Something about this game feels so vital. I never got into the dungeon crawling sort of games like Diablo, largely because the dungeons just felt pointless or aimless. Games like Ultima VII never feel that way. Everything you do advances the story, which is compelling and interesting and full of twists. Origin perfected their open world approach with this game. Certain areas are locked until you get to certain parts of the story so you never get completely overwhelmed, but of course you need to scour every drawer and every chest to get the best armor and weapons so you're not unprepared. The characters are easy to get attached to, and it starts right off the bat. Most games of this era, the characters in the game are so boring and 1 dimensional. Every character in every city has a role. That's always been one of the franchise's strengths. Sure a city may only have a population of 20 people but you need to talk with every single one of them and exhaust all conversation options in order to advance the plot. Sometimes this gets tedious but it speaks to how huge and well-thought out this game is. Monk Isle may be the only place in the game that has NPCs you can't talk to - and that's because they took a vow of silence! The only negatives about this game are the classic Ultima pitfalls - inventory management takes up more of the game than it should, and until you get the "magic keyring" in Silver Seed, managing keys is tedious. And there's also the idiosyncrasies within the code that make advancing the plot nearly impossible without having a walkthrough at the ready. (For instance - spoiler alert technically - you need to use the Hound of Doskar on Batlin's Amulet in order to get the password to Skullcrusher from the Gwani... completely unrelated tasks! But you cannot advance without doing that random action.) Have fun with this game! And remember, if all else fails, rub your face on the wall till you find an illusory one.
The initial install page says I need to upgrade to the latest Warband patch, which I just did, so I'm on 1.162, but I still get the error. It won't let me get around it. What am I doing wrong?
