been playing it on 386/33 and 386/40s, although I wouldn't recommend anything slower. What's really important here is a fast video card - Pagan shovels an incredibly large number of bits to the graphics card, so a 386/40 with a fast local bus graphics card might easily be faster than a 486/33 with a slow card like a Matrox.
Pagan runs in 4 megs, but 8 megs definitely makes things perkier because you can give 2 megs to a disk caching program. And you want to do that, trust me on this. The game doesn't thrash your hard drive like Ultima VII did, but it still looks to it. Without a cache, loading a game takes about 25 seconds, saving takes 80 seconds. With a good cache that delays writing, loading and saving take about 10 seconds each. You're going to be doing a lot of saving and loading.
Pagan is much more system friendly than Ultima VII was. Installation is nice and easy, and as long as you don't load any EMM managers there's no problem. Several people on Usenet got bitten by the old problem with defective floppy disks that characterizes Origin products, but that's solved by exchanging it for a new copy.
That's one of the reasons I like the CD-ROM distribution version. Origin has discussed an Enhanced CD-ROM version of Pagan for later this year with extra sound and graphics, but this isn't it. You just get the game and the speech pack, and it still has to be installed to the hard drive. But it's cheaper than buying both and your arm won't fall off from disk swapping.
It may seem strange that one of the first things I'd mention is the sound, but the audio in Pagan really contributes to the atmosphere.
Pagan runs a four-sound digital sound mixer, meaning that you can hear four sounds at once. This is used to excellent effect - the Avatar makes different sounds as he walks depending on the terrain he's stepping on. Weapons make clangs and "Schwing!"s. Thunder rumbles, people scream, explosions kaboom, earthquakes grind, doors squeak and clunk, ghouls groan... you get the idea. The sounds are good quality and used unsparingly, and really add to the "you are there" quality of the game. Apparently support for Sound Blaster digital only is hard coded into the program, which causes problems with several sound cards.
If you have the optional Speech Package you'll hear several of the characters talk to you. For example, the Guardian will taunt you whenever you load a game, and at several key locations during the game. Having the Guardian boom "Ouch! That must have hurt, Avatar!" after you've been hit by a fireball rubs it in nicely. And having Pyros speak is much more impressive than just watching the sentences on screen. This is a double-edged sword, however, because sometimes the voice effects overwhelmed the voice and I couldn't understand what was being said. I had to turn off the sound and replay that scene so I could read the text and make sure I wasn't missing anything.
It's the music that really shines, however. The music on FM- synthesis cards like a Sound Blaster or PAS-16 sounds like the standard kazoo band you normally get. With a good wavetable or midi card like a Wave Blaster, Ultrasound, or Sound Canvas (ahh) , however, the music takes on a whole new dimension. There are 69 different compositions for different locations and special events (like combat). The music sits in the background under your level of attention, but slowly gnawing on your psyche. For the most part it's haunting choral type music, the kind of score where you look around nervously for little boys named Damien: lots of vocal "ahhhh-ah"s, tympanis, and vibrato strings.
This significantly effects the character of the game, in my opinion. I even extracted the music the game so I could have it playing in the background while I was doing other things.
Superb, absolutely superb. I loved Ultima II, and was peeved for years when Ultima III thru VI placed all the action in a small window on a screen. Ultima VII restored action to the whole screen and brought the graphics to a whole new level of detail, and Ultima VIII carries on with the tradition.
Pagan is more orthogonal than any Ultima we've seen before: you seeing everything at a top-down diagonal angle. This get you more "into" the action, and it lets the graphics for objects look nicer, since you see things from the side instead of just looking at the top of everyone's head. And, since you can only see the inside of two walls of any structure, you only need to search half as many walls.
On the flip side, you can't see as far as you used to, and everything is slightly closed in. Also, it's quite easy for something to hide behind a wall or other immovable object, where you'll never be able to get to it again. This is extremely nasty because there are many objects the game won't let you walk or jump over. If there's a flask hidden in a doorway you need to traverse, you can't get through. Here's a tip: go into combat mode and just start attacking where you think the item is. With luck you'll hit it and it'll bounce into sight, where you can deal with it.
The animation is extremely fluid. Origin claims 1200 frames of animation for the Avatar alone, and I can believe it. When he walks he really walks. Get him too close to the edge of a precipice and he windmills his arms and twists his body (and yells "Whoooooaaaa!"). Get him too drunk and he staggers around and bends over to throw up. Eat the wrong mushroom and watch out as your world goes psychedelic. All the graphics are well designed and the animations are nice and smooth with lots of in- between frames. Someone spent a lot of time on explosions. Outdoor scenes are particularly beautiful, with lots of different types of vegetation, dirt, and water, especially near a waterfall.
Of course, with all these graphics, something had to give. In this case it's the representation of the Avatar. Regardless of what he's wearing, he's always completely armor-clad while wandering around. He doesn't hold different weapons while walking around like characters did in Ultima VII. In combat, whatever weapon you're using looks like a mace or a sword, even if it's something else like a hammer. There are no animations of such things as the Avatar climbing into bed and sleeping, presumably because there are too many different types of beds to draw pictures for. Also, everybody is just a mirror image in left and right orientations, so they're left handed when facing one way and right handed when standing the other.
You may have noticed that I always refer to the avatar as He. There is a "paper-doll" inventory window where you can make your Avatar wear and hold things, and your only choice for representation here is good old blond haired, blue eyed Rod Beefcake. Given the minimal effort it would have taken to change this single static picture to other races and sexes (especially since the armored Avatar is sexless and raceless) I assume they just ran out of time.
All these graphics may overstress your system. Origin has been nice enough to include several options in the game which let you skip frames or otherwise tone down the graphics so you can play with a slower machine. Biiilyuns and biiilyuns of pixels are being dumped to your machine, so card which is fast in standard VGA mode is a must (Windows acceleration won't help you here).
The world of Pagan is impressive in many ways, disappointing in others. It's simultaneously very small and rather large, very realistic and very unrealistic. Just looking at the cloth map that comes with the game will let you know that things are different - it's been a long time since the map was so totally useless as far as gameplay goes.
There was much worry that Pagan would be much smaller than previous Ultimas, based on comments in some publications. 25 hour playing time rumors were tossed around. Not to panic! Pagan itself is rather small, being only one island on a world of water. However, you can cram a lot into an island, and since we're closer to the action, distances appear larger. I never thought it was very realistic for the Avatar to go traversing around the world in a day - this is much more reasonable.
Things a primitive physics engine. Things go flying and bouncing when you blow them up, or fall if you drop them. It's fun to throw something into the water and watch the splash, or toss a Molotov cocktail into a room with lots of objects (you can do a lot of pyrotechnic things in this game). Try holding onto a lighted flask of oil....
But it's easily confused. If you drop an object where Pagan doesn't think it should go, it may start wildly bouncing around until it finds a resting point or flies of the screen. That it wouldn't let you place the object somewhere which would be supremely reasonable for it to be in the real world (stacking one book on another, for instance) is a serious flaw. Pagan is just so _damned picky_ about where you can place things that you spend much of your time trying to figure out where it will allow you to put items.
Unlike Ultima VII, you have to be close to something to pick it up. This makes sense from a realism point of view, but Pagan is also picky about where you step, so it might be hard to get near it. And once you get close enough to pick it up, it might think that you're stepping on it (when you're clearly not) and won't let you pick it up anyhow. Also, because of the orthogonal view, you'll block anything you're standing in front of.
Ditto for character movement. Pagan will let you step over and climb on to some things, but not others. You can walk all over a dead skeleton, but can't step on or jump over a dead ghoul or a potion. Getting around can be an exercise in frustration at times, especially when you can clearly see that the opening you're trying to squeeze through should be large enough, but the game decides that it's not.
The world here is not internally consistent. In Ultima VII you had one big world, and if there was a dungeon in a mountain range, then the size of the dungeon was limited by the size of the mountain range, by God! Pagan divides things up into chunks of limited size. There are many ways you can get "outside" of the area the game thinks you're supposed to be in - by climbing on top of things, or walking somewhere that someone forgot to block off. You can end up walking under the map, or off in nowhere land, leaving a trail of Avatars.
If you're supposed to meet a character at a certain place and time, you can't just go to their house and sleep, or wait there. You need to exit the area of world you're in and go to another one for the character movement to kick in. This "chunky character" problem shows up vividly when a character is in two locations at once.
I miss the "if you can see it you can use it" philosophy Ultima VII had. You could pick up a bucket and use it on a well to get a bucket of water, sit in a chair, take things off the wall, make bread, break glass and mirrors... in Pagan, many things are just there to be looked at. You can't sit, you can't use wells, things on the wall are probably just decorations.
The Avatar has three movement modes: small mincing steps, walking, and running. You indicate movement by placement of cursor on the screen, as in Ultima Underworld - the farther from the Avatar the cursor is, the faster he moves. There are some problems - at times he almost refuses to step off the edge of something, at others he happily plummets to his death. Everything is mouse controlled, which is very frustrating at times, especially in combat, when you'd like to be able to back up but still keep attacking, and you're also fighting the mouse controls all the way. The Avatar has inertia, and all together it's a pretty clumsy combination. I dread narrow doors, because the Avatar likes to keep going, and often resists efforts to line him up with the door.
You can climb things now... this is very interesting, because you can do things you never thought of doing in previous Ultimas. If you can't get in a locked house, you can at times climb up to the roof and get in via the second story. It took me three days before I shook the old habit and realized I could do this. It opens up another dimension - for instance, climbing up and down is a good way to escape monsters. But there are some flaws - you can climb up to places you can't climb down from. The wise and powerful Avatar just steps off the edge and falls to his death. Oh well.
The Avatar has three jumps - straight up, forward, and running. I mention this because he has no intermediate jumps. This is particularly stupid in situations where a short hop would land the Avatar on that rock sticking out of the water, but he jumps right over it and into the briny deep (he can't swim, either). This leads us to the worst part of the game - the arcade parts.
Yes, that's right, arcade parts. There are sections of the game where you need to dodge rolling spiked balls, run between electrical zappers, and worst of all jump from platform to platform. Lots of the latter. Miss one jump and you die, of course, and the Avatar is a lousy jumper. These sections of the game devolve into 1) Save the game, 2) Jump, 3) if you made it, save the game again. Otherwise, 4) reload the game and go back to 2. The mouse controls are clunky, so you're going to die often. Since loading and saving games is not quick, this is supreme and pointless tedium. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and a bad way to extend game play.
Combat has changed as well. It's in real time, like Ultima VII. However, now you don't have to worry about nonexistent companions killing each other, and you actually have to do the fighting. You can attack with a weapon, kick, or block (useless). The best strategy for fighting seems to be just to hack as fast as you can. Combat and explosions are somewhat "realistic" in that the Avatar can get knocked over and has to get back up. However, this guarantees his doom in certain situations where he has no chance at all to get away - he gets up and immediately gets knocked down again. Frustrating. And he falls over far too often - apparently the Avatar suffers from an inner ear disorder. Actually, your best combat strategy in many cases is just to run like hell - you're much faster than anything else.
You can't stop combat by opening your inventory any more... Better grab that Frisbee of death quickly, because those ghosts aren't stopping while you rummage around. Even opening your stats window doesn't stop the action. One nice touch that helps out here are a pair of status bars you can place in the lower right corner of your screen showing hit points and mana. They like to disappear, unfortunately, but it's MUCH better than nothing.
Interaction with NPCs (Non-Player Characters, i.e., anybody but you) has always been a prime component of Ultima, and the series has tried many variations on exactly how you converse with people in the game. Pagan uses a method fairly close to Ultima VII's. All your conversation options are listed on the screen, and you click on what you want to say. Whatever the NPC tells you opens up some avenues of conversation and closes others. Especially interesting in Pagan is that some options disappear if you don't follow up on them for a while, and unlike Ultima VII you can say some fairly insulting things. You need to choose carefully at times.
There are several annoyances, however. First, there is no way to stop the text (in a rather ugly font) from going away after a certain amount of time. You can increase this time, but not make it infinite. When you're frantically trying to copy down critical information only to have it disappear off the screen because Pagan decided you should be done now, the urge to hurt something is strong. Second, when you want to advance through text instead of waiting, you have to click on the actual text itself, not just anywhere on the screen. Because the conversation is bouncing around between at least two places on the screen, there's a lot of mouse action involved here for no sufficient reason.
The Avatar comes off sounding like a moron, because he often just parrots everything back the NPCs say. Sorcerer: "We serve Pyros." Avatar: "You serve Pyros?" Quite a few people chide our hero for sounding like a fool and at times I'd have to agree.
The NPCs suffer from selective amnesia. An NPC may have been instrumental in the death of another NPC, yet after the death of that other NPC all the pre-death options are available, even when the death finishes off a major story plotline. This results in schizoid conversations in which the NPC expresses sorrow at someone's death, then tells you to go talk to them.
Finally, there's the lack of portraits. Ultima VI and VII used detailed facial portraits of whoever you were talking to. Origin claims that the bigger animated characters here make that unnecessary. Hah! You can tell characters apart, certainly, but a 10 pixel high face doesn't offer much room for expression. I thought it just might be me, but several Ultima players I've talked to agree that this decision results in a significant loss in terms of relating to NPCs. There are so few people in the game compared to previous Ultimas that the work wouldn't have been overwhelming.
That's the point of a computer role playing game (CRPG), right? The story. You wouldn't know it from viewing several recent offerings, and again rumors were worrying, but Pagan comes through. When viewed as a whole from the point of view of having completed the game, the story is quite decent. The Avatar is finally coming into his own with much needed development.
Not to say that some people aren't going to be confused. This game is much less linear than previous Ultimas - you may find that you have to come back to some place you've already "completed" to do something else. This plot makes you work a bit harder to figure out what you're supposed to do, and the major plot development takes some time to build. There's lots of wandering around looking for things to do. You need to carefully read books looking for hints. There are even quests which are wild goose chases, which is almost unheard of in a CRPG. After being led around by the nose through both parts of Ultima VII, I consider this an improvement. However, there are still lots of "Bring me this item" quests, and in the first part of the game you may simultaneously feel totally lost and that you're playing "Avatar the errand boy."
Let me tell you right now that after wandering around in the catacombs for a while you may be tempted to do a "del /s *.*" on the game. Don't do it! Things really pick up afterwards. If this was intended to increase the feeling of loneliness and isolation you feel, it succeeds. When you start out you're on an immediate downhill slide. The Guardian has dumped you on an unknown world. You have NO connection to previous Ultima characters (except the guardian) or terrain for the first time since Ultima I - I hadn't realized how much I enjoyed re- exploring familiar places. There aren't very many people, and all the ones you find are rather depressing. Your mood will not be improved after wandering through a city of the dead for several hours. There are occasional flashes of humor in the game - mostly in books which you'll read, sometimes in a conversation. These serve to lighten the mood slightly.
Then things start to pick up... a plot forms, hope appears, everything starts making sense, you start meeting new people, and things take off from there. There is a bit of suspension of disbelief involved at how eager these supposedly suspicious people are to help and even trust a total stranger, but that's always been one of the hallmarks of the Avatar.
There are a few places in the game where you can't avoid acting like a total bastard to continue your advancement, which can be another emotional roller coaster. On one hand you just completed a major part of the plot... on the other hand you just made the lives of a lot of people miserable. Bummer. Of course, you have to distinguish these from the nearly infinite number of places where you can be a total bastard though it isn't necessary. If you find that you end up stealing lots of food and money from people you might consider a career in politics.
There are quite a few side-plots, which is a big plus for me. You don't have to explore everywhere, and you'll probably find that when you finish the game there are still several places you haven't visited yet. It's fun to stumble across one of these while you're wandering around. Many of these mini-adventures involve finding some of the many magic weapons which abound in the game.
This is definitely a PC-13 game... lots of blood, body parts, and adult themes (including the obligatory Ultima child killing scene). There's no nudity and no bad language.
There are groups which might be taken aback by a huge red horned creature materializing out of a pentacle, but I imagine they'd already be quite put off by the magic elements of the game. The Avatar has to learn and deal with several different types of magic, namely Necromancy, Theurgy, Thaumaturgy, and Sorcery, each with its own rules and methods. It's quite fascinating - if you thought the "mix reagents" of the previous Ultimas was a pain in the rear, wait till you try Sorcery. The whole magic system is very well done.
The Avatar still uses the "items in a container" method of inventory control. This sounds bad, but it has two major improvements over Ultima VII - first, items remain where you place them. This is a big win, and means you can keep things arranged to your liking. Second, you can get key rings, like those in the Silver Seed add-on. Just add all your keys to the ring, then use the ring on anything you want to unlock. If you have the right key on the ring it unlocks. These features combine to make the inventory quite usable. Pagan is very unbuggy, which is welcome, not to mention surprising in something this big. I experienced an occasional controlled crash where Pagan returned to DOS with an error, but nothing frequent, and nothing like the abominable disappearing key problem of Ultima VII or the trigger problems of Serpent Isle.
So I've rambled on and on about various parts of the game and said various good and nasty things about it. What's the verdict?
Two toes up. It shows several signs of being slightly unfinished, which is a disappointment, but the overall package is still top notch. I played it for two weeks and thoroughly enjoyed myself, then went back and continued exploring. I have polled several people who completed the game, and they were all enthusiastic about it.
Yes, you may be aimless and even depressed at first, but this makes the second half of the game even better. Persevere! I don't often get so immersed in a CRPG - the sound, graphics, and story combine to make it quite an experience (which makes it all the more jarring when the occasional arcade section makes you load and save the game a dozen times).
Yes, there are some niggling frustrations, but once you learn what they are you quickly learn to work around them. I even got pretty good at combat, eventually. And the overall game overwhelms the details. Some of the details are disappointing only because of the high standard the rest of the game lives up to.
All this makes me eager for the next offering, which will hopefully build on the best parts of this one and get rid of the irritations. I don't want to spoil the plot, but the ending of Pagan opens up huge new opportunities for the direction of the series, assuming they don't turn the Avatar into a wimp again at the start of the next Ultima. If you have a machine that can handle the strain this is absolutely worth taking a look at.
This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by Ron Dippold for Game Bytes Magazine. All Rights Reserved.