Ultima™ 8 Gold Edition

great game would love to see this game remastered ,cleaner graphics and smoother running would become top seller i reacon .

I'm surprised at how many people are dismissing this as a good game simply because of it being part of the Ultima series and that it's an old game, I remember going through the Ultima collection and Ultima 8 seemed absolutely terrible, not to mention the horrible platforming levels, bland environments and shallow combat. The worst is that you don't feel like the Avatar playing this game, if you are up for an engrossing RPG experience DO NOT get this game.

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