Ultima · MS-DOS · 1994 · Preceded by: Ultima VII: The Black Gate
The follow-up to one of the richest RPG worlds ever built turned the Avatar into a platform hero, shipped by its creator's own admission three months unfinished, and was nicknamed "Super Avatar Brothers" by its fans.
Ultima VII had been Origin Systems' masterpiece: a dense, simulated Britannia full of characters with schedules, conversations and moral questions. Ultima VIII: Pagan, released for DOS on 23 March 1994, exiled the Avatar to a new world and changed almost everything about how he moved through it. Origin wanted to broaden the series' appeal beyond its hardcore audience, and the result reduced the scope of the role-playing and pushed action to the front. The most notorious addition was jumping. Pagan is full of platforming sequences — leaps between moving platforms and across chasms — in an isometric engine that made distances hard to judge, and the early version was buggy enough that patches had to add targeted jump distances and stop platforms moving. Computer Gaming World observed that it resembled Prince of Persia more than earlier Ultimas, and fans called it "Super Avatar Brothers". Richard Garriott later conceded: "We probably shipped it three months unfinished." A nearly finished expansion, The Lost Vale, was cancelled when the game underperformed, and a separately sold speech pack was undercut when a later CD edition included the same files. Reviews were mixed — PC Format praised its depth and detail, while Scorpia called it a disaster for anyone expecting characterisation, story or role-playing — and Computer Gaming World later ranked it the 20th worst game of all time.
The disappointment of Pagan is measured against what came before it. Ultima VII was admired for density: a world where you could bake bread, follow a townsperson through their day and argue ethics with a companion. Players expected the next game to go further in that direction. Pagan went the other way — a smaller cast, a lone Avatar and a game increasingly about getting across a room without falling in.
The decision to chase a broader audience was not absurd in 1994, when action games were outselling everything. But it was executed in the one genre Ultima had no experience in, on an engine not built for it, on a schedule that did not allow it to be finished. The result satisfied neither the audience it was chasing nor the one it already had.