Ultima VI: The False Prophet, released by Origin Systems in 1990, is the sixth part in the role-playing video game series of Ultima. It is the third and final game in the "Age of Enlightenment" trilogy. Ultima VI sees the player return to Britannia, at war with a race of gargoyles from another land, struggling to stop a prophecy from ending their race. The player must help defend Britannia against these gargoyles, and ultimately discover the secrets about both lands and its peoples.
Ultima VI continues to advance the technology of the Ultima series. The game world is larger, with a 1024x1024 tile map seamlessly connected and to scale. World interactivity is further increased with object manipulation, movement, and crafting. Graphics and sound are likewise advanced with the use of new sound card technology and VGA graphics cards, and the user interface is streamlined with the use of point-and-click icons.
Ultima VI was followed by Ultima VII: The Black Gate in 1992.
Plot
thumb|left|The main overhead view of Ultima VI (MS-DOS). Here the Avatar and their party are fighting gargoyles at the beginning of the game.
Some years after Lord British has returned to power, the Avatar is captured and tied on a sacrificial altar, about to be sacrificed by red demon-like creatures, the gargoyles. Three of the Avatar's companions, Shamino, Dupre and Iolo, suddenly appear, save the Avatar and collect the sacred text the gargoyle priest was holding.
The Avatar's party flees through a moongate to Castle Britannia, and three of the gargoyles follow. The game begins with the player fighting the gargoyles in Lord British's throne room. After the battle, the Avatar learns that the shrines of Virtue were captured by the gargoyles and he embarks on a quest to rescue Britannia from the invaders.
It is only later in the game that the Avatar learns that the whole situation looks rather different from the point of view of the gargoyles – indeed, they even have their own system of virtues. The quest for victory over the gargoyles now turns into a quest for peace with them.
Gameplay
This game ended the use of multiple scales; in earlier games a town, castle, or dungeon would be represented as a single symbol on the world map, which then expanded into a full sub-map when entering the structure. In Ultima VI, the whole game uses a single scale, with towns and other places seamlessly integrated into the main map; dungeons are now also viewed from the same perspective as the rest of the game, rather than the first-person perspective used by Ultima I-V. The game retained the basic tile system and screen layout of the three preceding games, but utilized a much more colourful and detailed oblique map view and displayed NPC portraits during conversations. These changes took full advantage of the recently released VGA graphics cards for PCs.
Development
The development of the Ultima series originated on the Apple II and every game thus far had been developed primarily on that platform, but by 1990 the market for 8-bit computers in the US had nearly evaporated, so there was no Apple II version for the first time. In any case, the games were starting to outgrow the capabilities of 8-bit hardware. Origin reportedly attempted an Apple II port of Ultima VI, but gave up after deciding it was impossible. A port for the more capable 16-bit Apple IIGS had been planned, and rumored to have been started, but was never released (despite mentions of the machine on the box packaging and manual). The game was ported to the Commodore 64, although not without trimming considerable elements including aesthetics (no portraits), but also gameplay (no horses, no working gems, reduced NPC dialogs, simplified quests, etc.).
Some major changes were made that distinguished Ultima VI from earlier Ultima games. Several of these changes were influenced by Origin's 1988 action role-playing game, Times of Lore, created by Chris Roberts, and FTL Games's 1987 RPG Dungeon Master. One such change was the world design,
The software routines that governed every element of movement and combat was developed by 25 year-old Boston programmer Herman Miller, who previously wrote the IBM conversions of Ultima V and Times of Lore. The conversation system, the means by which the player talks with characters, was developed by 26 year-old Chinese programmer Cheryl Chen, who developed her own programming language for the game called UCS (Ultima VI conversation system). This CD-ROM-based version included full speech in both English and Japanese. Remarkably, in this particular version voice acting was recorded at Origin under the direction of Martin Galway, mostly by the people the characters were based on (with Richard Garriott as Lord British, Greg Dykes as Dupre, Chuck Buche as Chuckles, etc.), though not all personnel could be reached at the time of recording, so some substitutes were used.
The game came with a cloth map of Britannia and a Moonstone made from a black colored bit of glass. Slightly improved versions of the Ultima VI engine were also used for the Worlds of Ultima spin-off series.
Origin produced a deluxe edition of Ultima VI for sale by mail order at the same $69.95 price as the retail version. Lord British autographed the copies, which contained an audio interview with him, game hints, and higher-quality moonstone.
thumb|right|Fan-made patches and remakes exist for many Ultima games. This is the Nuvie engine which provides several upgrades to Ultima VI.
The DOS version of Ultima VI may have sound and speed problems when running on modern computers and operating systems. However, it can run reliably in a DOSBox environment. Several open-source remake projects exist; Nuvie and xU4 aim to recreate the Ultima VI engine in a manner similar to the goals of Exult.