In Ultima IV, the great villains have already fallen — what's left is to beat yourself

Origin Systems' classic swaps the final boss for a notebook of clues and a demand for virtue — and not every player can stomach the pace that takes.

The evil that lingers after the great war

By the time Ultima IV begins, the enemies that drove the series' plot have already been brought down: Mondain, Minax, and the being known as the son of the underworld, Exodus, were left behind in earlier chapters, and peace blankets Britannia. Evil hasn't vanished — it has retreated into isolated pockets and, above all, into ordinary people. The adventure that remains has no villain waiting at the end: it asks for someone willing to master both magic and might to confront that evil on every front, and to become, along the way, the very measure of what it means to be good.

That changes the game from the inside. You talk to a resident of Britannia by typing keywords and waiting for short, direct replies — a system that two players, one in 2013 and another in 2020, describe as rare for its time, because it spares you the frustration of sentences the game simply doesn't recognize. And the choices carry weight: one review recalls the scene where you can cheat a blind reagent seller in Skara Brae — cheat her and the game goes on, except your chance of becoming the Avatar closes right there.

The game is credited to Origin Systems; Electronic Arts handled its distribution. That blend of roles, adventure, and fantasy reached the GOG store in September 2011.

The notebook the screen never shows you

Those who wrote during the game's GOG release week, in September 2011, sound like people revisiting their own youth: one recalls buying the game at a brick-and-mortar store, long before the version GOG sells today, and still keeps the cloth map and the history book that came in the original box. A far more recent review, from 2023, written by someone recovering from a serious illness and with plenty of free time at home, describes the same kind of reunion: rediscovering the game through GOG Galaxy and feeling that nothing essential had changed.

The praise that recurs between 2011 and 2013 isn't about graphics or combat: it's about being among the first to treat the player as someone capable of making a moral choice, not just pressing a button, and about a world where towns and characters seemed to respond to whoever passed through. None of these reviews hides the cost of that. The 2011 one warns: it's repetitive, it asks you to visit the same place more than once, kill the same enemy again, talk to every resident — and with no map on screen, anyone who doesn't jot down every clue by hand will get lost.

The harshest review still praises the rest of the game

The only review that fails the game, published in 2020, isn't from someone who hated it: it acknowledges the same keyword-based conversation system and the same town exploration that fans praise, and even calls those conversations a rare success for their time. What weighs against it is the shift in purpose — trading the direct clash with a villain for a long gathering of words of wisdom feels, to this person, closer to a plodding chore than to an adventure; the plot inherited from the earlier games, in their eyes, amounts to no more than a poorly resolved nightmare. It's a lone voice: among those who played it, approval is broad and dissenting voices like this one are rare.

No map on screen, no shortcut to the end

Ultima IV doesn't ask for your reflexes, it asks for your steadiness: you return to the same town, hear the same resident again, write down the clue the game won't repeat. Anyone who starts it expecting a goal marked on screen gives up at the first street with no signpost — that's not who this game is for. Anyone who accepts that pace, and above all who is willing to become the very measure of the Eight Virtues instead of chasing a final villain, finds what players who wrote years far apart keep repeating: the game doesn't end when the last monster falls, because the final adversary was always the one on the other side of the screen.