Thanks to EA this put an end to the Ultima series. The game is far away from being finished since EA put an impossible deadline to release the game before it was really finished. To make it playable there had been some patches after release. You can see the unfinished parts in many areas of the game because they didn't had time to hide them properly. Every fan of Ultima got really upset and angry to see the impressive capitol of this world shrink to a hand full of NPCs and some houses. This did also happen to the rest of the original game content. All who said it couldn't get any worse after Ultima 8 had been disabused. I have bought the original game on CD which still works, so I don't need to buy it on gog but I would if it is on discount since $5,99 is too much for an unfinished game.
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.
