Ultima IV, The Computer Game That Led to Enlightenment | Hacker News Reader

Ultima IV, The Computer Game That Led to Enlightenment

newyorker.com

27 pointshomarp13 comments

Ultima 7 was probably my favorite game of all time. I don't think I ever beat it, just explored endlessly the amazing world, finding pirate islands, companions, magic carpets, and dragons deep in dungeons.

Modern games have better graphics but they don't have the same richness that Ultima had.

Plus these games were pre-internet so when you got stuck or lost somewhere you got really stuck. I remember spending over a month looking for something called "the hall of the mountain king" in ultima 8, to the point that I had hand drawn a bunch of maps and carefully planned out exploration paths.

I always thought that was one reason for the death of the adventure-game genre. Ultima at least had parts to it besides the exploration and puzzles, but adventure games that might take 100s of hours without a guide can often be completed in a few hours with a guide.

Yep, I remember Might&Magic to have distinctively different feeling than, say, Skyrim. You'd get a task but no map markers about where to go, and pre-Internet me would cross the world three times to find some hideout.

I'm not sure though if I'd have the time and patience any more for this, even if it felt a lot more rewarding.

It would be interesting to take a tile-based game with adventure story elements and add a procedurally generated map and locations to recreate the sense of discovering a new world.

It's brutally hard to make a good procedurally generated adventure game. Even if your bar of design quality is some of the poorer Sierra games.

Definitely, although my idea is to keep the plot point and characters somewhat fixed, but having geography and in-game item placement be procedurally generated. You could probably inject some additional randomness my having certain plot lines be optionally incorporated. That would reduce the spoiler effect and maybe add some replayability.

IIRC mixed up mother goose randomized item locations, but nothing else.

The concept of a game as a transformative/developmental journey is as relevant and necessary as ever. If interactive games are the future of education, this approach could make philosophy/religion/ethos accessible to a wider audience. It would be impressive if someone could figure out how to apply these concepts to a modern, multiplayer game. It would be fascinating if machine learning and technology could be harnessed to track progress with the virtues in a dynamic multiplayer world.

Loved loved this series. As it happened broderbund hired me out of arcade to test video games. Had fun testing spelunker, load runner, whistler brothers among other home computer games. Loved it.

> One player wrote to say that Garriott taught him “almost everything I know about morality and ethics.”

I was in fifth grade when I played--I still remember painfully mapping out nearly the entire world on graph paper. The first time I ever really deeply thought about morality and ethics was because of Ultima IV. It honestly probably changed my life, at least a little.

great article, but it's criminal that they don't mention Mass Effect at all, which to me is the all-time exemplar of this idea (in the modern era) (we all pretend like Mass Effect 3 didn't happen lol). it's the only game I've ever played that felt like it could be a Neal Stephenson novel.

The article repeatedly references Skyrim. Are the games related?

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