![]() The Age of EnlightenmentBut when people speak of the Ultima series, its tropes and mechanics, they tend to think of the next three games in the series, Ultima IV, V and VI, collectively called the "Age of Enlightenment". This is the one that specifically influenced the creation of Dragon Quest I, and thus unintentionally spurred the birth of the Eastern RPG. ![]() This game started laying the foundation of RPG elements such as towns, overworld, dungeons, and monster encounters in the way many video game RPGs came to emulate. The series started to find its legs in Ultima III: Exodus, in which the evil robotic child of the previous two villains wreaks havoc across Sosaria. The series continues with Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress, as space-time distortions threatening Earth are Best Served Cold by Minax, the jilted widowed lover of the first game's last villain. (The "other world" being implicitly "our world", and the "stranger" being implicitly the player.) Its plot saw an Evil Sorcerer named Mondain defeated by The Hero known as "the Stranger from another world". The Age of DarknessThe world of Akalabeth was fleshed out to form "Sosaria", the setting of Ultima (later subtitled The First Age of Darkness). The game was hand-coded entirely by Garriott in Applesoft BASIC. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings books the name Akalabeth itself derives from AkallabĂȘth, the fourth part of The Silmarillion. Originally titled "D&D28b", as it was Garriott's 28th game, Akalabeth was also heavily influenced by J. Overview of the Ultima seriesThe Ultima saga begins, it is generally considered, with a primitive Dungeons & Dragons-inspired game called Akalabeth (also referred to as "Ultima 0"), which introduced the character of Lord British, king of a pastiche medieval/high fantasy type world. Ultima IV and VII, in particular, had a major influence on general RPG mechanics and open-world games, respectively. Though the series was computer-based, its general mechanics became likewise imprinted on the console RPG market thanks to its influence on the mechanics of the Dragon Quest franchise (and via osmosis, to a lesser extent the Final Fantasy franchise). In many senses the Trope Maker of the computer Role-Playing Game, Ultima is a long-running series of CRPGs created by Richard "Lord British" Garriott and Origin Systems that, along with Wizardry, more or less defined most of the classic computer role playing game tropes, going on to influence games more broadly.
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