![]() ![]() Never intentionally! There's no arguing that. In the first place, damn near everything that goes wrong is entirely, literally, the Avatar's fault. This is never really gone into in the games, where he quickly becomes a mix of Superman and mythical god due to games that feature up to 200 year jumps between instalments, but looking back it's tough to argue that what it led to was worth the benefits. What I find fascinating about the Avatar though isn't that he/she (it was a choice up until Ultima VIII, at which point he became canonically male and started wearing a bucket on his head) is able to accomplish that, but that you can argue that despite saving the world on at least four separate occasions, the Quest Of The Avatar was the single worst thing that ever happened to Britannia. Yeah, when a game's villain gets to score moral points, you're not the greatest Avatar. Cheating blind merchants for instance, or stealing, was something of an Honesty no-no. Each Virtue was basically 'do a thing', with Honour a simple matter of completing quests and remembering that Honour is spelled with a 'u', and others a bit gimmickey. ![]() ![]() The goal was to set a good example for the world, albeit an inevitably primitive one that was limited to 1985-vintage technology. In Ultima IV: Quest Of The Avatar, Garriott moved away from stories about beating up the latest threat to his world (at the time, Sosaria, later renamed Britannia) in favour of a story about a land more or less at peace and in need of a symbol to represent the best that it can be - the Avatar, the only one capable of bending all eight virtues of Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Honour, Sacrifice, Spirituality and Humility. What really defined Ultima IV-VIII though (let's not speak of the final game, Ascension) and depressingly few games since have picked up on is that each of them was an attempt to be about something. #Ultima iii vs shroud of the avatar series#Ultima - the very last series to be able to get away with Ren Faire dialogue. ![]()
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