Ultima VII: The Black Gate

About Ultima VII: The Black Gate

Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992) is Origin's real-time, mouse-driven RPG in which the Avatar returns to an open, deeply interactive Britannia full of schemes, monsters and threats to the crown.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate in Depth

The player returns as the Avatar, a would-be paragon of virtue who must cleanse the medieval world of Britannia of plots, monster infestations and the undermining of royal authority. The world is no longer tile-based as far as the player is concerned: maps are layered, objects can be stacked, sometimes into makeshift stairs, and the game fills the whole screen at a pseudo-isometric angle. It was the series' first entirely mouse-driven game, with items simply dragged and dropped, and it introduced gumps, on-screen windows for containers, books, the spellbook and equipment. Play is real time, pausing only for inventory, menus and dialogue, and every companion is controlled by AI with a chosen behaviour, which spares micromanaging up to eight characters but occasionally fires a triple crossbow into a crowd of allies.

Almost anything not nailed down can be moved or used: the Avatar can bake bread, forge weapons, play instruments, paint a self-portrait or change a baby's swaddling, and the party must eat and drink or perish. Dialogue trees replace typed keywords, and topics appear only once they are learned in the story. Once free of the walled city of Trinsic the game is highly non-linear, and it puts less weight on virtue than earlier Ultimas: the Avatar may steal and murder without breaking the game, but witnesses react, companions may leave or even turn on him, and the Guardian appears to mock each crime.

Making Ultima VII: The Black Gate

Origin Systems published it in April 1992 for MS-DOS. It was critically acclaimed and commercially successful, widely lauded as a high point of the series and regarded as one of the best video games ever made. Scorpia of Computer Gaming World praised its "first-class" graphics, sound and realism and its "engrossing" story, but criticised the slow performance, several serious bugs and the combat, estimating that the speed added about a week to her playing time. Charles Ardai argued it was "not more of the same" but "daring and unusual", calling the plot the best in the series and an allegory for real-world problems. Dragon magazine gave it four out of five stars.