I forgot to keep tabs on The CRPG Addict as he worked his way through Savage Empire…and it turns out that he has gone and finished the game entirely, blogging about his progress through it in five additional posts:

• The Savage Empire: Neither Savage nor an Empire
• The Savage Empire: Seeking Home
• The Savage Empire: Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
• Savage Empire: Won!
• Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire: Final Rating

Savage Empire didn’t make quite the same impression on him that Ultima 6 did. As he details in the Seeking Home post, he has some criticisms of it as compared to its predecessor:

I loved Ultima VI. It’s my second highest-rated game. Why wouldn’t I at least like this one? Why would I find playing it a chore instead of, at least, a diversion from my woes? As something of a preview of the GIMLET to come, this is what I see:

1. A stupider game world. Eodon just doesn’t really do anything for me. A land of dinosaurs and tribesmen ought to be more interesting than this one, which is largely based on tropes from a genre (early 1900s pulp magazines) that modern players aren’t familiar with and don’t care about.
2. Lamer NPCs. NPC dialogue has always been a strong point of the Ultimaseries, but the NPCs in The Savage Empire are somehow less interesting than the standard high-fantasy ciphers that occupy Britannia. They don’t talk in ways particularly unique to their tribes; too many of them are literal copies of each other; and a lot of what they say is just goofy. There are a few notable personalities among them, but not as many as Ultima IV–VI.
3. Depressing combats with innocent animals. Combat wasn’t a particularly strong feature of Ultima VI, but it’s just worse here, with your own party members refusing to act most rounds and your enemies composed primarily of mindless animals like dinosaurs, great apes, and saber-toothed tigers, all of which seem wrong to kill.
4. Theft or poverty. At least so far, I haven’t found many places to legitimately loot items. You either have to steal them from the huts of tribesmen or run about unarmored.

Still, he did find much to like about the game as well, giving it:

…a final score of 48. That’s considerably lower than the 68 I gave to Ultima VI, but still in the top 10% of 1990 games, and the third-highest rating I’ve given in the past year.

I started my series of posts on The Savage Empire praising Origin for re-using a great engine instead of discarding it after a single use. Thus, I was a little surprised and annoyed to find Dennis Owens complaining about the same thing in his March 1991 Computer Gaming World review. “Although once upon a time, Ultima stood for innovation and surprise,” he grouses, “[they] seem to have devolved into copies of themselves–all requiring that worlds be explored…monsters be bashed, and objects be found.” I mean, Jesus, Dennis–you could reduce all RPGs to such trite phrasing. Ultimahasn’t lost its innovation just because the creators re-used one engine. Frankly, if they hadn’t, we’d be waiting until Ultima VII for the next game. Would that have been better?

While he does have some positive things to say, his conclusion is mixed: “Compared to any except its own brothers and sisters, The Savage Empire…must be considered dazzling and successful. Compared to its peers, however, the game presents what may be a disturbing view of a possible trend in the Ultima line: caricature.”

In her 1993 “survey” of RPGs on the market, Scorpia was a little more positive, concluding that it was “good for filling in the hours while you wait for the next real Ultima,” with which I completely agree.

He has some other games to get to first, but we can look forward to his playthrough of Martian Dreams at some point in the next few months, as he crosses from 1990 to 1991 in his ongoing chronicle of the history of computer role-playing games.