I like old games. I mean really old games, where the CGA visuals drip from your screen and make most of you run away screaming. That said, not all old games have aged gracefully. Ultima 1: The First Age of Darkness, which is actually a 1986 remake of the 1981 original game (and then ported to MS-Dos in 1987), is a fine example of that. While it’s the official first game of the classic Ultima series, it takes the dungeon-crawling gameplay from its predecessor Akalabeth (another game that has aged terribly) and expanded the world and added a few quests, and called it a day.
In theory, it’s a massive open world with an incredible 36 dungeons to visit (each dungeon is 10 levels deep with 9×9 squares per level, though some of those are walls). But you really only need to visit one of them. Likewise, there are a massive amount of cities scattered throughout the world of Sosaria, but you don’t really need to visit any of them.
The only places worth visiting are 4 castles (out of 8) that each give you a mission to kill a specific monster, after which you get 4 gemstones needed to build a time machine. The other quests you get are about visits to certain signposts on the world map, which are useful for getting your strength up but aren’t exactly essential.
So what we have here is a massive game with lots of content, but not a lot of content that is actually interesting. None of the dungeons are unique. They are randomly generated for each new game and stay fixed for that specific save, but all have similar layouts, the same monsters, and provide the same experience.
That’s not the worst. From a dungeon-crawling perspective, the dungeons just aren’t that much fun. Combat often is monsters turning up from the side and attacking you while you turn around, and it happens all the time. It’s sorta turn-based but so simplistic that real-time action would have been an improvement. Monsters feel mostly the same, and the few times they are not, like thieves or gelatinous cubes, they either steal your equipment (annoying) or destroy your equipped armor (really annoying).
Worse is the character building, which is admittedly one of the biggest flaws of the series as a whole and one reason I don’t think highly of it overall. Unlike say Wizardry or the Goldbox games, character and race choices are superfluous, as is the whole attributes system, as you’re supposed to max them all out anyway, independent of your initial choices. Character growth is getting more HP, either by surviving dungeons (you basically farm HP by dungeon diving) or buying them from any of the castle lords.
Basically, the game just isn’t much fun. It’s a large sandbox that’s not exactly empty, but most of its content feels just pointless. I can imagine getting the game in 1981 or even 1986 and feeling excited running around the world and trying out all this stuff. But these days we have much better options, unlike say the Wizardry series or the Goldbox games, that still manage to kick lots of modern games in the balls with their depth. Ultima, on the other hand, at least the first one, has been roundly surpassed, by later incarnations of its own series and many, many other cRPGs.
The Entropy Pump 