I’m a bit late in noting Linguistic Dragon’s latest blog post concerning his ongoing attempt to replay Ultima 2…but it would seem that Linguistic himself has experienced a bit of a slowdown in said playthrough:

Life is picking up speed again, or at least it has for the past week or so, but I’m still pushing forward, albeit slowly. This post is a couple days due at this point, covering a session from… Wednesday-ish, I think, but hey, slow and steady wins the race and all that!

His comments on when the game “opens up” — a point he asserts exists in all Ultima games — to the player are rather interesting:

For Ultima II, that moment is unequivocally the moment you commandeer your first ship.

Up until that point, it’s a desperate dashing about from here to there, hoping enemies will spawn where you can actually do something about them, hoping that your stats are enough to not make you lose too many hit points, hoping that you’ll be able to scrounge up enough gold to replenish your food or at least be able to swipe enough…

That all changes once you get a ship. Your cannons can strike down most enemies in one hit, their location is no object to you as you can reach the islands, food has no meaning as it doesn’t decrease when you’re on a ship – you can then turn your goals toward more far-reaching things. Collecting enough gold to increase your stats, stocking up enough food to make exploration a bit more feasible.

Ship successfully commandeered, he went on to do a fair bit of exploring, and progressed through a fair bit of the game’s story. His most recent session with the game culminated in obtaining an oracle reading and then proceeding to explore one of the game’s towers:

Dungeons and towers are different experiences than they were in Ultima I – I needed torches to see my way, I came across monsters that would blow them out, I stumbled across many traps that tools helped me get through… all in all, dungeons and towers struck me as rather more dangerous places than they had been in Ultima I. Less variety of creatures, but more interesting to navigate.

Still, I was losing more than I was gaining from the venture, so after gathering some more gold, I went back to Baradin’s Town to see if I could get any good advice from the oracle – and promptly got swarmed. I’m pretty sure I had to fight through a conga line of at least a dozen creatures before I could make my way into town. That was… well, one of the most entertainingly tense experiences I’d had yet in this round of Ultima II. I gained little use from the oracle for my trouble, being told that the Queen is the King and the King is a spy, whatever that meant, and a musing on the evil man is capable of. I suppose I should know something about that, considering all I’m about to do.

It has been a couple of weeks since Linguistic posted the above, so it would seem that real life has gotten a bit busy for him again. Hopefully he’ll find time in the near future to get in another session of Ultima 2, and perhaps even finish the game.