Ultima™ IV: Quest of the Avatar

I love Ultima IV, but on - any other version - than the IBM DOS one. No music? CGA graphics? Come on. DOSBox as a vehicle to preserve 1980s-1990s games is a questionable decision, given that the IBM PC with CGA graphics and 1-bit speaker or other pre-Soundblaster audio gives one of the worst experiences for games from this era. The Atari ST, Amiga and even the C64 versions of games like Ultima IV, when available, would give a much better experience graphically and sonically. Please, GOG, consider re-releasing these games as versions running under emulations of the more capable machines of the era. Emulators like STeem could be licensed for many games I am sure.

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.

I'm mostly playing this game for nostalgia value, but it's good fun.

Great old school game, love it

Ultima IV holds up to its quality decades later.