Linguistic Dragon has begun exploring the land of Sosaria in Ultima 3 now. If memory serves, he has never completed Ultima 3 before, and in fact burned out on the game rather early on his previous attempt at it, so it is likely that much of it will be new to him. For now, though, he has focused on finding his feet in the game, so to speak:

My first order of business, of course, was equipping everything I’d been given at the start of the game (daggers and cloth armor for everybody!) and figuring out what the heck all the commands did. Having a full and varied party now makes combat a lot more interesting, especially now that it takes place on a separate tactical screen, but it also means it takes a lot of keystrokes to separate everything out right. Each character has their own inventory, gold purse, food stock, and so forth, which means four times the work in keeping track of everything. Which isn’t too tedious once you get the hang of the commands, but so far it’s involved a lot of (Z)tat-ing to remember who’s got what and who I passed everything over too. The (J)oin Gold command has been a godsend to help with the money situation, although I expect that’ll get more complicated when I’m dealing with larger sums.

He also gave himself the opportunity to just run amok on the continent for a while (after arming up some, of course):

I dashed around the continent trying to find a moongate, then mapping them all out as best I could. I marked towns and dungeons on my map, making the rounds through Devil Guard, Britain and Yew to gather what clues I could. I fended off orcs and cutpurses and even a horde of demons, making use of my new slings, a slew of Mittar spells, and the occasional Repond. I Appar Unem’d the resultant loot, was pleased to find that sometimes I’d get equipment from chests, and used the proceeds to continue to stock up on food and save up for some new armor for my front-line fighters. I even got lucky and found myself a ship, manned by a lone pirate who was swiftly dispatched. And on my way to park it into an eddy so it didn’t get swallowed by the whirlpool, I found myself facing a storm of squids, which poisoned Olivia before I finally struck them down, making me scramble for my notes amid a bunch of Sanctus from Ivan and Aric so I could recall where the nearest healer was to get her cured.

All in all, a good start to the game; enough to grasp the mechanics and convoluted command set, but not significant progress along the plot of Ultima 3 proper. But that, no doubt, will be the subject of his next post about the game.