Information Ultima VIII Gold Now Available on GOG

Aye, but the rest of the game is a big bag of old shite.

Honestly, though, the setting is pretty interesting and the general premise of the story (especially its climax) is damn awesome. Just a crying shame most everything else in between is so fucking awful.

"Gold Edition"? Why, because it has the speech pack and a patch?

Only Mordea really fits that description and she only has her powers because of heredity. Lore check fail

If you like Ultima 8, then maybe you would enjoy Dark Souls. It has jumping and magic and is actually not that different. In fact, there's even a guy who kind of looks like the Avatar from U8.

http://armaitus.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/ultima8.png
http://i.imgur.com/W6bBW.jpg

Perhaps the expansion is included as well.

Haha, I wish

If they managed to do that they could ask for 59.9$ and I would buy it out of curiosity

Cut content in mah game!?

I believe the speech pack makes it the "Gold Edition".
Anyway, it says that the The Chronicle of Pagan and the manual is included. But as far as I know, The Chronicle of Pagan IS the manual.

Game is not fit to be called Ultima.

Back in the day when Crusader: No Remorse came out, the game showed you ads of other Origin games every time you quit the game, IIRC. Or maybe it was just the installation. I can't recall which. But there were screenshots of Pagan and being the little illiterate graphics whore I was in my young age, I was fascinated with it and always wanted to play it but could never find it then.

I was lucky.

The game has its redeeming qualities as well as plenty of decline, but I do wish that the description of 'a more mature approach' where you need to judge whether the ends justify the means was actually correct (as opposed to an apparent wilful stomping on the avatar concept, leaving it to desperate fans to try to reinterpret in a manner that fits the earlier games).

I can see that sort of approach genuinely fitting the long-term Ultima themes. A first act (U1-U3) that follows traditional crpg kill the foozle, 'might makes right' and defeat the bad guy by whatever barbaric means are necessary. A 2nd act where you turn the land into one of virtue and civilisation by becoming a paragon of virtue yourself. And then a 3rd act in U8/9 (let's assume a potential 9 that wasn't shit) where you're finally faced with the decay of all that is created, with an evil too powerful to be defeated without the avatar sinking at least partway into evil itself. A running theme of whether perfect virtue is capable of facing down evil, or whether it's ultimately a form of cowardice that either lets evil run amok or forces others to do the necessary dirty work while you keep your hands clean (so instead of 'good v evil' as you might have in the 2nd act, or 'anything goes' from the first act, you have 'clean hands but a hypocrite' vs 'make yourself into a monster so that others can keep their humanity' in the final 2 games.

I'm not thinking an emo ultima insomuch as a high tragedy - no avatar moaning about how dark he's become, or wanting to do the right thing, etc. Whichever way the player takes it, the avatar should remain a being of certainty in his conscience. If the player chooses something, the avatar shouldn't whine about how horrible it is: he should do it with full heroic certainty that he is doing the right thing, letting the player and the consequences determine whether he's right.

At least it would have been better than a semi-arcade rpg that simply stomped on the lore.