Computer Graphics Memory Disk Space
Minimum 486/33 VGA 4 MB 25 MB
Max/Rec. 486/50 8 MB +10MB saved games
Control: Mouse (required) + Keyboard
Sound: Sound Blaster, General MIDI, Adlib
Notes: Supports simultaneous sound effects card and music card.
Physically possible to run on a 386 but not desirable...
Reviewed on: 486/66, 8MB RAM, Pro Audio 16, Roland SCC-1
Reviewer recommends: Local bus 486, 6MB+ RAM, sound card
Long, long ago, in a role-playing computer game far, far away...in a trio called Ultima I, II and III the player defeated three mighty villains by the power of his keyboard.
Then the games' author, Lord British, had a vision of a role-playing game that would be more than the defeat of a Generic Evil Villain. Thus was born the classic, Ultima IV, in which the player quested to become the Avatar, the embodiment of virtue.
In Ultima V the Avatar was called on to rescue Britannia's sacred ruler and free the land from a usurper's tyranny, and in Ultima VI the Avatar set Britannia on a firm peaceful footing by dealing with the menace of the Underworld gargoyles. And then came... the Guardian.
In ULTIMA VII: THE BLACK GATE we met the evil extradimensional Guardian, who sought to subvert and conquer Britannia, only to be foiled both then and in the sequel, SERPENT ISLE, by the Avatar. So the Guardian banishes our hero to a conquered world, so that the Guardian may work evil at will while the Avatar languishes. Thus begins PAGAN: ULTIMA 8.
On the desolate world of Pagan, you must gather the mystical power to leave this prison planet and confront the Guardian. You will have to survive the perils of a truly vicious, wretched and lonely realm; and ultimately confront and surmount the Elemental Titans of Earth, Air, Water and Fire who rule here.
As you start your quest you'll find that the graphics and sounds have taken another giant leap forward since the already stunning Ultima 7. An isometric view and large, detailed graphics give an amazingly visceral three-dimensional feel to the game. The people you talk to and the monsters you fight are modeled in large, detailed figures. Particularly on a fast machine, your own character can move very fluidly, and all characters move elegantly enough to convey a superb "you-are-there" sensation. Sounds are unspeakably good -- your steps sound different when you walk on wood or on dirt or on stone; you can hear a sword unsheathed, a blow landed; fire crackles and lava bubbles.
The effect is magnified by the interface that lets you walk, run, jump and climb. As in Ultima 7, the left mouse button acts as your hands and the right as your feet. Various clicks let you step carefully along ledges, jump over chasms, climb up ledges, attack or block or kick.
The sense of physical reality produced by the combined graphics, sound and interface defies description. You can watch and hear the Avatar walk, break into a run, hit a wall, recoil, climb up the wall, jump off the roof, fall down, get back up... it's incredible, and I guarantee that if you play this game you will spend an hour or two doing amazing, silly things with your on-screen hero. "Wheeeee!"
But the genius of the interface is a flawed one. I have spent several minutes looking for the one spot on several inches of identical-looking wall where the computer would let me climb. I spent an inordinate amount of time laboriously stepping my character around tables and chairs to get to the other side of the room. I would curse as my character stopped dead in the middle of combat to sheath his weapon before moving. I groaned as I knocked an object into a place where a wall obscured it from my view.
So the interface can be as rich in frustrations as it is in potential. (A path-finding algorithm and a more accomodating combat interface would have done wonders.) As it is, the player can expect a mind-blowing sensory feast, but also the occasional urge to smash his keyboard. Such is the "curse of technology"...
Of course, after Ultimas 6 and 7 it should surprise no one that Ultima 8 is a technical landmark. The real pleasant surprise in U8 is the adventure itself: what the player has to do to win the game.
PAGAN's adventure design is the best of any Ultima to date. There are no repetitive "find the eight pieces of the map" time-wasters. The "you must do A before B" linearities are well hidden from the player. Challenges are varied and interesting, and the player is asked to think instead of mindlessly following instructions. The upshot is that playing Ultima 8 is in many respects more fun than prior Ultimas have been (and that's saying a lot).
At the start of the game, for example, you get two basic leads to people who may know how you can get off Pagan. You can follow either in either order, as well as pick up plenty of eventually useful information just talking to the inhabitants of Pagan's last remaining city, Tenebrae. When you follow up on one lead -- the Necromancers -- they'll ask you to retrieve a stolen dagger. To do that you'll need a key, but nobody tells you how to get it -- you have to figure out for yourself who would be likely to have the key in question. Later, you have to figure out how to get into a room with no apparent entrance. Later yet, you have to negotiate a number of conversations very carefully to get the information you need. The point is that unlike THE BLACK GATE and SERPENT ISLE, Ultima 8 assumes you have and can use your brain, letting you take the responsibility and credit for solving challenges instead of blindly following the orders of sages and prophets.
Moreover, throughout the game the player almost always has at least two different subplots available to work on in whatever order is preferred; intense combat is interspersed with detective work, detective work with dungeon exploration. PAGAN does an elegant job of varying and pacing its challenges while leaving the player feeling in control.
Unfortunately, excellent adventure design doesn't always translate into exellent adventure execution. PAGAN has two notable adventure letdowns. One is the physical puzzles. To complete the game, on four occasions the player will need to jump across a series of platforms hanging in the air. If the platforms were relatively easy, this would be a modest challenge that got your blood racing as you jumped from one to the next. Instead, positioning for the jumps is so tricky that one ends up just going through a save-jump-die-restore-jump-die-restore-land-save-repeat procedure. This slows the game pace to a crawl and is about as much fun as moving files around in DOS. These four sets of platforms form only a small part of all the challenges in PAGAN, but their frustration factor makes them loom large in a player' mind...
The second adventure flaw will be familiar to SERPENT ISLE players: nonsensical game flags. At one location in the game you're told to go on a "pilgrimage to the birthplace of Moriens", when in fact you should be looking for the Shrine of the Ancient Ones -- the only place of Moriens' you'll eventually look for is his tomb. Hydros, in turn, won't talk to you until you've completed the Shrine's miniquest, but no explanation is given for this. Finally, a magician will, after describing to you the spell needed to leave Pagan, refuse to give it to you with no explanation -- unless you've freed Pyros. Why? Nobody knows. Again, these things are a small part of the overall adventure, but can be extremely frustrating when you hit them.
On the whole, though, comparing what a player had to do to complete any prior Ultima side by side with what a player goes through to solve Pagan, there's no question that Pagan is set up for a smoother, more enjoyable and more intelligent range of puzzles.
Of course, the challenges the player faces are only half the story. What makes a role-playing game work is the synthesis of challenge and plot, so that solving the puzzle can translate into saving the world. In Ultima 8, the plot is a definite good news / bad news story.
The good news: the major subplots are superbly scripted. The characterization is every bit the equal of the stunning graphics. People in PAGAN act in realistic manners; some of the personalities practically jump off the screen; events unfold in a manner that is logical, evocative and fitting. Intrigue and betrayal and tragedy and victory all play out in PAGAN in far better form than in most other computer games. Stupid villains and smart ones come to buffoonish or dramatic ends; there are noble deaths and wasted deaths, backstabbers and innocents. Most computer games come off as silly or melodramatic when they try to portrary realistic and serious emotions; PAGAN does it better than I would have thought possible. Where prior Ultimas have offered a mostly static world around the player with ham-handed transitions ("OK, now everybody dies"), PAGAN's people are dynamic, credible and vivid in their intrigues. Like its sound team, Ultima 8's script team is worth its weight in gold.
Unfortunately, top-notch scriptwriting in the details doesn't let PAGAN rise above the problems of the "escape from prison-world" premise. The world of Pagan is a terrible, desperate place. The land is dying, the people are dying, the monsters are taking over and half of those are already dead. Pagan is a world of dank pools and shadows and deadly lava, of long, creepy catacombs and howling ghouls. The people have little to look forward to except death -- half of them worship it and the other half are trying to accomplish it on someone. The graphics, sound and script teams have succeeded so terribly well in conveying the desolate air of the world that unless the player accomplishes something to change it, it seems hardly worth fighting for.
And at the end of the game, what has the Avatar accomplished? What has the player's effort secured? The Avatar was trapped on Pagan, and now he's off it. Great. The Guardian isn't defeated, Pagan isn't somehow restored -- outside of the Avatar himself, nothing fundamental has changed. If Ultima 9 were available right now, so that from escaping Pagan I could leap directly into the final assault on the Guardian, that would be great. But as a standalone game, PAGAN leaves me feeling a bit empty.
Of course, like the movie The Empire Strikes Back, PAGAN could be seen as a transition story about the changes the hero himself goes through as he approaches his destiny. Some interviews have implied Ultima 8 was intended to portray the dilemmas of the Avatar's transformation into a demigod. Just one problem: if the Avatar does become a demigod over the course of Ultima 8, it certainly doesn't show. At the end of the game, the Avatar has more fun spells available than at the beginning, but he can't walk on water, can't smash enemies by force of will, can't call up small armies by snapping his fingers, or do much else that reeks of Titanic Power. Sure, given a bunch of reagents he can create some neat effects, but heck, we Avatars have been doing that since Ultima IV! PAGAN as the story of the Avatar's transformation fails because there's no obvious transformation to speak of.
All of this could have been turned around and redeemed by a well-scripted endgame. If the defeat of each Titan had triggered enough conversation or pyrotechnics to convey a sense of real power gained by the Avatar, and real defeat of the Titan; if we had some glimpse of a post-Titan world suddenly convulsing and reforming with new hope; if the Guardian had expressed some rage and renewed defiance at the Avatar's sudden escape -- these would give the player a real sense of accomplishment after playing the game. Instead, the Titans' defeat is ridiculously formulaic, and the endgame animation almost meaningless. Add all this to a desolate world with understandably little exploration to offer outside the player's main goals, and you get a game that when done feels a bit short and a bit empty.
On the whole, PAGAN: ULTIMA 8 makes more sense as the prelude to the forthcoming ASCENSION: ULTIMA 9 than as a standalone game.
The new interface has its kinks and occasional major nuisances, but the vivid sense of physical reality is well worth it. My copy crashed every few hours, but I encountered no persistent bugs. The graphics are wonderful, the sounds are beyond wonderful, the challenges are varied and well paced, the subplots are superbly scripted... It's a terrific game, except the end leaves you incomplete!
So I can't recommend it as a first jump into the Ultima series. But for those who liked Ultima 7, PAGAN is a must-have as a stepping stone to Ultima 9. If you're willing to think of it as "just the beginning" of the Avatar's final confrontation with evil, then PAGAN: ULTIMA 8 is the best beginning to any Ultima yet.
This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by Daniel Starr for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.