Ultima™ IV: Quest of the Avatar

So this is older than me, mind you, so I cannot be completely objective here. Anyway, just finished this gem yesterday - spent 60 h to finish it. That is a lot for the game nowadays and with all our social/professional duties it could be simply too much. Overall I really liked this game, it is surprisingly well made, the general setting (there is no plot per se, we collect stuff and raise stats) is VERY well thought out. First part is more of a puzzle, we need to move around different settlements and embrace the talking mechanism, which is very great, and make notes on where is what etc. This is fun. The later part of the game is a grind - where you know what's what and where it is you just move a lot to the same spots, combat gets repetetive, you max the stats and gold by doing the same dungeons etc. Also this game gets almost impossible without a walkthrough - where are certain items, how to avoid specific perils and obstacles - I cannot imagine doing the whole game without any help (and you are not supposed to - read all the materials you are provided with this game first!) but the game does not hold your hand AT ALL. Lord British, the main 'king' in a castle in this game, lays on you some general ideas what you need but otherwise, well... I would still recommend it - the first part that involves a lot of talking still shines, but once you get a grip of the world and find better weapons, know when the cheapest food/magic reagents are, you just start to click a lot of buttons and spend the time until the end.

This is the first game that got me hooked into playing CRPGs. I am amazed at just how much of this game I recall.

I played a fair bit of this game in the Ultima 4+5+6 collection. I also beat Ultima 1 and 2 and played plenty of Ultima 3. While Ultima 3 and 4 do a lot of things better, the combat in these games is atrocious. When you touch an enemy, you get thrown in a grid based combat arena. Each character can only do one action per turn. So you can only walk in one direction, do one attack or cast a spell. Your party and the enemies also are far away from each other. Needing to spend so much time to get close makes melee weapons not worth it. The amount of hits you miss makes it that much worse. Then think how by the end of the game, you'll control 8 party members. If you see anyone complain about basic turn based combat from NES/SNES games being slow, show them this game. Gameplay wise, it's a slow strategy RPG without strategy. Sadly, this greatly overshadows the best parts of Ultima 3-4. Asking for information. Going around looking for clues means the open world is actually well implemented. Many modern games don't benefit from it but still throw it in. Crazy to think how such old games do open world better than most modern RPGs. The story is something different and for it's time, the way they built it is really good. I know a lot of people recommend Ultima 4 for people looking to try the series out. But if you don't really have much of an CRPG background (like me), it's not a great start. I still recommend trying it but giving up when you start not having fun. It's great for a while. I'm sure the newer games are amazing since Ultima was really ahead of it's time from the first game. So it might be best to start with 6, 7 or Underworld. CRPGs are generally hard to get into. If anyone who isn't an old fan reads this and wants to get into CRPGs, try lots of games. Something's bound to click. They're really cheap on sale on GOG. Currently struggling with this myself but CRPGs have a lot of things going for them. I say they're worth the struggle.

This game must have been amazing for its time. Even really now I can see how it was enjoyable... it's like a giant treasure hunt really and having OneNote in this day and age is very, very useful for playing through. It's refreshing to piece together a picture, and THAT part of the game is great... However.... it is also very very old and as such there are number tedious elements. The combat, searching for hidden buttons in passages to go deeper, the time it takes to go places in general... I gave it 5 stars since I feel that's what it should get for it's time, but it certainly has not aged well. Like another review said you're never, ever gonna beat this game. Very, very long and fairly repetitive.

A great game that stands the test of time.