Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress

The setting is a mix of science fiction and fantasy, so you explore the overworld and dungeons but later on, you fly a spaceship to different planets. The core gameplay loop is grinding enemies to earn gold, getting items and improving your character until you are strong enough to progress. To complete the game there are some puzzles to solve and advancement is often gated until you find a certain item.

Goal

In Ultima I, you had to travel back in time to defeat the evil wizard Mondain. In Ultima II your goal is to defeat Minax, Mondain’s apprentice.

Character Creation

The game starts with the following screen and to begin a new game, you first need to create a player character by pressing C.

After being prompted to insert a player disk, the next screen invites you to create a character and all of the character creation is done on this single screen. The creation screen is shown below.

Stats

There are six primary stats:

• Strength - Determines attack damage. Requirement for armour types.
• Agility - Determines to hit chance. Requirement for weapon types.
• Stamina - Reduces damage inflicted on player.
• Charisma - Reduces prices in shops.
• Wisdom - Determines chance to cast Wizard and Cleric spells.
• Intelligence - Determines spell power for wizards. Reduces prices in shops.

These are the same set as in Ultima 1. The values of these stats can range from a minimum of 10 to a maximum of 99.

Character level and experience points are also tracked but they don’t impact much.

Experience points were very important in ULTIMA I and you strive to increase them but in Ultima II they are not important and if you get above 9999 the counter will just reset to zero.

Ultima II: A Review, James A. McPherson, Computer Gaming World, March 1983

The only place of note where the level stat is used is for the magic missile spell which becomes more powerful with higher levels.

To create your character you must distribute 90 points between the six attributes: strength, agility, stamina, charisma, wisdom, and intelligence, then choose your gender, species and class. Ultima II uses the term “type” to describe the choice of class because “Character class” hadn’t become a common phrase yet.

Species, Gender and Classes

Choice of species impacts starting stats.

1. Human - Intelligence +5.
2. Elf - Agility +5.
3. Dwarf - Strength +5.
4. Hobbit - Wisdom +10.

Then you choose a class and this is where things get more interesting.

1. Fighter - Strength +15. Cannot use spells.
2. Cleric - Wisdom +10. 6 spells.
3. Wizard - Intelligence +10. 6 spells.
4. Thief - Agility +10. Cannot use spells.

The Cleric and Wizard get access to 6 spells, 3 of these spells are shared and the other 3 are specific to the chosen class. This means the class choice cuts off some game features, which makes this the most interesting choice in the character creation process. This is a significant difference to Ultima I which allowed the player to cast magic regardless of class.

Finally you choose a gender, which unusually also impacts starting stats.

1. Male - Strength +5.
2. Female - Charisma +10.

Once that’s all decided you begin the game with:

• 400 gold
• 400 food
• 400 HP

But no items, equipment or spells.

Input

Ultima II was released first on the Apple II and therefore has a keyboard first input system. The direction keys move you around the overworld map or the dungeon, in the first person view. Then there are a lot of different keys for various game actions, here’s a sampling:

• A - Attack (must specify a direction to fight nearby creature).
• B - Board (mount horse or enter a boat/plane/rocket).
• C - Cast (after readying a spell with M; only works in dungeons/towers).
• G - Get (pick up items on the ground).
• M - Magic (ready a spell) and then C to cast it.
• N - Negate (stops time in nearby area, if you have the special item).
• O - Offer (give gold to kings/guards to buy services or safe passage).
• T - Transact (trade or talk with townspeople/merchants/royalty).
• Z - Ztats (display stats, possessions, spells; also halts time for a moment).

Exploration

The game world is vast. Unlike Ultima I’s single continent, Sosaria, Ultima II takes place on Earth, spans multiple eras and even other planets. Time Doors allow you to visit several Earth time-periods: an ancient “Time of Legends”, prehistoric Pangaea, 1423 BC, near-future 1990 AD, and the post-apocalyptic year 2112 also known as the Aftermath. You can also travel to planets throughout the Solar System. Many of these planet areas are sparsely populated and have no Time Gates or Eras.

Each era contains castles, towns, towers and dungeons that can be entered switching to a first person view for dungeons and towers, or a more zoomed in overhead view for castles and towns. In towers you find ladders to travel upwards and in dungeons you go down. The entrances to towers and dungeons are at fixed spots on the map. Unlike Ultima 1 the dungeons are not procedurally generated, instead they’re all authored locations.

You start on the overworld map in the 1423 B.C. era on Earth and you can find Time Doors that transport you to different eras if you walk over them. An era is an entirely new overworld map. A given Time Door will always take you to the same place and they’re bi-directional, so you can go back without any issue. The overworld maps and Time Door locations are always appear in the same places game to game. Time Doors are not static, they flicker in and out of the game world over time so sometimes you need to wait where you know one will appear before using it. There is always exactly one door open on the current map and they change every 8 turns.

Travel is initially on foot but as you progress you’ll gain access to various vehicles that unlock new areas:

Horse

Purchased from stables. Provides faster land travel. Horses cannot travel through marsh tiles.

Pirate Ship

Requires the Blue Tassle item, which is a random loot drop from Thieves. Find a pirate ship and press B to board it. Allows travel across water tiles. Food is not consumed while aboard. The ship can fire cannons with F.

Bi-Plane

Requires the Skull Key to board and the Brass Button to launch, both random loot drops from Thieves. Find a plane at an airport/hangar, press B to board it, then L to launch. You can fly over mountains and water. Food is not consumed while flying.

Rocket Ship

Requires the Ankh to board and Tri-Lithium to launch, obtained from Thieves (Tri-Lithium can also be found in deep dungeon/tower levels). The only rocket is located in Pirates Harbour (2112 A.D. Aftermath). Reach the rocket launch area, defeat the guards, and press B to board it. Press L to launch. Allows travel into space and between planets using H for hyperspace. Tri-Lithium is consumed for launches and hyperspace jumps.

In Ultima II transport becomes more of a progression system, to access new parts of the game, you need to find the various modes of transport, work out what’s required to get them and then you’re rewarded with being able to go somewhere new. This is more sophisticated than Ultima 1 where the only requirement to accessing new modes of transport was ability to buy it.

Using transport is also “faster”, i.e. riding a horse makes monsters act on alternate turns rather than making you move further.

The other thing to note about the world of Ultima II is that it continues Ultima’s game world persistency. If you see a boat, leave the era then return later, it will still be there and the same for vehicles you pilot to places. This may not seem like a big deal but it requires tracking this information in the game code and ensuring it’s included in the save game. This is one of the things that gave the Ultima games the feeling of a real world.

Inventory

Ultima II has a fixed inventory. There’s no way to drop items and all items stack. There’s a G command for Get, this is used in towns to pick up items from the floor and also to loot dungeon chests. When you defeat an enemy, it may drop loot, and in that case it’s automatically added to your inventory.

Items

In Ultima II you buy weapons, armor, items and spells from shops with the Transact command, as well as find them as loot and scattered around the world.

Consumable Items

When we come to magic you’ll see there’s very little that distinguishes items from magic spells. The biggest difference is the class requirements to use them.

Non-Consumable Items

Ultima II has a distinction between “boarding” and “using/launching” a vehicle:

• Board - enter the vehicle. You are now aboard it, but it isn’t moving.
• Launch - actually start operating/moving the vehicle.

These are commands you can use with B and L.

Equipment

Equipment in Ultima II is simple. You can have one weapon readied and one suit of armour equipped at a time, using the Ready and Armor commands. Weapons have a power value that determines how much damage they add to an attack, while armour has a defensive value that determines how likely it is to protect you from an attack. In both cases, higher values are better.

All items are available in shops, apart from the quick sword.

Reflect or power armor is required before you can travel into space.

Combat

Combat can occur pretty much everywhere on the overworld map, in towns or in dungeons and towers.

The combat simulation is pretty standard - determine if you hit, determine damage, apply damage, do the same for enemies and repeat.

Hit chance is determined by agility, and due to the way the comparison logic and the binary format work, an agility of 80 or above guarantees a hit.

1int agility = BcdToInt(player.Agility);2int roll = Random.Next(128);3if (roll >= agility) { Print("--MISS"); return; }4// otherwise the hit lands and we carry on.

The chance to hit works out like the table below. I’m just showing the tens here but these aren’t hard thresholds it’s just to give a flavor.

Then the damage is calculated by:

1int strength = BcdToInt(player.Strength);2int damage = (weapon.Power * 4 + strength) / 4;

Again, the assembly here operates directly on byte values, so it’s difficult to translate it into a higher-level language while keeping the result both faithful and easy to understand.

The damage calculation is entirely deterministic. The Quick Sword, the most powerful weapon, hits for 56 HP of damage when the player character has 99 Strength.

For the opponent, their chance to hit is always 50%. The player’s armour can prevent them from being hit; with cloth avoiding 1 out of 10 attacks and reflect armor nearly 9 out of 10. The damage inflicted is based on the opponents current HP, so monsters hit less hard as they are weakened. Damage is multiplied by 2 when you’re in a forest and there are similar, greater multipliers for towns and dungeons. I’m glossing over some of the details; overall it contains a few oddities.

Overworld Combat

Enemies appear as you travel around the overworld map and move towards you when you get near. You attack enemies with your equipped weapon by using A to initiate an attack.

Enemies become less dangerous when wounded. When an enemy reaches 15 HP or less it attempts to flee and starts regenerating HP. This makes being able to kill an enemy in one attack particularly useful. Enemy damage is mostly based on their current HP rather than some attack value connected to their type. Enemies in towns and castles receive additional bonuses. Terrain can also impact combat, for instance standing in woods doubles the damage you take.

Dungeon and Tower Combat

Dungeons contain 16 levels, with increasingly dangerous monsters appearing as you descend. Up to two monsters can be present at once, and killing one can cause another to appear. This means combat can continue indefinitely if the player remains in the dungeon. Enemies apply a damage multiplier based on dungeon depth and this makes the deeper levels more dangerous than the overworld. Spells only work in towers and dungeons which gives magic users an advantage in these environments. Dungeons are optional; there’s no requirement to explore them to complete the game, though they can be a good source of Tri-Lithium.

Monsters

Most monsters simply pursue the player and make normal attacks, but several have special abilities that are ranged or interfere with the player’s ability to act.

• Daemons can paralyse the player’s legs from up to two squares away, preventing movement, even while travelling in a vehicle.
• Thieves can steal items from the player - including the Ring item which is required to complete the game.
• Devils can paralyse the player’s arms, preventing them from attacking.
• Balrons can cast a sleep spell from two squares away, preventing the player from doing anything.
• Wizards can cast Magic Missile from two squares away. Their spell uses the equivalent of 255 HP for its damage calculation, making it particularly dangerous.
• Ghosts, found in dungeons from level 2 onwards, can extinguish a torch or end the Light spell when they attack.
• Gremlins, found from dungeon level 8, can steal 100 Food when they hit.

The special abilities have 1 in 8 chance of triggering.

In the Dungeons there are Orcs, Ghosts, Carrion Creepers, Vipers, Gremlins, Minotaurs and Balrons. On the overworld map and in the towns and castles you’ll encounter Orcs, Sea Monsters, Daemons, Devils, Balrons, Frigates, Guards, Jesters, Merchants, Kings, Fighters, Clerics, Wizards and Thieves.

Magic

In Ultima II, spells are a type of consumable item. You purchase them at stores and casting uses them up, even if the spell fails. Spell effectiveness is tied to the user’s stats, so as the player character grows more powerful the spells do more damage.

Spells only work in dungeons.

Spell use has the equivalent of single equipment slot. You can assign a spell to this slot using M, for Magic, followed by the spells number. Then you can cast that spell, assuming you have enough remaining, by pressing C for cast.

Ultima II has two types of shops one for Wizards and one for Clerics, though the shared spells can be bought at either. Spells in the shop are sold in bundles of 5. All shops sell the same set of spells.

Below is the list of spells and the descriptions are taken directly from the manual.

Spells Wizards and Clerics can Use

Cleric Only Spells

The prayer can instantly kill your adversary but it’s a random chance, exactly how random is hard to say but it seems to have about 50% chance of success.

Wizard Only Spells

Advancement

Advancement in Ultima II is pretty wild, hold on while I explain it.

There’s an experience point and level system but it’s almost entirely useless. Experience points are awarded for killing monsters and the threshold for increasing level is raised by 100 points each time, so it’s a straight linear progression. The only thing your level improves is your magic missile spell. It’s not used in any other circumstance.

How you improve your attributes varies depending on the build of the game. But the rough shape is the same: you need to offer money, using the Offer command, to a certain king (or hotel clerk), then a random attribute is raised by 4 points. There’s also a chance no attribute is raised.

Using the same Offer command you can buy hitpoints from Lord British or the Lord of Castle Barataria on Planet X. The maximum hitpoints you can have is 9999 and the amount you’re awarded tapers off as you accumulate more hitpoints. It has been speculated this taper is also to prevent the number overflow bug where if you add over the maximum you cycle back to the number 0.

This means advancement is directly bought with gold. You buy attributes, you buy HP. Also there’s no maximum HP, it’s only one pool and you buy it directly.

Quests

Ultima II doesn’t have a quest system as such but, like Ultima 1, completing the game isn’t as simple as finding an orb at the bottom of a dungeon. These are minimal steps required to complete the game.

1. Kill guards to get keys. You’ll need to use these keys to open three doors in towns to complete the game.
2. Kill thieves and collect their loot. You need Tri-Lithium to power a rocket later on and an Ankh to use the rocket. You’ll also need access to a frigate or bi-plane and these require a Blue Tassle or a Skull Key and Brass Button respectively.
3. Buy reflect or power armor, which will let you survive space flight.
4. Find the Time Door to the 2112 Aftermath and pass through.
5. Get to Pirate Harbor. You’ll need the frigate or the bi-plane to reach it.
6. In Pirate Harbor unlock the door to the docks, take a boat and cross to the three rockets in the north of the town.
7. Board a rocket with the Ankh, launch it with Tri-Lithium, then hyperjump to Planet X.
8. Transact with Father Antos in Castle Barataria for his blessing.
9. Return to Earth and travel to San Antonio in 1990.
10. Unlock two doors in the town to find an old man. Give him 500 gold to get a ring.
11. Find and enter castle Shadowguard in the Time of Legends.
12. The ring allows you to pass through the force fields and fight and defeat Minax, completing the game.

As you talk to people in the game you’ll get hints about these steps but to solve the game blind, like an original player, would have taken some trial and error.

Systems

Ultima II continues using systems from Ultima I including: traps, chests, stealing, the hunger clock and so on with minor variations. I’ll delve into a selection of them below:

Semi-Turn Based

Like Ultima 1 time advances when you take an action, then all enemies take an action and repeat. But if you don’t take any action for slightly over 3 seconds then a default “pass” action is taken an enemies will move, so it’s semi-turn based or semi real-time.

Dungeon Light System

To see in a dungeon you need to use torches or spells. Each of these sets a light clock to 150 turns and when the turns run out, the light extinguishes and the dungeon stops being drawn to the screen; plunging you into total darkness.

Death

In Ultima 1 Lord British would resurrect you on death, not here, you die and you’re dead. Though your death isn’t written to the save game, so you can reload and restore to wherever you last saved.

Viewport Expanded to Towns

In Akalabeth and Ultima I the overworld used a viewport i.e. a small portion of the map was displayed and the rest scrolled on to the screen as you walked around. In Ultima II this viewport feature was also expanded to towns which gives the game a greater sense of scale.

Rather than seeing the entire layout of a town displayed onscreen at once, the player looked at only a small portion of it at any one time. When his character moved along the cobblestoned sidewalk, the rest of the town “scrolled” along, bringing more of its shops, hotels, and pubs into view.

The Official Book of Ultima, Shay Addams, 1990

Piloting the Spaceship

Space flight is it’s own small system within the game. From the overworld map you can launch into space where you see a star field and are told you’re orbiting the earth. From there, assuming you have enough Tri-Lithium, you can choose to enter hyperspace where you’re prompted to enter 3 coordinates from 0-9. These coordinates are called Xeno, Yako and Zabo - apparently made-up words that reflect X, Y, Z coordinates of 3D space. Earth is at 6,6,6 and Planet X, the planet you need to visit to as part of the main quest is at 9,9,9.

Once you enter hyperspace there’s a very nice starfield effect of you zooming through space and even with the right coordinates there’s a chance the hyperspace jump fails and you need to try again. Then once you’re orbiting the planet you can choose to land which moves the game to another special “landing state”. Here the overworld map scrolls-by relatively fast centered on the rocket and you have to time your landing so the rocket lands on grass, if you land on any other terrain you die.

Number Bug

There are bugs in the game, in particular a lot of numbers roll-over when they go past 99. To a programmer that might sound odd. The Apple II had 8 bit bytes and you can store 256 numbers in a such a byte. But Ultima II splits the byte in 2x4 bits with each side representing one 0-9 number. There was no test or clamp so numbers that went beyond 99 wrapped to start back at 0. In this way you could over-improve your stats, overflowing them and ending up with a disappointingly small number.

Development

Ultima I had sold exceptionally well. Garriott’s father was a NASA astronaut and the income from Ultima was multiples of his annual salary. Gamers wanted more and Garriott wanted more.

“It was funny, because what I was doing purely for fun was already making four times as much as anyone else in the family, even when I was still in college.”

Richard Garriott quoted in The Official Book of Ultima, Shay Addams, 1990

Garriott began work on Ultima II while attending the University of Texas but ended up dropping out to concentrate on finishing the game.

“We were pretty sure he [Richard’s Father] was going to kill Richard,” remembered his brother Robert. The conversation first ended in an uneasy compromise, in which Richard would come back to Houston to devote most of his time to his game, but would take part-time classes at the University of Houston. This he did, albeit in somewhat desultory fashion, for about a year, until his father finally accepted that the games industry offered more opportunity than university for Richard at this moment. “When this ends,” said his father, “you’ll go back to school and get a real job.” That day, of course, would never come.

The Wizardry and Ultima Sequels, The Digital Antiquarian, 2012

Garriott felt he had taken BASIC as far as he could with Ultima I. Ultima I already had snippets of assembly for the most demanding parts of code; the map blitter, and Garriott felt to make a bigger world would require him to code it in assembly exclusively. Therefore he called California Pacific and asked if they had anyone who could help him and they did; Tom Luhrs. Luhrs spent a month giving the 20-year-old Garriott a crash course in assembly during his summer break in 1981. In the autumn Garriott returned to the University of Texas where he continued work on Ultima II in assembly, from the ground up.

Around this time the relationship with his existing publisher, California Pacific, faltered as the company went out of business and several other publishers were quick to swoop in and try to secure the rights to publish Ultima.

So I said, ‘Well, guys, I’m glad you’re all interested,’ and told them what I wanted. I wanted my game in a box, I wanted my game with extensive documentation, and-most of all I wanted a cloth map. As soon as I made that statement, every publisher but Sierra On-Line dropped out.

Richard Garriott quoted in The Official Book of Ultima, Shay Addams, 1990

Ken Williams [CEO of Sierra On-Line] pursued him relentlessly, smelling bestseller. After flying the young author to Oakhurst, he agreed to all of Lord British’s demands, even the thirty percent royalty. Ken Williams wanted him to sign then and there, and, Garriott later said, “got all huffy at the fact that I wasn’t going to sign anything [that day].” But after he returned to Texas, Garriott did sign. “I couldn’t see a reason not to.”

Richard Garriott quoted in Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984

Garriott made the most of his position and pushed for a cloth map to be included in the box, an important point to him, and On-Line Systems were willing to make it happen.

Richard signed a contract with Ken Williams: by April 1982, he would deliver the full game and On-Line Systems would publish it

Through the Moongate, Part 1, Andrea Contato, 2019

Development took longer than expected, the game grew increasingly ambitious and difficult to debug. The April 1982 delivery deadline came and went. Ken Williams “invited [Garriott] to stay in Oakhurst … to work in On-Line Systems’ offices”. Garriott relocated from Texas to one of Sierra’s local houses. He worked alongside Sierra’s programmers and was able to complete the game there.

There was one final obstacle before Ultima II could be released. Mark Duchaineau, a programmer at On-Line Systems, had developed new copy-protection software and wanted it used on the game. A disagreement over the system delayed the release until after the 1982 Applefest.

Garriott had the game in hand at Applefest; festooned in gold chains and a suede-and-leather tunic […] one problem that was preventing Ultima 2 from being released that very weekend. The problem was Mark Duchaineau. He had not copy-protected the program, and it was not clear that he would.

Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984

Even during Applefest the game had thousands of preorders and so when it did release it was a huge success, selling 50,000 copies.

Legacy

Like Ultima I, Ultima II was a big deal, for the time it sold a lot of copies.

Sierra Online […] released Ultima II in an oversized box and with the handsomely produced cloth map Garriott coveted. Ultima II immediately established the state of the art for computer role-playing games and was soon widely emulated by other designers. In addition to achieving critical acclaim, the 1982 sequel sold over 50,000 copies then, a figure that earned it Certified Silver status and an accompanying plaque from the Software Publishers Association. By now nearly 100,000 have been sold.

The Official Book of Ultima, Shay Addams, 1990

A later Origin press release also reports Ultima II selling over 100,000 copies, so these games were being played very widely and influencing the idea of what a computer game could be. While the game was popular at the time, the contemporary view of Ultima II is that it’s not much fun to play. It’s arbitrary and unfair plus it demands the player spend a lot of grinding for gold and HP.

Contemporary Setting

The game is partially set in 1990 on planet Earth, which would have then been a few years in the future at the time. It’s the first RPG to have a contemporary setting like this but it’s mostly set dressing, it doesn’t really have any impact on the game.

Scale

This is the biggest RPG of the time in terms of the scale of the world and volume of hand authored content. However the giant world it’s dungeons, towers and towns are mostly backdrop. As James A. McPherson put it at the end of his review in Computer Gaming World:

The villages, castles, and towns are all unique; the oceans and lakes even have animated water. My only thought as I finished the game was that very little of this enormous work was really utilized as being required to complete the game.

Ultima II: A Review, James A. McPherson, Computer Gaming World, March 1983

To complete the game you don’t need to engage with the majority of this content and there’s little reward to doing so, outside of curiosity. Ultima II’s game loop is a fight against entropy - keeping your ever-falling numbers of gold, hit points, hunger and items topped up. This means it’s expensive to explore dangerous places like dungeons and if there’s no reward to doing so, it’s unsatisfying.

Cloth Map

Ultima II was released as a boxed product. In the early days of video games not much thought was given to packaging, games were distributed in zip-loc plastic bags. However to give a more premium impression larger games started to be sold in glossy cardboard boxes printed with art and features. Ultima II was not the first boxed-product, that probably goes to Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai, in fact in 1982 boxed products were not unusual but it did have one thing other boxes did not - a cloth map.

The item that Garriott insisted on was the cloth map, a direct inspiration from the movie Time Bandits. There was something uniquely compelling about a physical item that connected you to the virtual world you were about to explore. The production of the cloth maps was tendered to a firm in Iran which added to delays due to sanctions related to the on-going Iran hostage crisis.

Runic Alphabet

As the Ultima Series goes on it introduces a runic alphabet. This alphabet is a simple substitution cypher; to pick a few letters at random B is ᛒ, U is ᚢ, then there are a few combined letters combinations as well like th being ᚦ but overall it’s an invented alphabet.

Ultima II introduces the first use of the runic alphabet to write some labels on the cloth map included in the game. This alphabet adds to both the world building - an alien land with a different language - and introduces a fun puzzle.

Wizardry and Oubliette before it, use a special language for spell names but Ultimas use of language feels more in service of the world building. That said, later entries in the Ultima series do start to use runes for magic too.