Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny ranks among the high points of Richard Garriott's entire series, and its 1988 Commodore 64 version proved that even an eight-bit machine could carry a sprawling open world with dozens of towns, castles, islands, and branching underground complexes. The player returns to Britannia, where in the Avatar's absence the tyrannical Order of the Shadowlords has seized power and imposed a strict, outwardly just but actually oppressive regime built on suppressing the people's free will. The game thus goes deeper into moral gray areas than its predecessors, forcing the player to consider what freedom truly means and what price they are willing to pay for order.

The gameplay is built on top-down exploration, text dialogue with characters that respond to specific keywords, recruiting a party of eight companions, and tactical combat on its own screen, where unit position and terrain matter. On the C64 the world was spread across many floppy disks, and frequent disk swapping was part of the price for its scope, but the game still offered an elaborate day-and-night system, the need for food and light underground, shop opening hours, and a believably living town economy where characters kept their own daily routines. The graphics were more modest than the PC versions and the color palette more limited, yet the atmosphere was well supported by spare but functional music accompanying the journey across the land.

At release Ultima V was received as one of the most ambitious RPGs on the market and is still ranked among the best entries in the whole series. It influenced a whole generation of open-world RPGs with its emphasis on a simulated world with its own rhythm, one that doesn't just wait for the player's steps but keeps living on without them. Today the game will appeal mainly to players interested in the genre's history who have patience for period controls and constant disk swapping — but as a piece of design it remains remarkably readable even decades later, and many of its ideas still turn up in RPGs today.

Why play it: For players interested in the genre's history with patience for period controls and disk swapping, Ultima V offers a remarkably readable design and a simulated world whose ideas still turn up in RPGs today.