Ultima VIII: Pagan

Ultima VIII: Pagan is a role-playing game developed by Origin Systems and published by Electronic Arts. It is the eighth installment in the mainline Ultima series and is the direct sequel to Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle. During the development of the game, it had to reach a tight release deadline, leading to crunch time, and many features present in the other games had to be cut out of this entry.

Main game
For the development of the game in the series after Ultima VII, known as Ultima VIII: Pagan, EA had set up a tight deadline on the employees at Origin to meet the strict release date in March. Therefore, crunch insured and many planned parts for the game were cut out just to get much of the game to a playable state. For example, there is no leveling system, no player customization, barely any interaction with the world unlike the endless possibilities from the last game, no companions, and being a lot more linear. Due to this, the game shipped with many bugs, including an infamous one where every chest in the game explodes after opening, even with a key. Some things were even left in the game that would have been expanded upon with a future expansion pack known as The Lost Vale, but due to that pack's cancellation because of low sales numbers, these elements remained unfinished forever. Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series, does blame himself more for the development, claiming that "I sacrificed everything to appease stockholders, which was a mistake."

The Lost Vale
Planned from the beginning of the game's development, there was going to be an expansion to the game called The Lost Vale, which was to restore the content missing in the main game. In the finished game, there is a set of double doors that are inaccessible in the base game, but would have begun the expansion once it has been installed on your computer. However, this expansion was cancelled, due to this game and the expansions for Ultima VII: The Black Gate (The Silver Seed and Forge of Virtue) selling lower than Electronic Arts has expected, and led to the expansions cancellation, leaving the game unfinished. The source code was never archived and has now become lost, but a box for the expansion, documents showing some of the plot, and screenshots for the expansion have been found and are confirmed to be real, showcasing what could have been.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The main problem with this game is that it removes a lot of what made the Ultima games so unique and fun in the first place. Rather than having a game full of complex role-playing mechanics such as multiple different skills, character classes, moral choices, and many different systems to create a layered experience, due to the hellish development the game had, Pagan completely throws all of those the deep mechanics away in favor of being much less complex, more linear, and overall much simpler than the other games in the series and even other RPGs at the time, making the game itself as huge disappointment for many hardcore and even more casual players.
 * 2) The graphics in the game are incredibly dull and tiring to look at. Almost everything in the game is the color grey, making the game look the complete same. There is no distinction between any of the environments and you can't even tell which place in the world of Pagan is which. Even the locations of all of the elements like fire and wind are completely devoid of any distinction, with everything being a dull grey cave, which is unnatural in an Ultima game, and even the past games had a lot more dungeon and room variety. It just makes the entire world not fun at all to explore and making the world just as bland as the first three Ultima games, which barely had any color at all.
 * 3) * While most of the in-distinction is in the indoor environments such as caves, dungeons, and buildings, even the outdoor environments are incredibly dull to look at. The edges of the world are all grey too, and there is just a lot of browns and greens on the grounds and trees that look just incredibly generic, not even the giant mushrooms in the overworld are enough to make the world distinct enough to stand it out from not just the series but all gaming as a whole.
 * 4) On the same subject of the bland graphical quality, the animations are weird, ludicrous, and stiff, and all of the characters seem to walk like robots. The animations for the Avatar are very bland, as he has only one single attack animation that is so robotic, lame, and gets boring very fast. As for strange character animations, one NPC in particular looks like he is touching his groin over and over which is unintentionally hilarious for the player to see. Another issue with this is that other games at the time, including ones on the less powerful Super Nintendo had some fluent character animation in their games, so it is quite disappointing to see this one being more robotic in movement than organic.
 * 5) For some reason, the creators of the game decided to include platforming into this entry of the series. While this is somewhat of a unique idea, especially since most CRPGs that have a swimming skill only allow you to get through water areas easier, the controls for jumping in the first place are so horrendously bad that it ruins much of the entire experience.
 * 6) * The jumping controls are incredibly tedious to use. Not only do you have to jump using both mouse buttons at the same time, but you can only jump in the direction where the Avatar is facing, so to make a jump, the player has to carefully position themselves to where they want to go and jump, so if you are a little bit off, the jump fails and you die. To make matters even worse, most of the platforms in the game are incredibly small, so the player already has a hard time of reaching them in the first place. The only way to even make it through these sections is to quick save whenever you reach a platform and quick save again after reaching the next, and so on to make it a little more risk-free. And even so, that won't help you in the sections where there are moving and disappearing platforms, making the game much more frustrating than it should be.
 * 7) ** Even worse, there are some sections where you can make the jump and find a chest immediately in front of you, and if you open it, the chest explodes and you are knocked backwards into the water, killing the Avatar. Therefore, players not only have to successfully make the jump, but also must carefully position themselves so they don't die opening the chest.
 * 8) * Eventually, a patch for the game released (Which was difficult to get at the time since it was before widespread usage of the internet and the only way to know it released was usually word of mouth), the jumping is still hard to execute in some cases due to jumping from some places still being bugged. Also, since the patch makes jumping easier, it makes it more of a chore than actually being fun since, as stated before, the platforming sections are everywhere.
 * 9) Completely broken character progression. Rather than being able to create your own character and give his or her your own skill preferences and level up the character as time goes on, you are instead just given a generic blond male jack-of-all-trades style character that has no interesting skills other than being able to cast spells and attack with any weapon in the game. And as stated before, there is no leveling system, so progressing with your character and getting stronger is different and is easily exploitable. You see, rather than leveling up, you increase your stats by doing certain actions. You can increase strength and dexterity by attacking at anything, even nothing at all, so if the player just spams the attack button at nothing or an invincible NPC, they can have those two stats maxed out in out twenty-five to thirty minutes. As for increasing intelligence, that is done by casting spells and reading books, and you can easily max out intelligence in about ten to fifteen minutes by casting spells, resting to restore your mana, and repeating the process. Therefore, you can pretty much max out your entire character in about an hour if you want to grind out the game.
 * 10) * Even worse is that even if you do max out all of your three stats, they do not make the game any easier and less repetitive at all. It will still take over ten or twenty hits to kill a single enemy even when you have maxed out Strength and you will still get injured by exploding chests even with a maxed out Dexterity stat. And even with all of your stats maxed out and even when using the game's best weapon, the Avatar has a very low accuracy rate at hitting an enemy no matter how skilled he is, which is one of the reasons why killing enemies takes so long. All in all, the easy stat booting may make the game somewhat less difficult and tedious by making things go quicker, but it doesn't make it any more fun.
 * 11) A severe lack of any kind of variety that the other Ultima games had, making this entry feel more like a downgrade rather than a step forward for the series.
 * 12) * There are barely any ranged weapons in the game at all, and the main meat of the combat in the game is based around melee attacks. Most of you get are close ranged weapons like axes and maces. The only ranged weapons the Avatar gets other than the ranged spells he can cast are death discs, fire flasks, and oil bombs. However, due to the inventory system, it is a hassle to use them in the first place and they don't do things as quick as the melee weapons do, so you are better off sticking to those instead.
 * 13) * Furthermore, there are only single-handed weapons in this game, and no two-handed weapons or reaching weapons like polearms, as the player is just confined to simple and generic items like maces and axes. This removes some of the variety to the combat, as the two-handed weapons and other styles gave more variety, such as two-handed ones dealing more damage at the risk of lowering your defenses.
 * 14) * There is also barely any unique interaction outside of talking to NPCs, picking up objects, and attacking enemies. The other Ultima games, especially the previous one, allowed the player to do all sorts of things, such as donating blood to increase one of your virtues, baking bread, forging swords, and using other vehicles like carts, horses, and boats to explore the world in a faster way. In this entry, there is absolutely none of that, and you only get the most basic of actions to progress through the game.
 * 15) * Most of the enemies that the player encounters in the game are skeletons, zombies, and ghosts, and really nothing else. This makes each of the other dungeons in the world feel a lot more of the same, as these are the enemy types that the player is going to be fighting much of the time, and it makes combat more repetitive and boring than it already is.
 * 16) Bad inventory management system that is once again a downgrade from past games in the series. Everything that you pick up is just cluttered in your backpack and it takes a while to take out a single individual item to equip or use. Even worse is that the backpack that you use to hold everything in is very small and so hard to pick out an item that you can even accidentally pick up something else rather than an item tat you wanted. It would have been much easier to have a list or something to pick out the items you want easier rather than going through every single item in your tiny backpack to find what you want. Yes, some of the previous games also had this problem, but it was a little less severe.
 * 17) * There is no spellbook to contain all of your magic spells in to pick them out easier. Instead, each individual spell that you can cast is thrown in with the rest of your inventory, making casting a spell in the first place much more tedious than it really needs to be. The last game has all of your spells set up in a neat little list to use, so why couldn't this game have that?
 * 18) Ugly level design throughout the world of Pagan, with so many cheaply placed objects and platforming sections that the world is not fun to navigate at all.
 * 19) * Throughout the overworld and the dungeons, there are very tiny red mushrooms of varying sizes that are found on the ground. Touching one of these will cause the mushroom to explode and the Avatar will take damage from it. Some sections of the game take these mushrooms to far in some cases, and place intricately placed mushrooms for the Avatar to walk around carefully, and hitting one of them is frankly inevitable with the game's control setup.
 * 20) * Outside of the deadly mushrooms, there are many other traps such as falling stalagmites, cannons, electricity, and collapsing ground. However, due to the game's control scheme that is very hard to move the Avatar around quickly and accurately, you don't have the accuracy to quickly dodge and avoid all of these hazards accurately and quickly, making these hazards much more frustrating than they should be, and most of the time it is best to save your game and run through them repeatedly and reloading upon death, hoping to gt through eventually.
 * 21) * If the fact that having the platforming sections themselves wasn't bad enough, the game is full of these sections, they are not just a one time only thing and are quite common. Having these in many places is incredibly frustrating for the player, as they just want to get to the end of where they are without any frustration. Another problem is that the multiple platforming segments also slow down the game's pacing considerably, as some players can spend more than twenty minutes at these sections before they are about to continue the cave or dungeon.
 * 22) * Once again, the dull colors of the entire game world completely makes any of the layouts lose whatever creativity these sections had.
 * 23) The Avatar can't gain any companions in this game, which hasn't been a thing in the series since Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress, which had come out nearly twelve years earlier than this game. While this does make some sense to the game due to the Avatar being in a completely unfamiliar world and no one knowing who he is and what importance he has on the world, this lack of party members also makes the game more bland. Without them, more of the complexity that made these games fun is lost, such as managing different inventories and having a lot more options in fights, as well as being a big part of the overall story. Without them, this game feels more lonely and just not as fun to play without their presence.
 * 24) Many frustrating bugs, glitches, and design problems due to the game being released in an unfinished state. While some of these problems are only found in the floppy disc versions of the game, many are common problems in the CD-ROM and GOG.com versions too.
 * 25) * The most infamous of these issues, technical or development wise, is the exploding treasure chest. Whenever the player in the game opens up a chest in the game, it will explode, either killing the Avatar outright or causing some damage to him. This happens in every single chest in the game, there are no exceptions to this issue. Even if the player uses the key for a particular chest and uses it, the chest will explode anyway, which makes no sense. And you can't avoid it with maximum points in Dexterity either, as you will still take damage from the explosion. The only way to safely open a chest in the game is to use a specific spell on the chest, and even then it still explodes and will hurt the player if they are not far away enough when casting.
 * 26) ** To make matters even worse, most chests don't have many good rewards to them that will be of any real use to the player other than gold, and some chests will even having nothing inside of them at all.
 * 27) * There are some places on the maps in the game where the player can fall through the floor and even get out of the boundaries of the game map, allowing the Avatar not being able to get back on the main map and only moving around the world, forcing the player to either reload a previous save game or finding a way back into the main map, although the former is a much quicker option.
 * 28) * While it is somewhat helpful to the player, some spells are bugged and will never run out of charges, allowing the player to use the spell as much as they want with no consequence, breaking some of the game's balance.
 * 29) * One particularly problematic bug is that once the Avatar gets the Breath of Air, he can immediately use it on the current Stratos to be immediately sent into the Ethereal Void after using it no matter what your progress through the game is. Unless the Avatar has any of the other blackrock pieces in his inventory, this immediately makes the game unbeatable, as there is nothing they can do if they reach this location without those items, forcing the player to reload their save or even restart the whole game if they save in this location.
 * 30) * Some of Beren's dialogue will not appear at all and will not allow the player to continue the conversation, forcing a save game reload or restarting your computer and re-entering the game.
 * 31) * While not problematic, there is a funny bug where if the player sets off multiple explosives in their inventory, they will explode multiple times, and many heads, torsos, and limbs start flying about based on how many explosives they set.
 * 32) * Before the patch, your save files could actually get corrupted, and making the player have to restart the game entirely in some cases.
 * 33) Repetitive and boring combat that never changes or ever gets interesting in any way. All the player has to do to win a fight is to mash the attack button over and over again, occasionally moving away from the fight to heal using an item, and going back in to mash the attack button again and again. In some cases, there is nothing to do at all other than attacking over and over again. The entire main combat system is entirely mindless and there is almost no strategy at all to make any fight different from any other fight, even the more powerful enemies will go down over the same strategy. And if you think about casting spells in the game, that's going to be a lot more time consuming than what you get for it. There are no hotkeys to cast a spell on the fly, and it takes a while to get a spell to use from your inventory and double-click on it to cast it when it would be a little easier to just attack over and over. And without any companions at all, there is no strategy to prepare for fights or anybody to manage to make them more interesting.
 * 34) The monetary system in the game is pretty screwed and becomes very pointless after a while. Similar to SSI's Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons games, once the player has gotten enough money to buy the best armor and weaponry they can buy, there is no point in having money any more, and the player will be going through the game with way more than they need, and there is no point in collecting money at all, so the money system is completely worthless by the time the game reaches its endgame.
 * 35) The plot of the game, while it does have a few interesting ideas, is a bit of a mess, and has some disrespect of the series lore, some plot holes, and a leaving many points unfinished.
 * 36) * Suddenly, the Avatar is no longer a symbol that represents all of the good in the world, the embodiment of the Eight Virtues, and a symbol for self-betterment, but is instead reduced to a murdering and thieving character who goes against everything that the Virtues that were a series mainstay since Ultima IV had stood for. This makes the player feel like they are playing a completely different person rather than the good hero that they had known since the beginning of the series. Even taking aside the fact that the Avatar is in a different world and his actions won't matter outside of the world of Pagan, what he would have done instead had he been the character he was wold be to spread the Virtues through the world and be a good example for Pagan's inhabitants, not stealing from people and killing children to reach his goals.
 * 37) * The Avatar ends up on Pagan with different clothes than what he was wearing at the beginning of the in-game cutscene in this game and what he looked like at the end of Ultima VII: Part 2 - Serpent Isle.
 * 38) * There is a romance subplot in the final version of the game where a man named Darion wants his daughter Jenna, a barmaid, to get married and sees the Avatar as a potential choice for her, but it isn't possible to have any real kind of interactions with her character.
 * 39) * Back in Ultima VII: Part 2 - Serpent Isle, there was a man named Morghrim who is from the land of Pagan, and he mentions that there is a tree called Elerion, which was a silver tree of life that was destroyed, but there is no dialogue from anybody in the game to indicate its existence, nor are there any in-game books that mention the tree, and you can't even find the spot where the tree used to be, making that line of dialogue in that game feel somewhat pointless.
 * 40) * Some characters will agree with what the Avatar wants to get done without building up trust with him, making many instances to getting a quest finished feel very unnatural in terms of writing.
 * 41) * Also somewhat related to the game's unfinished nature, there are times where the player has to go somewhere or get something, but are given no indication on how to do it, even if you talk to every NPC and read every in-game book. At times, it can get so bad that you need a strategy guide to progress through the game.
 * 42) Disappointing final boss fight. To fight the four titans of Pagan in the final fight, literally all you have to do to kill them all is to just get out a specific item from your inventory and click on each one of the four titans with the item and they each die immediately and that's it. No complex and long final battle or any kind of strategy or satisfying battles with each titan, just a few clicks and that's it. This makes the ending very anti-climactic and unsatisfying, and just feels like a quick cheap out, most likely due to, again, the rushed development.
 * 43) Mixed bag of an ending that is also just sequel bait. The game ends with the Avatar essentially becoming a god, and when he returns to the world of Britannia, he finds that the entire place has become destroyed by the Guardian, showing that the Avatar was to late to stop the Guardian from turning Britannia into a hellish wasteland, and the Avatar yells in agony, and the game ends, without any conflict with the Guardian or any kind of endgame to save Britannia again. That kind of ending is a little interesting, but is incredibly disappointing and feels more like a way to get more players to purchase the next game with the players expecting the next one to continue the story.
 * 44) Due to the rushed release of the game, there is quite a number of missing content and the game just overall feels very incomplete. Many parts of the game are not fully implemented, as there are unfinished subplots throughout the whole game, such as the romance subplot that never really feels completed due to the rushed development of the game. There is even a door in this game that doesn't open at all and leads to nowhere, which was going to be finished with the Lost Vale expansion pack, but that expansion was cancelled, leaving the game unfinished forever. Some of this unfinished content includes the following:
 * 45) * There are many areas in the game that seem to have an indication that they lead to somewhere, but are either just a complete dead end or are not accessible in any way.
 * 46) * The first section of the game where the Avatar works to fight the first of the Titans is much longer than the other segments of the storyline in the game, and is actually somewhat complex and engaging, and has some of the aspects that made quest progression in the last games so great. However, after fighting the first titan, the rest of the plot lines are very straightforward, and are just not interesting and engaging in any way.
 * 47) Clunky controls that are very painful and sometimes exausting to control at times and are a set down from past games.
 * 48) * The first problem is that the game is set at an isometric camera angle, but unlike other games that used that same camera angle such as some later CRPGs that had the cardinal directions in the way they are in most games, the cardinal directions are set at somewhat of an angle, so north is at an angle to where it normally is. That may work for some game genres like simulations, but for games like this one, it makes navigation somewhat more difficult.
 * 49) * Unlike the previous games is the series, you cannot use the keyboard to move around, so the player has to use the mouse for the entire game, which can get very tiring on the player, especially for the platforming sections.
 * 50) * To move the Avatar around, the player must press on the right mouse button to being walking, and depending on where the cursor is on the screen, the Avatar will either walk very slowly (Used for stealth purposes), walk at a normal speed, or run very fast. The player especially has to be careful for the running, because when running, the Avatar goes so fast that it can be very easy to lose control and fall of cliffs or hit a wall. The Avatar will move in the direction of where the cursor is pointing, and it can be a little hard to accurately go around and avoid hazards like the mushrooms and rolling spike balls.
 * 51) Bland and incredibly generic characters throughout the entire game. Many of the characters you meet in the game are just regular inhabitants that don't have any kind of backstory, which was something every single NPC had in the series since Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, which came out close to nine years before this game. Almost every NPC also never has anything interesting or even humorous to say, as they just spout out a single line of dialogue that will not be of any use to the player and are entirely forgettable. This just makes the game feel even more bland than it already is, and just makes the world feel a lot more empty rather than feeling like the living, breathing, complex world of the previous games, which is a huge disappointment to fans.
 * 52) The isometric camera, while a normal thing for many CRPGs both at the time and today, causes some problems with this game. One well known example is that due to the isometric camera, it is quite hard to calculate and plan out your jumps to the platforms in the platforming sections. It can be hard to tell if you are in the right place, and the camera can also unintentionally cause the player not to be able to see anything in certain places where they want to jump, and can make the platforming sections even more frustrating than they already are.
 * 53) Bad voice acting, although that was common for Origin's early titles to use voice acting. The original game didn't have any voice acting at all, but similar to other games by Origin Systems like Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi and mh:awesomegames:Strike Commander you could buy a speech pack for the game to make the experience more immersive. However, it might as well be a waste of money, as the voice acting doesn't have a lot of effort put into it, an in some cases is even worse than the voice acting in the aforementioned Strike Commander. You can't even tell if the actors are putting any effort into their roles, and in some cases the voice acting can be unintentionally funny. One of the characters even sounds like he was bored while reading his lines and sounds completely monotonous. Thankfully, the re-releases made the inclusion of speech included, but that still doesn't help the quality of it at all.
 * 54) * In addition, the dialogue can be pretty repetitive at times. Throughout the whole game, The Guardian will state a line occasionally about how he is taking over Britannia with the Avatar gone, which gets very annoying after haring it a few times while playing the game normally, and usually prompting players to turn the game's sound off.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The game does have a nice amount of good ideas, even if they end up being wasted.
 * 2) * While completely destroying the purpose of the Avatar, the plot of him doing anything he can to get back to Britannia to stop the Guardian, even if it means destroying the Virtues to do so, is quite a unique idea for the series and something that hadn't really been done since or before this game, and seeing how it plays out does make the game notable and worth playing in that way.
 * 3) * This was the first game in the series where the Avatar gets to explore a whole new world, Pagan in this case, rather than re-exploring the world of Britannia like the past few games, making the game feel a lot more fresh in terms of the game world than the other games in the series.
 * 4) Some parts of the storyline are pretty good.
 * 5) * As mentioned before, the first segment of the game where the Avatar works to battle the first Titan is pretty engaging, and is the most well developed part of the entire game, with a complex route to reach the boss.
 * 6) Right from the get go, this game continues the series' new, darker direction that had started with Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and is pretty well done unlike some other dark tone games of the time and even more well done than some of today's dark-tone works, as it never goes so dark that it becomes borderline cringe. The box art even gives the player this impression immediately, with an image of a pentagram and hellish flames on the box, as well as the M-rating (A first for the series). Much of the mood and atmosphere throughout the whole game is quite dark and gloomy, giving the game a unique tone that not many other games in the series had until then. The colors of the game world too, while being bland to look at, also help give this off well.
 * 7) Due to having many aspects of the series being dumbed-down and the more simple gameplay, the game is easy for newcomers to the series to play and have a fun time with. It is also more action focused, appealing to a wider audience, mostly for fans of other action games for its striking similarities to the Diablo series.
 * 8) The soundtrack for the game is actually quite decent. Even though it is mostly ambient, it evokes an eerie mood for the game and gives the game a creepy and lonely tone as well.
 * 9) Even if they do lack in variety and color, the quality of the graphics is pretty good in many cases, putting aside the dull color scheme, and were some of the best 2D graphics that any game company was putting out on PCs at the time. All of the individual squares of the floor, as well as the buildings, items, and a few of the character models are quite well-detailed, despite the characters having distorted faces, and a few have some intricate details on them, making the game look good from a detail standpoint.
 * 10) The front cover of the game box looks very good, giving a rather dark and hellish atmosphere.

Reception
Due to the game's unfinished state, it received mostly positive reviews from critics, but mixed reviews from players, with many seeing it as a massive disappointment compared to the last game. Reviewer Scorpia of Computer Gaming World bashed the game hard in particular, stating "If you were expecting characterization, rich story, role playing—you're expecting it from the wrong game" and would later call it Mario: The Avatar due to the game's large amount of unnecessary platforming sequences.

David McCandless of PC Zone was also mixed on the game and stated "Pagan is a game you will either love or hate. If you get into it, it will last you weeks and you'll think it's brill and you'll love it and you'll play it and play it. But personally, I don't think it's much good ."

Ultima fans have also been very harsh on the game, with many considering it to be where the downfall of the series began, and many have pointed out its multiple flaws such as its unfinished state, as well as calling out the Avatar's behavior in this game.

Trivia

 * It was the first game in the Ultima series to be given a Mature rating in North America.
 * As with most games in the Ultima series starting with the forth game, the original releases included two "feelies", which was an object that came with the game that is inspired by something in the game. In this game's case, it came with a Pentagram coin, along with a cloth map of Pagan.

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