Ultima™ 1+2+3

I'm not going to deny that these are some RPG classics, but man are they hard to play. Its mostly the controls, and me being raised on RPGs from the 90s that had fluid interfaces. Great games, better bundle, hard as hell to play.

This whole package is a really mixed bag. Ultima 1 is fun enough for most of a normal playthrough because it's simple. Ultima 2 is a grindfest. Ultima 3 has the most tedious battle system I've seen in an RPG. I finished Ultima 1 and 2 and played some Ultima 3 and 4. Ultima 3 and 4 especially are super fun to talk with people to gather information. If Ultima 1 and 2 had more of that without the awful battle system from 3 and 4, they would've been great even by today's standards. But since talking with people isn't much of what you do, mixed with confusing hints, you fight more than anything else. Ultima 1 and 2 have a super simple battle system, which works alright. You press A and a direction and attack monsters on the world map. You either hit or miss. In Ultima 3 and 4, you enter a new screen when touching an enemy. The gameplay is a grid based strategy RPG. But... without the strategy You can only do one thing every turn. Moving one tile or attacking once or casting one spell. Enemies are pretty far away from you so you waste a lot of time getting close. With melee characters. It's a must to mainly use ranged weapons to not waste too much time on one battle. Missing your attacks makes the battle system even worse. Ultima 3 has 4 characters you control and that's tedious enough. But imagine starting with Ultima 4, like most people recommend. Where you control 8 characters by the end of the game. With the same horrible gameplay. The only true qualities these games have is talking with people to get information and the fact it's an open world game that makes use of the open world. And there's not enough of that to keep you engaged even in Ultima 4. Let alone Ultima 1-3.

Loved Ultima IV as a child but playing these three games for the first time was a mixed bag of quality. Ultima I, the first of the series is a fairly simple game. It's been a few years since I played it but I found it fairly enjoyable, the game was straightforward. Accomplish quests for various kings by entering the dungeons. Upgrade your characters, buy more equipment and eventually defeat the big bad. It's a decent start to the series and is a good iteration of the original Akalabeth. Ultima II however is a major misstep in the series. The world is much expanded, instead of four areas you now have 5 time periods of earth and all the planets of the solar system. It sounds like an explorer's dream but there's really little of interest to find, stores and NPCs are carbon copies of each other, dungeons are pointless and needlessly difficult, and the game is just a massive grind. You will spend most of your time circling pangea in a ship, killing enemy after enemy because outside of the ship your player eats food at an absurd rate and running out means instant death. The same weak enemies on the surface are much tougher in dungeons and insanely tough in towns. Also leveling up your character's stats is completely random and stupid. I would skip this game unless you want to experience the history. Ultima III is where the series really takes off. Instead of one character you have a party of four, you fight battles in a tactical area, zero food no longer kills you but slowly degrades your health. The dungeons are not only fun but necessary to completing the game and there's a fair amount to find and explore. NPCs only give tidbits of information but it's much better than U2. The game is not without its flaws, the ship movement is atrocious as you are unable to move in the direction you want 40% of the time, spell casting is too limited as you run out of mana quickly, and the reference card is missing from this download (it has the controls!). Otherwise fun.

When playing games this old, it's important to keep in mind the vast difference not only in technical capabilities, but also in knowledge and experience of game developers. Nowadays we all have some understanding of things that work and those that do not, but pioneers had to experiment and find out everything on their own. What to expect if you dare to play? The first Ultima trilogy is mostly an experiment, Garriott was still learning and exploring narrative, world-building and gameplay possibilities. These games offer a wild mix of fantasy and sci-fi (and a bit too many pop-culture references in Ultima 2). These games are very different to what we used to nowadays -- they don't lead you by hand and don't try to solve everything for you. Instead they let you explore and figure out the way to win on your own. Ultima 3 is quite close to a modern open-world RPG in it's structure and progression: you level-up and gain power as you explore the world and dungeons to achieve a set number of objectives that let you progress to the ending. It can get somewhat too grindy, but for me it was definitely worth it. 1 and 2 are a lot simpler in this sense: The character and plot progression are simplified and quite detached from each other, the world is overall much less detailed and thought-out. If choosing one of them, I would recommend playing the first one, as it is not only a much better port, but also is a lot better game by itself with less grind and better-working gameplay elements. It's highly recommended to install fan-patch for both Ultima 2 and 3 to fix an awful lot of issues and bring some improvements to graphics(and even add music to 3!). I, personally, have enjoyed my time with all of these games and found playing these classic gems an amazing experience.

Good memories of staying up late into the night eating pizza, sketching out dungeons on graph paper, trying to make sense of clues. This game was top of the line back in the day and very hard for a 10 year old. Some of the music is reminiscent of Conan The Barbarian. I had missed a few things, digging up the exotics and searching for the cards, and thereby couldn't get passed the serpent to exodus castle. So I finally finished the game last night some 35 years later, what a relief.