Avatar (Ultima)

For other uses of "Avatar", see Avatar (disambiguation).

The Avatar
Series	Ultima
First game	Ultima I (as the Stranger) Ultima IV (as the Avatar)
Created by	Richard Garriott
Voiced by	J.C. Shakespeare (Ultima IX)

The Avatar is the main player character and protagonist in the Ultima series of games by Origin Systems, first introduced as "the Stranger" in Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness in 1981.

In video games

The Avatar was first known as the Stranger (or, more fully, Stranger from another world) in Ultima I, when he (or she) rid the world of the evil wizard Mondain, later returning to bring an end to the wicked sorceress Minax in Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress and to dispatch their legacy in Ultima III: Exodus. Ultima IV says the heroes of the first three games were several different persons and implies that the party of heroes from Ultima III still lived in Britannia. But later Ultimas (Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle being the most definite example) imply the Stranger and the Avatar are one and the same person. As far as the gameworld itself is concerned, this could be explained with gradual muddling of history (as Batlin explains in Ultima VII: The Black Gate). The games cover a very long time span, and due to different rate of time in Earth and Britannia, there are intervals of up to multiple centuries between the games.

While in later games the Stranger/Avatar follows a set of ethic guidelines called the Virtues, in the first three the player is not bound by any moral guidelines, leaving the future Avatar free to steal and murder, with only the authorities to stop him/her. The fourth time the Stranger returned, his quest took a different task. Instead of defeating an enemy, his goal was to follow the path of the Virtues, and retrieve the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom from the Great Stygian Abyss. In the fifth episode, the Avatar defeated a repressive regime over Britannia, and in the sixth he brought peace between men and gargoyles. In Ultima VII onward, the Avatar battled the Guardian, finally destroying both himself and his foe to rid the world of him.

Appearance

In almost all of Ultima games (except for Ultima IX: Ascension), the player is allowed to name the Avatar character how they want. In Ultima IV and Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, due to graphical limitations, the player could only choose the gender of the Avatar character, but in most later games (including Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, Serpent Isle and the Ultima Underworld series) several different character portraits with different skin and hair colors are available; however, in The Black Gate the choice is reduced to gender only - both the female and male portraits have blond hair and fair skin. (If played with Exult with Serpent Isle installed, the Serpent Isle portraits are also available in the Black Gate.) The Avatar sprite is determined by class in early games, and always the same in Ultima V and Ultima VI: The False Prophet. Ultima VII has two different sprites, one for each gender. In Ultima VIII: Pagan and IX, there is no choice in gender, portrait or sprite/3D model - the character is male with blond hair.

The Avatar's trademark clothing often includes a chain mail, with a white, red or orange tunic (with a golden Ankh symbol on the chest and back) over it, and a red cape. Typically, he's also shown wielding a sword. His appearance varies from game to game and version to version, but usually follows this schema - and it is possible to use whatever other clothing, armor and weapons that the game provides. In Ultima VIII, the Avatar's face is obscured by a large helmet.

In Ultima I to III, no speech by the Stranger was ever shown. In Ultima IV and onward, the player must choose keywords (in early parts by typing them out, in VII by choosing the keywords from an on-screen list). Thus the other characters discuss things with the Avatar, but apart of the topic, the player never sees what the Avatar actually says. By tradition, the dialogue choices the player knows beforehand are "name", "job" and "bye" (this is parodied in Ultima VII where an actor playing the Avatar boasts about how he has hundreds of lines to memorize, only to reveal that every line consists of "name", "job" and "bye"). The first time the Avatar actually spoke directly was in Ultima VII, but even in those games, full lines were very rare and only appeared in one or two instances. Ultima Underworld broke this tradition by being the first Ultima to give the Avatar full dialogue throughout the game; Ultima IX would later follow this tradition, and add digitized speech..

Development

Ultima creator Richard Garriott has stated that after Ultima III he received a lot of hate mail from parents, bringing his attention to the fact that in his first three Ultima games immoral actions like stealing and murder of peaceful citizens had been necessary or at least very useful actions in order to win the game. There was also criticism about supposed Satanic content in games at that time and the demonic nature of the antagonist of Ultima III, and the picture of it on the box cover, was an easy target. He was called "Satanic perverted of America's Youth" by some groups. The official biographer of Richard Garriott, Shay Addams, wrote: "He decided that if people were going to look for hidden meaning in his work when they didn't even exist, he would introduce ideas and symbols with meaning and significance he deemed worthwhile, to give them something they could really think about." Watching a television show on the Hinduism, and its 16 virtues that are necessary to lead one to the state of Avatar-hood, he decided to use that, forging his eight virtue system from that, and getting the name for the character, Avatar.

By the time of Ultima VII, Richard Garriott noted that he had grown tired of the moral concept seen in Ultima IV, V and VI, and the Avatar returned to a more traditional role for the player where the moral code wasn't as strictly enforced. The Avatar in Ultima VIII was designed to be male, taking away the choice of gender, but still having some of the moral flexibility seen in prior titles. Ultima X: Odyssey promised to return to the character development of achieving Avatar status, but the project was ultimately cancelled.

Reception

GameSpot listed Avatar among the ten best heroes in video gaming, commenting: "In the minds of many longtime Ultima fans, identifying this timeless character by a face - and removing your ability to imagine his visage, or project yourself into the role - was a careless mistake on Origin's behalf. In Ultima V, the Avatar was more than a hero, he was a projection of yourself. Sadly, now he has become someone else - just another hero out to rid the land of evil." In 2008, IGN included him on the list of characters they would like to see in an ultimate fighting game, adding: "The Avatar may not be the first RPG adventure hero, but he's certainly the most memorable of the early gaming era."

Cultural impact

The Avatar's name became the first mention of the word "avatar" in its modern virtual context. He (or she) is not an embodiment of a god (as in the traditional meaning of the term), but of the Virtues. From Ultima IV onward, the player must balance the Avatar's actions and have him behave according to the Virtues. Since the games in the series focus on spiritual growth and hope to teach some good ideas to the players as well, the implied idea behind the Avatar character is to make the in-game character a mirror image of the players themselves (the character in the game, in a way, becoming an "avatar" of the player), allowing the players for to choose the gender and race of their characters for the first time in the history of video games.

The Avatar concept also pioneered an RPG game design where the player has control over a single character, and builds a party of followers from preexisting non-player characters.

The Avatar makes a cameo appearance as the last heroic adversary in Dungeon Keeper, also released by Electronic Arts but developed by different subsidiary, Bullfrog Productions). He is also humorously shown in the last cutscene, locked in a wall as a knife-throwing target practice, with the same appearance as in Ultima VIII.