Ultima IV - Quest of the Avatar (1985) is the fourth game in the iconic Ultima series. As the first game in the Age of Enlightenment trilogy, it marks a radical departure from the kill-the-villain formula and the Tolkien/AD&D influence of its predecessors.
Since Ultima III, the world previously known as Sosaria has undergone massive geographical changes and is now united under the leadership of Lord British and the name of Britannia. There is no single great evil threatening the world, but the people of Britannia need an example of morality to follow in their day-to-day lives. Ultima IV introduces ethics to RPGs in the form of a system of virtues. The player must master the eight virtues through righteous behaviour and ultimately become the Avatar.
Read more about Ultima IV at:
My Ultima IV Monsters show the EGA monsters, together with their special abilities and the experience you get upon killing them.
Ultima 4 inaccuracies [English | German] can be found at Hacki's Ultima Page [English | German].
Marc Winterrowd's Ultima Tech Info and Patches has a list of Ultima 4 bugs.
Ultima 4 sections can be found:
See the dedicated dialogue page.
The Encore CD-ROM game manual is on the Ultima Web Archive.
The Ultima 4 manual [TXT], originally from Quill Dragon's Lair, is now being hosted here at Dino's Ultima Page.
Music can be downloaded from The Bard's Library in Mysterious Sosaria, or else some music can be found in the Ultima Web Archive's Music page.
Ultima IV can be upgraded from here on the Moongates Ultima IV Annex.
Marc Winterrowd's Ultima Tech Info and Patches contains a patch for Ultima 4 which replaces normal text with runes where necessary.
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar can be downloaded for free from GOG.com.
The game is also freely available for download at select Ultima Dragon websites:
The Tale of the Kicked Ass at The Lair of Contrapuntal explains how Origin gave its backing for this, reportedly making it legal. The Usenet thread that is mentioned in that story, "Ultima IV, downloading and the law.." from 1997 seems to be preserved at Google Groups. Email correspondence between Contrapuntal Dragon, Fortran Dragon and Mike "Boomer" McCoy confirming Origin's "OK" to release Ultima 4 survives at the following locations:
At an archived version of Xenerkes Dragon's Ultima homepage, you can find descriptions about the tileset, world map, town, dungeon and combat map file formats.
There used to be lots of technical information about the Ultima 4 file formats at the Moongates Ultima IV Annex, but alas, it is currently out of service.
Marc Winterrowd's Ultima tech info and patches has a description of the Atari file formats [TXT].
xu4's source tree contains a file about Ultima 4 File Structures [TXT].
The Ultima Codex has a page about Ultima IV internal formats.
The C64 tileset of Ultima 4 was extracted by Minstrel Dragon, who kindly agreed to have it hosted here at Dino's Ultima Page.
The Ultima 4 Amiga page at The Cutting Room Floor describes an easter egg referring to "Banjo" Bob Hardy.
There's a page about the Skull of Mondain at The Codex of Ultima Wisdom.
The Ultima IV cloth map can be found:
Computer-generated Ultima IV maps can be found as follows:
If you need maps of the dungeons, you can find:
The Moongates Ultima IV Annex has an interesting Moongate Map showing the destinations of the moongates when you move your cursor over one of the moon phases. It requires the Flash plugin though.
Bryan Carter wrote several text files containing annotated maps of Britannia as well as the various castles, towns and villages. You can reach them from either Bryan's projects page or his list of text files.
Sheet music for Ultima 4 has been transcribed by Yofa Dragon. A video of the music (with sheet music download links) is available on YouTube. Copies of the sheet music are available here at Dino's Ultima Page with permission (NTSC tuning [PDF] and PAL tuning [PDF]).
The Let's Play Ultima IV-VI is a visual walkthrough full of screenshots (pointed out by WyrdWeb).
Ultima IV: The Dawn of Virtue was a remake of Ultima IV led by Jaakko Peltonen, using a completely new engine. See its WebDB2 entry for more information.
xu4 is an attempt to allow Ultima 4 to operate in a modern machine environment, in a similar way to Exult.
Virtue of Humility was a completed attempt to recreate Ultima 4 in Dark Basic - not intended to be entirely faithful to the original, since an additional adventure was planned.
Avatarship was a complete remake of Ultima 4 for Neverwinter Nights.
Classic Ultima Online (formerly Ultima 4 Multiplayer) is "a completely free, online, modern remake of Ultima I-IV using the RUM Construction Kit. The remake attempts to adhere closely to the original experience of each Ultima, with a few tweaks for online play and to modernize the game somewhat." (from the About page)
Ultima IV Part II: Dude, Where's My Avatar is a parody taking place between Ultima 4 and 5.
Ultima IV Remastered is a remastered port for the C64, published by MagerValp in 2015.
Ultima IV Rebirth is a mod for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition by Melavir Sauin Dragon. It builds on earlier mods and creates "an alternate reality of Britannia, set during the events chronicled in Ultima IV Quest of the Avatar in the prime universe".
Check out:
Ultima 4 ranks (Wayback Machine) as #21 on 1UP's Essential 50 (most important games ever made).
Read about Ultima 4 at "CRPG History Abridged - 21 RPGs that brought something new to the table", by Felipe Pepe for Gamasutra (25th June 2015).
"An Unexpected Lesson in Humility, OR, Fuck You Katrina: My Journey Through Ultima" describes Isaac Jourden's experience with Ultima 4.
The CRPG Book contains a two-page review of Ultima 4 by Scorpia.
"The Computer Game that Led to Enlightenment" discusses the events that led to the creation of Ultima 4 and its virtue system.
"My Ultima IV experience: from a modern gamer’s view" (28th September 2020) by Yulo Tomorrow on Reddit discusses Ultima 4 from the perspective of a new-generation gamer. Yulo praises the game for its depth, but criticises the combat and confusing systems.
The MS-DOS Project has a 20-minute video review of Ultima 4.
"Review: Ultima IV – Quest of the Avatar" (26th June 2022) at Old Game Hermit gives Ultima 4 a perfect 100/100 rating.
Vectorpoem's Ultima IV map viewer displays the world map with animated tiles.
Andrew Schultz's RPG Mapping Tools include an Ultima IV Dungeon Surfer that can be used to explore the dungeons.
The Ultima IV Walkthrough by Fallible Dragon contains vital information on Ultima IV.
An Ultima IV walkthrough by Stephen Lee is on Psycho_ultima (still available only thanks to the Internet Archive).
The Let's Play Ultima IV-VI, part of the Let's Play Archive, is a humorous visual walkthrough for Ultimas 4 to 6 (thanks to WyrdWeb for finding this).
The Ultima IV walkthrough at The Codex of Ultima Wisdom is more of a collection of essential information needed to beat the game than a step-by-step walkthrough.
© by Daniel D'Agostino 2002-2023
