Ultima 8 is one of the worst games ever, and utterly unplayable and intolerable. This is a forum for us to express every horrible, crippling aspect of this game, this piece of fucked up bitchshit that all the curses in the Angry Video Game Nerd's vocabulary would not properly insult. I have not played it in many years, but here are the problems I remember:

Jumping is a futile chore, as you cannot tell where you are aiming, where the platforms are in relationship to your character, how far you will jump, or your ultimate destination.

One type of magic requires pixel-perfect positioning of many items on a pentagram. This has to be used many times during an incredibly tedious training sequence.

All of the environments look the same, and you have no idea where to go, so wandering aimlessly is a constant.

You get killed whenever you commit a crime--except for all the times you are required to kill and steal.

Combat is like a slightly better version of Diablo, with endless button mashing instead of tactics or fun.

Your character is supposed to be the ideal of virtue and goodness, but he has to kill everyone on the planet. I am O.K. with being evil in games normally, as games are escapism and let us do what we cannot and should not in reality, but when a character is explicitly described as pure good, this is a problem.

Don't forget the completely lineal storyline. And the hidden exploding mushrooms. And the enemies attacking while you are talking to someone and can't defend yourself. And...and..and... The litany of complains is long indeed.

Sadly Garriott got too taken with the idea of pushing the computer envelope with this and U9, which led to a whole host of problems, including delayed releases, poor play quality, and financial troubles for Origin. Unfortunately it also masked a fairly good story, and the progression from Serpent Isle of the Avatar having to do some very un-Avatarlike things to finally defeat the Guardian. Some things I could ... fudge, but some I agree are inexcusable.

It takes some time but once you get the jumping down the game progresses much easier (unlike the early versions where some of the jump stones rose or sank unpredictably and led to a lot of complaints). And you might want to get a good walk-through. GameFAQS.com is a good place to look.

The tragedy of U8 and U9 is that done right, they could have been amazing games. The way 8 forces you to betray the virtues in order to get home to Britannia before the Guardian conquers it was an interesting idea. Setting the game in Pagan, a whole new world, as opposed to Sosaria/Britannia could've taken the game into a new alien environment unlike anything we've seen in an Ultima game.

As for 9, I imagine returning to Britannia to find it conquered, under the heel of the Guardian, similar to Blackthorne's dictatorship in 5, only far, far worse. Maybe Lord British was apparently killed at the beginning of the invasion, only to be revealed as working against the Guardian in secret, along with the Avatar's surviving companions. The quest would focus on retaking Britannia and defeating the Guardian once and for all.

But they were just crap. Oh well.

May I introduce you to Ultima IX? Actually the problem was that Garriott wasn't very involved in 8. He was in 9, but got distracted by UO..

Actually I quite liked U9, exploring my favourite world in 3D, all those nostalgia references... it was good fun. Yes, the dumbed downedness, flash gordon avatar, stupid love interest were all annoying, but it was pretty and atmospheric. Was it as good as u7? Not a chance, but then U6 peaked the series for me so I wasn't expecting miracles.

(Why u6? Balance of hacknslash and plot/talky stuff - u7 was little too far the latter)

Honestly, had they just used Ultima Online as the basis for Ultima 9, I probably would have loved it. Excluding the MMO aspect, it felt more like a real Ultima game than 9 did.

Agreed - a single player game using that engine would have been fine as a next step between a VIII engine and a IX engine. The IX engine could have come later - they didn't need to jump so far ahead they blew all the dev time on the engine and not on the story or gameplay.

Reportedly, it's because the dev. team was moved to <i>Online</i> that we didn't get something resembling that.