Hello there. Let me get to the point. I tried to play Ultima V Lazarus, and for the most part, it works fine, but there's one noticeable problem; some of the text is completely unreadable. Not all of it, but some of it. For example, right in the very first speech-block in the game, after the opening cut-scene, the first couple of sentences are fine, but everything after that in that block is either blurry, of varying font sizes, or completely obscured. And this sort of thing keeps on showing up throughout the game, if not consistently. For example, every other line of text in that first conversation was fine, but later, when I asked the jester in the abby in the first part of the game about Blackthorn, most of the proceeding text block was also nearly completely unreadable. I've tried adding mods and patches, but nothing seems to work. I'm wondering if maybe it has something to do with the original Dungeon Siege which Lazarus uses as a base, but if it does, I have no clue what it could be or how to fix it.

If anyone has any idea what the problem is, please let me know, as I don't really know what to do here.

A couple quick questions:

1) What OS are you running?
2) Do you have Dungeon Siege installed and fully patched (or the expansion installed)?
3) What resolution are you running at?
4) Are you zoomed out all the way? There are some old posts about some of the text being unreadable if you're zoomed out too far. I didn't have that issue, but it could have been my screen resolution

Thanks. Anyway, I'm running Windows Vista, I have Dungeon Siege and it's expansion fully installed, and I'm running it at a 1280x800 resolution. I don't have a clue about zoom-out though. I guess I could try that, but I don't know if that would explain why the first sentence or two in a textbox might show, but not the proceeding 4 or 5 sentences.

EDIT: Also, here's a picture to give you an example of just what the problem is. Hopefully this well help.

UPDATE: Managed to solve the problem, sort of. I looked up some old posts on another forum, and it turns out that by pressing ECS and bringing up the menu during a conversation, all of the stuff covering the text dissapears. I don't know it works, but it does, and while I'd like not to do it, that's not really a problem either. Still, thanks ncarty for trying to help.

Is this game actually playable? I had it installed and was loving it but gave up on it because I read somewhere that it was basically broken due to bugs.

I've played through it twice, never had any type of bug that was game killing or even major. The closest is that for instance when you go to Yew, if you get arrested because you refuse to join the oppression, that's it for that subquest. You can't go back and join again later. Its not really a bug, its just a bit hard core for the average player. There is a mod out there that changes that though.