Avatar (Ultima)

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

The Avatar
'Ultima' character
First game	Ultima I (as the Stranger), Ultima IV (as the Avatar)
Created by	Richard Garriott

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.

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 a set of ethic guidelines called the Virtues. From Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar onward, the player must balance the Avatar's actions and have him behave according to the Virtues, or have negative consequences result from it. 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.

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. It is widely debated whether or not the Stranger and the Avatar are the same person, as the games themselves are not quite consistent on this issue. 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 as 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 the Stranger/Avatar followed the Virtues in later games, 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 the seventh, eighth, and ninth games, the Avatar battled the Guardian, finally destroying both himself and his foe to rid the world of him.

The Avatar is also 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: Pagan.

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 VI, 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 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.

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."

Writer Sheri Graner Ray wrote of Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle

Players could chose their avatar's gender and race. This was a first in computer games. The models the artists used for the female avatars were female athletes, and the armor they were was femine, but not hypersexual. Overall, they were a good representations of both gender and race.