I have a soft spot for Ultima 8. It was the first RPG I ever played and the one that got me into the genre. When I first played U8 I had nothing else to compare it to, and so I enjoyed it. Coming back to it decades later I still feel echoes of that enjoyment, but I am no longer blinded to its many, many flaws. Ultima 8 is a bad game, and not just in comparison to its predecessors. Combat is terrible, with even basic enemies requiring far too many hits to kill. It is also pointless because with the exception of the flaming skulls thrown by ghosts, you can just walk past enemies and they will never catch you. The varied magic systems are a great idea hampered by clunky execution. The dungeons, which compromise most of the actual playtime, are dull and hampered by baffling design decisions, like insta-kill collapsing floors that you can't see coming. And then there's the story. Ultima 8 contains the nuggest of an interesting idea - a hero finds himself stranded in a foreign world, Pagan, while his homes (Earth and Brittania) are being assailed by an evil invader. In order to save his homes he has to destroy the 'gods' of Pagan and steal their power. But this will obviously have a huge impact on the people of Pagan. This is an interesting moral quandry but unfortunately Ultima 8 does nothing with it. You just murder those gods and nope out of Pagan with not even an apology. There is a serious lack of content in Ultima 8. I spent days wandering Pagan as a child but that was mostly down to a lack of signposting from the designers on where to go next. The middle section is an extended dungeon crawl that frankly sucks. And you can really feel the cuts in developer-time in the end game. U8 has no real side quests, just the main campaign and a couple of optional dungeons with okayish rewards (a magic weapon and magic armour). And that's it. The game does have a creepy atmosphere, mostly due to the excellent music, but U8 is still badly designed and ultimately unfinished.
This is not the remake I wanted it to be. The original System Shock is in my top five games of all time. I got the demo from one of those shareware discs, installed it on our 486DX4-100 and fell immediately in love. The game had an atmosphere like nothing else at the time. System Shock is one of those games that was so far ahead of its time that I'm not sure people knew what to make of it, but its influence in games of the next three decades is undeniable. Without System Shock there would not have been Deus Ex, Bioshock, Doom 3, Prey, Thief, Dishonored, and more. SS1 tends to get overshadowed by its sequel. System Shock 2 leaned harder into the survival elements and for that reason was, in my opinion, the lesser game. I have no doubt this claim will upset fans of SS2 because if I've learned one thing about people who like survival games, they REALLY like survival games. Having played the remake I suspect quite a few devs at Nightdive are in this camp. Because this isn't a straight remake of System Shock 1. This is a quasi-remake that tries to remould System Shock 1 into something more like System Shock 2. It injects new and unwelcome elements like a grid-based inventory that needs constant management, or scavenging for junk to feed vending machines, that were not present in the original game. System Shock 1 was its own game with its own style. It didn't need to steal some its younger brother's clothes. Even with mods you can't revert these changes entirely. What you end up with is a game that just doesn't play like the original. Which is a real shame because Nightdive have done a fantastic job elsewhere with the visuals and sound design. If they had simply not chosen to add these new elements to the game it would have been an amazing remake. Instead the game suffers from a kind of identity crisis. I wanted System Shock 1 but what I got was System Shock 1.5.
