Times of Lore

Times of Lore is a 1988 action role-playing game by Chris Roberts that was developed and published by Origin Systems.

It was originally titled Ultra Realm. According to Chris Roberts, it was inspired by console action-adventures, particularly The Legend of Zelda. He started working on it in England then he went across to America where Origin published it.

Martin Galway came to Austin in 1988 as a contractor, to help develop Times of Lore.

Gameplay
Like most Origin games developed before Wing Commander, Times of Lore was a serious RPG. In terms of story, the game followed the typical RPG path at the time, asking the player to choose among character classes and then sending him to locate and retrieve magic artifacts to save a kingdom, however the game featured an intricate world map and boasted alack of in-game load time.

Earlier RPGs, chief among them Origin’s Ultima series, featured a text-based interface. As games became more complex, the number of commands multiplied. For times of Lore, Chris Roberts developed a mouse-drive icon-based interface. Times of Lore managed with eight icons what contemporary RPGs and adventure games were doing with dozens of commands.

It had a whole interface for the conversation system that was menu driven for joystick.

Legacy
Times of Lore went on to inspire several later titles by Origin Systems. This includes the 1990 title Bad Blood, another action RPG based on the same engine. It also inspired the 1990 title Ultima VI: The False Prophet, which adopted several elements from Times of Lore, including real-time elements, a constant-scale open world (replacing the unscaled overworld of earlier Ultima games), and an icon-based point & click interface. Richard Garriott, in addition to citing it as an influence on Ultima VI, said that Ultima VII: The Black Gate was also inspired by Times of Lore. The game was a precursor to Diablo and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.