Ultima IV: Kids don't get it

http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/09/unplayable.html

18 and 19 year old college students find Ultima IV impossible to play. They're baffled by the game mechanics, by the feelies and manuals, etc. Back from a time when you were (gasp) expected to read the manual.

This article makes me feel 92 years old. Crank up the old Victrola.

edited 2nd Oct '10 9:41:35 AM by JAF1970

Jonah Falcon

Uh, they could just watch The Spoony Experiment Ultima Retrospective episode about it.

edited 2nd Oct '10 10:10:54 AM by RocketDude

"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel

Hell yes!

Though I admit, not even reading the manual is kind of dumb—even shooters don't always provide all necessary information in the tutorials alone.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

And some of these kids probably play Nethack. Amazing.

Try Nethack without the wiki, the way it was in olden tymes.

Eric,

Huh. Odd. Although, to be fair, the game IS rather different to...well, pretty much every other game that exists. ...Including a few of the Ultima games.

Escape.

SEE, THE KIDS PLAY THE JRP Gs, WHICH GIVES THEM THE BRAIN DAMAGE

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard. ~Voltaire

To be fair, Ultima IV does make the design choice of having you start off in basically the middle of nowhere and you have to divine, somehow, that your first goal is to talk to Lord British and receive the quest proper, and the documentation doesn't exactly tell you this. I can see how that can lead to confusion.

Ultima IV is the fourth game in a series, after all. Perhaps it would be better to start off with the simpler, clearer Ultima I and let them work their way up.

The Kagami topic has now reached 201 posts! (Nov 5)

Play the original Carmen Sandiego (you know, the actually difficult one that came with the enormous almanac?) without using the internet for help. Then we'll talk.

edited 3rd Oct '10 9:11:42 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Or you can read the manual.

Besides, when you die, you get transported to British anyway.

Jonah Falcon

JAF, if you're going to quote someone and say "or you can just read the manual", don't intentionally leave out the part where they point out that the manual leaves out that bit of information.

True about teleporting, but my point is the author seems to have Fan Myopia—he thinks everyone will know or make the same assumptions he does as if they had the same experiences, but they haven't, and rather than recognize that this is due to actual flaws in the game or else his own unrealistic expectations, he just assumes his students are idiots. There's something slightly elitist about that.

The Kagami topic has now reached 201 posts! (Nov 5)

No. It's not "fan myopia". There's just skill sets kids under 30 don't seem to have.

I shudder to think of them trying to navigate in the original Pirates, in which all you had was measuring the sun from the horizon and applying that to the actual cloth map that came with the game.

Jonah Falcon

Older Generation Can't Understand How Kids' Tastes Could Possibly Differ From Theirs; Film at 11

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

Isn't it kind of awesome how video games are now old enough for the older generation to complain about how newfangled games are ruining the youth of today?

It's like we've invented our own rock and roll.

What do you mean by kids?

ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅ

18-19 is still young enough to be the "Younger generation," especially compared to people who grew up with the NES/DOS games when they were 10-15.

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

Yes, it is.

I'm at least explaining my viewpoint, I'd appreciate it if you'd respond with something besides "nuh uh" with no counter-explanation. You say kids today don't have "skill sets" that we old fogeys have. What skill sets would that be, hmmm?

And don't give me the "read the manuals" baloney. The manuals actually ARE mostly unimportant fluff that you don't need to understand the game. I got through the whole game twice, the first time using just a reference card of button commands/spell mixtures.

EDIT: Incidentally I also posted a comment on the guy's page, which is basically a more drawn-out version of what I'm saying.

edited 4th Oct '10 7:14:11 AM by Edmond_Dantes

The Kagami topic has now reached 201 posts! (Nov 5)

From the second-to-last page of the PDF manual xu4 came with:

I've always enjoyed reading game manuals, and found the fluff a lot of fun most of the time. I'd actually played a lot of Ultima-like RPGs, but never actually played an Ultima game until pretty recently when I stumbled on the xu4 source port from a link Jeff Vogel gave in an interview about… How older RPGs are beyond most peoples' ken now.

Playing it, the clunky keyboard-based interface (I'm a Mac user) was kind of annoying at first, but I eventually got used to that. Running around writing down clues and hints to hunt down stuff and trying to figure out my goal was actually pretty neat, but there was one single thing that I DID find almost impossible to deal with: The unforgivingly maze-like first-person dungeons that blow out your lights and require spamming vertical teleportation spells in order to even navigate.

Eric,

@Freezair: I'm 20, do I count as the "younger generation"?

I've never played an Ultima game, so I don't know how well I'd do; I'd probably just look at an in-depth walkthrough somewhere. I'm not terribly interested in a lot of older games in general, like those made before I was born.

edited 4th Oct '10 1:25:25 PM by Videogamer_07

Troper page Nothing interesting here, move along...

Manuals are generally optional in modern games. They can be fun to read, but I can't remember the last time I read one to get useful information about how to play a game.

Modern interface design tends to be intuitive enough that manuals aren't necessary except for the most complex of games, and tutorials tend to replace manuals where they would be needed. Of course players versed in modern games won't expect to need a manual. This is just the medium evolving.

Torment liveblog is still hiatusing. You can vandalize my contributor page if you want something to do.

It's too bad you can't really remake this game without copying another game's style to fit today's standards.

ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.

Depends on via whose eyes, and, probably, where you got your gaming start and what you consider your gaming "golden years."

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

I find it strange that the students were doing that bad. I'm a 15-year-old, and I always read the manuals of games (Hell, the idea of all the lore in Ultima would only make me want to read it even more). Granted, I've never played an Ultima game before, but I could probably figure it out.

"Who wants to hear about good stuff when the bottom of the abyss of human failure that you know doesn't exist is so much greater?"-Wraith

Hmm...well, I don't remember exactly which systems I had, or what some of the games' names were, but I believe I had both NES and SNES. I definitely remember having a Genesis and a Sega Saturn, but I don't think I have any of these systems anymore; however, I still have several Saturn games in the closet. As for handhelds, I have 2 Gameboy Colors: a purple one and a Pokemon Yellow one.

I never had many computer games, but I did have all 3 Doo M games (Ultimate, 2, and Final), Quake, and several others that I don't remember.

Troper page Nothing interesting here, move along...

I'm probably one of the idiots who wouldn't get it (never played Ultima). I always read the manual, but I still prefer an in-game tutorial, because even if the manual is perfectly clear (which sometimes it isn't) being able to see it done or be given hints as you get to new things is a much easier way of doing things.

That said, that wouldn't work with Ultima IV. Then again, I prefer shooters (especially those like the Battlefield Series) and strategy games to adventure games.

"The fact that your food can be made into makeshift bombs alarms the Hell out of me, Scrye." - Charlatan