Ultima™ 8 Gold Edition

This game gets an unfairly bad rap, partly because it has so much squandered potential, and partly because it was a drop in quality for a series that had up to then prided itself on excellence. Add to that the fact that it was a significant departure in design from the last several games in the series (though if you look at Ultima overall, the series had always been about reinventing itself) and you have a game that tends to be hated by a highly vocal group of people. The fact is the game does have a lot going for it, so much so, that the real heart-break comes from seeing just how good this game could have been with just a few more months of development. The music and atmosphere are great, and the the world wonderfully intriguing. The magic systems in particular had enormous potential: the game attempted to create no less than 5 different types of magic, each of which worked in different ways. Necromancy for instance, had you creating complicated rituals to prepare your spells, rather than just simply clicking to fire it off. Unfortunately this too failed to execute as well as it might have, but the ideas are present enough to enjoy. Overall the game is frustrating. The jumping is a bit annoying, but with the patch, not even close to as bad as some would say. It is flawed but also unique, and well-worth checking out if you're a fairly patient rpg fan looking for something different.

I got this game by chance in a gift pack along with other games including 3 older Ultima games. I didn't know of the setting and the series at the time, but U8 captivated me still because of its beautiful graphics, story, elemental magic, music and ambiance. It's still one of my favorite old games. I recommend it.

I played Ultima Viii Pagan hundreds of times, beginning probably in November 1994. I think this game is highly underrated, and very unfairly so. As a matter of fact, the version that came to be known as Gold Edition is a patch that made lots of things much easier to the player, and, IMO, this made the game rather bad. Jumping on moving platforms became super easy, the Wisdom Trial became rather easy, and so on. The first version seems to be nowhere to be found, almost like the Lost Vale data. Fortunately, I still have a copy of the first version. One of these days, I will go in this world one more time, to remember the old days. By the way, I still have material from those times on me website, in a page entitled Pagan The Beautiful. Best Wishes to all, Julio Siqueira

Thanks to EA who ruined many fine game series after buying Origin, Maxis, Bullfrog, Westwood Studios, etc. this game has been released to early with very limited content (compared to Ultima 7). EA wanted to release things quick and sell addon content instead of a whole game. So Ultima was not the only series which got killed by EA. I liked to play it anyway since it was my first Ultima. I'm playing computer games since 1987 but I never heared of Ultima until I had seen it on a friend's computer. I liked it so much that I bought it myself and soon wanted to play Ultima 7 as well which quickly became my favorite RPG and still is. Maybe I liked Ultima 8 because I didn't compare it to Ultima 7? I have bought it on gog but I still have the original game and speech pack on diskettes. I still would like to play "The lost vale" or any fan made additional content to that game. Sadly not seen any yet.

Ok this game is not as good as everyone remembers, it is terrible, the rpg elements are broken (its absurdly easy to max your stats) the story is.. Okay i guess but a stark contrast to other ultima games, it navigates poorly, it has JUMPING PUZZLES in a poor controlling environment, it has broken quests and incomplete dialogue. I must admit I never played Ultima 9 but 8. is terrible. Yet I enjoyed it when I was younger, but looking back, Ultima 7 is a far superior game.