Hi,
I'm thinking about getting ultima 7. I am also planning on playing it with my younger cousin. He really likes old school rpg games, and I think we would like playing Ultima together. Now, my question is: What kind of content does ultima have? Now I realize that it has some violence, but it is really very minor from what I've seen. I heard someone talking about the adult content that it has and that it was "there, but not forced". What does this mean exactly and what kind of adult content does this game have? I realize that this games is only rated T, but esrb ratings were so random before 2005. (Thief 1 is rated M ???) Thanks for any help.

The most graphic bits are the dismembered corpses at the murder scenes. But given their pixelly 2D sprite nature, it's not so bad. The rest of the violence is fairly tame; you whack things until they fall down and spill a small amount of ketchup on the ground.

There are a few other cases where the Avatar can have sex, but it always does a "fade to black" for that. There are a few other things that count as suggestive and/or nudity, but nothing that's going to get shown in graphic detail (and the graphic detail is too low-res to show much anyway).

Unless they or their family are extremely prudish, there isn't really much to worry about here.

There's also the nudist colony in the cave with the bees in it. Which is more played for laughs than anything and I don't think you can see much/anything on the sprites. But yeah, that's also in there, just to mention.

Just bought the whole ultima series. We are starting from one, but decided to skip 9. It's a shame that no more of these were made.

I HIGHLY recommend playing the two Dungeon Siege mods; Ultima V: Lazarus and The Ultima VI: Project after you are done. They are a fantastic way to revisit Britannia in a more modern context.

Well, Richard Garriott does have his crowdfunded spiritual-successor/quasi-sequel in the works and it's looking like it's shaping up beautifully. It's called Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, if you want to check it out. It's a shame EA ruined Ultima 8 and Ultima 9 so badly with their deadlines and crappy management decisions... Ultima 9 has shades of some really cool gameplay in it, but you can really see how rushed and compromised the whole design of the game was when you play it. The same can be said of Ultima 8 to an extent...

With out spoiling anything, Thief 1 had a pretty geursome cut scene late in the game as well as a glimpse of a woman's butt. The ersb actually did a good job with their ratings back then imo.

And in doing so, suffer permanent stat losses. (Using adds +5 to the stat subject to the cap, but you suffer -6 to all stats when it wears off.)

On the other hand, if you're not above a little glitch exploitation, you can get your stats to underflow, giving you 30 Dexterity and Intelligence. Unfortunately, your Strength will be messed up (over 200 and the game treats you as having negative Maximum HP). Using 1 more will fix that, leaving you (after it wears off) with 24 in each stat.

Another trick (that is not obviously a glitch) is to take drugs and train in Combat and Magic before they wear off. Training raises the stat by half the difference between the current score and Dexterity/Intelligence. (That mechanic is used elsewhere in the game code, including natural MP regeneration (unless you're playing Exult; last time I checked the source code (which was years ago) that version's natural MP regeneration didn't match original Ultima 7's)).

Then again, if you just want to max the Avatar's stats, all you need to do is play through the expansion.