Sentenza
Member
I fundamentally disagree with the assessment.
The Quest for the Avatar was genuine novelty because it was a story without a villain, where the main goal of the player character was embarking in exploration, discovery and occasionally even combat and pass a series of very open ended trial to ascend as a paragon of virtue according to the newborn religion/philosophy of the fictional world.
If anything it's a concept that has been repeated so little (in fact, as far as I can remember, not at all) that it would still strike most people in a contemporary audience as complete novelty even in a modern remake.
It was then left to the sequels to vivisect how shaky that system of beliefs could turn out to be if enforced under less good-intentioned interpretations.
Ultima V was a deconstruction of the virtues system.
Ultima VI questioned who benefitted and who got the short stick as consequence of your past actions.
Ultima VII proposed a rival doctrine (on a superficial level just as "good intentioned") that even attempted to reframe your past actions as entirely villanous and your figure as some sort of scourge of Britannia.
While the execution of these concepts admittedly wasn't exceedingly sophisticate on a moment-to-moment basis, there isn't really much around today that could challenge it on a thematic level.
