The CRPG Addict has finally, in his ongoing attempt to play through what is more or less the definitive history of RPGs, has finally gotten around to giving Savage Empire a go.

…it’s always surprised me how reluctant Origin was to re-use its Ultima engines. Ultima V, in particular, was brilliant. It could have sustained titles all the way through the mid-1990s and I’d be raving about them. But they used it once.

Thus, it’s a good thing that the company got some additional mileage out of Ultima VI, one of the best game engines we’ve seen so far. Yes, none of us like how limited the map window is. Let’s get past that. No other top-down game of the era–and few of any era–offers a more complex approach to inventory management and world-interaction. I like the Infinity Engine moderately better for combat, and of course the graphics improved, but in Ultima VI there are a score of things I can’t do in the Infinity Engine, or the Aurora Engine, or almost any other engine for that matter, including repositioning objects to get a tactical advantage in combat, smashing furniture, setting fires, and using objects interactively with each other, such as storing common objects in their own bags.

I wasn’t looking forward to The Savage Empire going into it, and I still have some reservations about the content, but almost all of my fears evaporated when I started playing the game and remembered how much I liked the “sandbox” feel of Ultima VI. Add to this the detailed dialogue and virtue-based roleplaying that the Ultima series has become famous for, and I’m already hooked.

He managed to get a good start in the game, and some of his initial reservations seem to have evaporated:

Definitely a fun game so far, and I am mildly intrigued to see what happens with the Shamuru/Shamino and Triolo/Iolo mystery. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be really, really stupid.

The music also gets singled out for conspicuous praise:

There’s some evocative background music, some of the most complex we’ve seen so far in a DOS game, with a a tom-tom beat and African rhythms underlying complex melodies. (It’s credited to “The Fat Man” George Alistair Sanger. This was his first year in game music, but he later went on to score Ultima Underworld, The 7th Guest, and The 11th Hour.) Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn it off independent of the sound, and as much as I like the game music, I really don’t want it playing while I play the game. Since other sound effects are sparser, and a combat theme appears jarringly every time you see an enemy, I’ve been playing with the sound off.

Do be sure to keep an eye on the CRPG Addict’s blog over the next few weeks — if, that is, his isn’t already a site you follow with some regularity — as he continues to work his way through Eodon!