Ultimate Underworld (1992)

From Software

Ultima Underworld is one of those games that's quite influential, but mainly in relation to a single other game that came a

Its worth thinking a little about where the foundations of this game came from. As an Ultima spinoff, it inherits a lot of narrative baggage. Ultima IV introduced the 'virtues'. Essentially the game is strung around your character going on a moral journey of self improvement. Over the game your aim is to bump your virtue stats up. Give money to a homeless person and you get compassion points. Go around thieving from chests and you'll lower your honesty points and so on. Get your stats high enough and you can access 'the Stygian Abyss', retrieve the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom and become the human embodiment of all those virtues, an Avatar.

I should put my cards on the table right now. I hate this system. Garriot's stated motivation was that following Ultima III, he got a lot of fan mail about people having fun murdering and stealing their happy way through his games. Worse, a minority of that mail was hate mail, the kind of things you'd expect from Satanic Panic 1980s America. There's