Orcs disappeared from the Ultima series early on allegedly because Origin wanted their world to be less of a Tolkien rip-off than other contemporary fantasy worlds of the time. Perhaps I should have orcs and an orc village in my Ultima VI side project #AgeofSingularity (assuming the word orc is even actually public domain, which I'd need to check first). I really think the throughline of "there's no such thing as a monster, only people you don't understand" as shown in Ultima VI, is something new Ultimas could also highlight. Similarly, I should have at least a few normal characters, living their lives, of each "monster" race.
Also portraying all races as 1) not just monsters, and 2) not all in racially-segregated villages, is cool and needs more exploration. And portraying the "barbaric" aspects as being individual or cultural aspects, rather than genetic ones, is also a positive and more interesting improvement over some more traditional world-building tropes. Here's an Extra Credits video discussing some of this:
I'm much more interested in the idea that someone being a monster is more about the choices they make, rather than their genetics.
Ultima throughout its games evolved its morality substantially as it developed, and there are more cool ideas that could evolve it even further now that we have the benefit of 30 more years of discourse and thought around many of its relevant topics. I'll try to link my thoughts HERE(I'llAddStuffHere) after I write it all out (for example, having a king living alone in a palace 30 feet away from homeless people, just MAY be immoral in itself), but for right now I'll focus more on the idea of "heroic colonialism".
A good example of "heroic colonialism" in Ultima VI I'm trying to grapple with, is the Sandy quest in the town of Trinsic. Essentially this cook says "I'll give you info for your quest if you bring me a dragon egg to cook." Interestingly enough, there's no morality loss for doing this - which shows the frontier boundary of ethical thought at the time the game was made. The dragons are not threatening the town. He just wants a dragon egg to cook. If we think of dragons as non-thinking animals like chickens who lay unfertilized eggs each day, it's less of a problem, but that nuance was not built-into Ultima VI. If we think of dragons as thinking beings as portrayed in many fantasy stories who only lay fertilized eggs, it becomes more morally shaky - you're stealing a baby to cook it, to get info to save the world. Not to mention the destruction your characters will probably cause fighting their way into the dragon lair (HABITAT) to get the egg in the first place.
It turns out Sandy is a less-than-moral person anyway, but the Avatar is not supposed to be. In ULtima V there are situations where you are required to do something morally questionable, and I'm not sure how I feel about that in the context of otherwise strong focus on always upholding a righteous path in Ultima games.
It'd be great if Ultima VI had tracked how you handled this situation karmically. Maybe sneak in, and be sure to find a non-fertilized egg - perhaps ask an expert first - or even make a fake egg to trick him, or find some other way to get the info from Sandy - but if you can't go in and fight dragons, where's the fun in that? So perhaps you can only fight rabid dragons? (We'll talk more about the concept of the "heroic veterinarian in a bit.) I think we can have cool quests like this, while writing them a bit smarter, to consider modern ethics.
So for thinking beings, their choices are what makes them evil, not their genetics. But what about for beings not consciously making choices and just causing harm? Well, we already have a term for those types of beings: animals. We don't call wolves evil for eating a village, nor bears - they are acting on instinct and in many cases, their actions could be considered self-defense against starvation. (If an animal is eating a village, this usually indicates something else much larger is wrogn in their ecosystem such as industrialization causing food scarcity since well-fed wild animals USUALLY won't attack humans unless they feel immediately threatened.)
This leads to the idea of stewardship - that thinking agents such as humans, have to either help or at least cause no harm to nature itself, rather than the common fantasy trope of colonizing it in the name of "heroics" to bring back a decapitated dragon head, find a lost treasure -- which really should be returned to those who lost it instead of used for profit or explore (invade) an animal habitat (oops I mean "monster lair").
All this helps us to consider making a game about deconstructing the concept of monsters and making something smarter and more interesting.
Zelda games often successfully solve the "you just went into an animal's habitat and killed it when it wasn't hurting anyone" problem in fantasy with the concept of the "infected guardian." The most perfect and distilled example being the Dragon Roost Island chapter early in Wind Waker: there's an island of people, and the volcano and their big guardian dragon are acting up and raining ash, and nobody knows why. You go up there and find out there's a parasite. Once you eliminate the parasite, peace returns to the island, and the guardian dragon is chill again. So as a player you still get the visceral joy of beating the crap out of a monster righteously during a fantasy adventure, while being able to credibly walk the ethical high road of "I had to do it because it was hurting people."
This pattern recurs a lot in Zelda games, and it gets around the colonial nature of many fantasy games by making you, Link, essentially a glorified veterinarian - which I like. If you go a little more pacifistic you could get real nuts and say "that parasite has a right to live, too". Yes, but I think it's reasonable to draw the line at the self-defense of endangered NON-parasites there - in zelda games, the parasites are actually the colonizers, and you go in and expel them, flipping the "heroic colonial" aspect of many fantasy stories.
Yes, if you go down the pure pacifism route you could even say something like "a human eating a fruit to survive is a form of colonialism against the plant" but feeling guilty about needing to eat SOMETHING, is a recipe for unpragmatic self-flagelation. We didn't choose to be consumer animals, but we can use our awareness and empathy to reduce harm as much as practically possible, ever expanding that sphere of stewardship and empathy as resources and technology allow, until that hypothetical trans-humanist day when we genetically engineer ourselves to consume only sunlight as plants already do. At that point you can ask "do we have an obligation to restore to the sun the power it gives off, to ensure it remains in its current state, even if it's not sentient?" This is well-beyond even the Prime Directive to be sure, and like I said, you could go real nuts taking this too far. Zelda strikes a good balance, and it'd be cool to incorporate some of that into Ultima.
So the smart balance point in my opinion is this: putting down rabid animals we cannot cure is NOT evil. Curing animals of parasites is not evil. Invading the habitat of a non-threatening "prestige animal" then "defending" yourself once it gets aggressive, and going back for the glory and gold - or to sell one of its babies for info - just may be evil. I want to explore those ideas even more in my games with a focus on how we can get all the fun "I slayed a dragon!" escapist adventure experience, in a way that follows a more ethical throughline, and I think it's possible. We can still have all the fun without ethically dubious actions, and the fun challenge to me as a gamedev lies in figuring out how to walk that line.
