Summary
An appropriate death knell for the single-player Ultima adventures.
The Good
The graphics are sheer beauty. (Better have a powerful PC and video card) The sound/music is sheer beauty. For all of its faults, it does sometimes feel like the Britannia so many of us know and love. I like the fact that EA let Origin release one more single-player Ultima (when the focus right now is on multiplayer, preferrably massively multiplayer)
The Bad
It feels like all you are doing is beta-testing the next incarnation of Ultima Online. The world is TINY (for an Ultima), the combat system is rudimentary, and the voice-overs are horrible. (But bad voice-overs are fairly standard for
Origin.)
The strategy manual was almost more interesting than the game's story. :)
The game would not even play Direct3D on most machines without a patch. However, Voodoo 3 users had no problem. That's Q&A SERIOUSLY LIMITED IN SCOPE.
The original release also had show-stopping game bugs. Not hardware related (which is understandable, with all of today's choices for hardware) but straight-up plot storyline show-stoppers. That's just plain BAD Q&A.
The Bottom Line
Bought it, and I still haven't had the heart to reinstall it again. But it's the last single player Ultima, so I suppose it'll have to do. I'll finish it ... eventually.
Also, to George's final statement: "I love it because I'm an Ultima fan. I hate it for the same reason."
Go read his review now, if you haven't.
