Oh yeah, it's missing the Lost Vale expansion. Now I can never have a complete experience with this game. Another example of EA's... *breath*. Ok, this game alone is good and I recommend it for your ultima playthrough. However, it might feel like somethings missing. That is because there was supposed to be an expansion pack, The Lost Vale, that would add finishing patches as well as complete the story. The pack was made but EA in their mind, whoops I misspelled it, GREED figured there was no money to be made and threw it out the window, no wait, if they did that someone would have found and released it. No, they deleted it forever. Now I can't get the experience Garriet wanted me to have. You know, I would've forgiven that, as long as IX was good. Wait, they ruined that too. I really wanted a good continuity but now I might have to just stick with VII as the ending. GOG in all their goodness did provide us with Lost Vale documents and Bob Whites plot to at least imagine the adventure. This game is still good, it's just incomplete, and will never be complete.
These are brilliant even for today. You really have to use your imagination to picture the chaotic worlds and crate a continuity between each games. The manuals are a great place to start. The worst game in the series ultima 2 can even be fun, but use cheats and patch. Ultima 3 is worth the price alone for being a revolutionary crpg, use patch as well. If your looking for a great place to start the ultima series, this is it.
I got this game for the design documents. The features may not be implemented but at least we now know how the story really ended. On the other hand, this game is the reason why good graphics aren't everything, because we almost got the Ultima we deserved, but EA decided to go beyond graphic wise and start over from the ground up taking away game play features. It still would have, eh, been ok. No more party system kind of killed it but at least we would still have the story. But no, EA wanted it released by Christmas because somehow parents would be buying their children M rated games. So now we don't even have the story. Hey, but at least we have the graphics. I DON'T CARE ABOUT STUPID GRAPHICS. Ultima games are supposed to be about the imagination, graphics should come last. EA was clearly targeting 21st century children (with an M rated, ninth sequal of all things) than us true, faithful Ultima fans. EA should stick to console games and buy out all those companies. Buy this for the documents, or at least install the dialogue patch. Or if you just can't stand tragedy, don't buy this or VIII at all and pretend it all ended at VII. Good luck.
