I have decided to revisit Ultima 8 after 10+ years; it was quite a fun experience, end-to-end. The final version I got my hands on feels different from the one I have played years back, even maybe for the "jumping fun" being more or less simplified. Unfortunately the patch did not glue story points together, so the game still feels at times like you're going aimlessly to places to try things. The feeling is that the game was only worked to detail until about the point you're done with the ancient necromancers and have to start the pilgrimage; from that point on there are different story portions stuck together without proper glue.

To go into more detail on story gaps:

* From a story perspective it feels like you should eventually go into the Zealan Shrine and talk to the ancient gods and learn of your destiny, but it's like a book with a few chapters missing. Birthplace of Moriens should have been in some ruined village or a temple somewhere, not in the middle of catacombs, like minutes away from the cemetery. Not having any more discussion points with Vividos afterwards also indicates that content was cut.

* The general advice the old gods provide to you is to go up in ranks with titan followers and subvert their respective organisations: this is pretty clear with Stratos: you get the respective blackrock fragment and they lose their healing powers. Or do they? The pre-patch version deactivates your foci once you get Breath of Wind (more in line with what should happen), the patched one does not. But when it comes to Hydros, it's not clear that you should free it in order to leave Tempests without power. Why would you do that, anyway, once Devon is in charge? Well, you need to, in order to get to Sorcerer's Enclave, but that's not clear beforehand.

* The sorcerer part is pretty well tied together, but from an endpoint perspective the intermediate decisions do not matter at all. E.g. Vardion or Bane? Sabotage the ritual of Pyros or just go along? Going with the blackrock fragment to the big pentagram to release Pyros or not? From a game perspective you should just get Tongue of Flames to Mythran for him to sell you the Ethereal Travel spell. Triggering fire storms is actually optional.

* When getting the remaining blackrock fragments, Avatar "knows" that Devon has one of them, without any previous indication. Conveniently, the particular chest also contains enough money for the final spell purchase, one more indication that corners were cut when designing the story. Getting the earth fragment is also pretty inconsequential - Vividos has nothing to say about that and Lithos doesn't care; it does not feel like that should be the case.

As for the gameplay itself, the game is pretty well tied together when it comes to fighting, jumping and character movements. There is only one spot in the Plane of Earth where it's hard to get the right position jump up, to the point of being a game stopper, but other than that it's just about saving often and experimenting with yet again another strategy.

My conclusion? The game had the potential to be much, much better than it ended up being, but something happened down the line.

EA happened. They ruined Serpent Isle as well, as well as many other developers back in the day (and still do today).
Ultima 8 could have been much, much more, and should never have been released in its current state.

Fun stuff/dark omen:
In the old guy's home (Mythran or something, I forgot his name) there's a morphing object that basically resembles EA's old logo. Have you double-clicked it?

In Ultima 7 you're constantly chasing Elizabeth and Abraham... EA.

The devs saw this nightmare coming from miles away.

The project was assigned a small team, and if I recall, some of them were diverted to get Serpent Isle out the door as well. They just didn't have the man-hours to make U8 a complete game.

There's irony for ya. Sometimes you gotta go through the bad to get to the good lol.
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Without EA I'm sure they could've found a decent publisher, as they had in the past. It was also EA that decided to cancel the release of U8's expansion, when it was ready to ship, and that game certainly needed some more content.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I remember really hating the jumpy gameplay back then, to the point I was never able to finish the game. Maybe I should give it another chance.

The rest of the story would have probably been explored in the "Lost Vale" expansion (what a fitting name!) . You can read up on its tragic demise here: https://gigi.nullneuron.net/ultima/u8/u8tlv.php

they had burnt through most publishers and NO ONE forced Garriott to make a deal with EA. He viewed it as the best possible way at the time.
So to repeat, without EA we would have been denied many good games, and even concerning Ultima 8 and 9, there is more to the story than the black and white ("EA is at fault").
There is a book out soon, "Through the Moongate Part 2" which is taking an extensive look at all of this (backed by official documents and interviews with ey persons). I've got to read an early edit...

So EA is a true double-edged blade then. Painful. I'm now both thankful and not thankful for them releasing Serpent Isle. x)

I wonder if it was also the case for Westwood? I can't really imagine them needing EA, since C&C TD was a huge success.

Well, the Ultimas were commercial successes too. I recall from some interview that it had more to do with a feeling on Garriot's part that "everyone" now had a prooper publisher and that this way they could tackle far more ambitious projects, go with the times and all that... It was their Tower of Babel, really. :p

He made his choice, and it proved to be a mistake. It's telling that the Origin team added multiple tongue-in-cheek references to EA in their latter games, none of them favorable. You have to ask yourself why so many successful studios, which had released multiple hit games, began to crumble quickly after their association with EA. Ex-employees of several of these companies have interesting stories to tell indeed.

Focusing on this sentence as a starting point but I wonder how much of this was a case of cut content and how much of it was a case of just... going into a linearish, ostensibly story-focused game without really fully planning out a linearish, story-focused story/bad writing.

This is a problem I have with all of the guardian-related games -- the guardian and whatever he's trying to do is central to them but I never got any feeling that that was actually planned out, anywhere, so for most of the games it just seems like he's a giant angry red space gorilla that's screwing with the avatar because has has nothing better to do.

(I don't really feel like U7's main storyline goes anywhere and has a lot of the same problems U8's does, but it's nowhere near as noticeable because you have... all the NPC and town side stories, which U8 does not have at all).

Ultima 8 was a game i revisited end of 2018, and also brought back memories of a difficult and unfinished game.

The difficult part back then was the jumping from platform to platform after the ancient necromancers(not sure), and i tried for hours but could not make the jump. And with the loading screen taking so long to load up your previous save point i got really frustated. But i reallly wanted to continue, and a friend introduced me the the cheats and hackmover, which enable me to continue.

The unfinished part...I would say thet the Lost Vale should have been the Birth place of Moriens , where the ancient Zealons guide you to your destiny and secure the black rock tip fragment. Mabey Old Man Mythran could introduce you to this and give you the key for the big double doors in the cave behind his house. But this is only my thoughts.

In the end i hope someone is able the get or recreate the Lost Vale and polish the game. I remember reading a post 10 to 15 years back that a single copy the Lost Vale was sold on Ebay to someone, but if it was a liget copy i have no idee.

What was sold was the box of Lost Vale, not the game itself ;(
(It was from the printer who made the box proofs, still uncut on the big cardboard)
Recently another (empty) box turned up that I got to hold for a couple of minutes ;)

You didn't run away with it? Missed opportunity. :(