As I already said, I love the virtue system and I wrote in some other thread about U4, that I think its pretty much one of the most genius ideas in the history of this medium.
Nonetheless, lets be honest - back in the day they were able to use the virtue system to tell very interesting and deep stories, the system itself however, if you really think about it, is a pretty arbitrary and simplistic ethics 101. I just don't think that, for example, 'becoming the avatar of spirituality' is something that blows the minds of people in the age of morally grey grimdarkness. Likewise, does the assignment of virtues to cities and classes seem like something thats very arbitrary and artificial. In fact, the whole way Sosaria is set up always felt pretty artificial.
The Digital Antiquarian said:
As a system of belief, it’s perhaps not exactly compelling for an adult (although, hey, cults have been founded on less). As an ethical philosophy… well, let’s just say that Richard Garriott is unlikely to ever rival Kant in university philosophy curricula. There are plenty of points to quibble about: Honesty, Compassion, and Valor are, at least in this formulation, really just synonyms for the core principles that supposedly compose them; the idea that Spirituality is made up of all the virtues lumped together seems kind of strange, as does its presence at all given Richard’s determinedly materialist worldview; the idea of Humility as literally an ethical vacuum seems truly bizarre. (Richard later clarified in interviews that he would have preferred this latter to be Pride, but, “Pride not being a virtue, we have to use Humility”; make of that what you will.) And of course the names of the virtues themselves are rather painfully redolent of the life of a Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed teenager. But poking holes in the system is really missing the point. Ultima IV gave its audience permission to think about these things, laid out in a cool if only superficially logical way. The fact that these ethics still speak the language of Dungeons and Dragons was a good thing, because that’s the language most of Ultima IV‘s audience spoke. Richard himself didn’t claim any mystical truth for the system, freely admitting in interviews that it was essentially arbitrary, that dozens of other formulations could have served his purposes just as well
How old was Garriot again when he came up with the virtues? The system
is interesting, yes, it
does make you think, but it - and with it the whole of Ultima - is still ultimately something that you can easily tell is very 80s, very nerdy D&D, very
adolescent in its origin. It is something that takes its charm very much from a time-dependent historical moment. Personally, I enjoy that very much - retrospecitively; I am simply not sure you can take something as genuinely 'historical' (for the lack of a better word, because I don't want to use the word 'outdated') and easily adapt it to 2016+ . To put it more bluntly, a lot of the stuff in Ultima that appears brilliant when you are a teen in the 80s, and appears very charming retrospectively, would probably appear just plain silly from a modern perspective.
I am not sure how it could be done. Change it so much that it becomes irrecognizable as Ultima, then why use the IP in the first place? Or stay close to the roots in a perhaps somewhat self-ironic homage kind of way. Again, I have to think of Larian as perfect for the latter, as they don't take themselves too serious to begin with. With EA however, they would probably take the first approach cause of mass audience and monies.
