Linguistic Dragon hasn’t had a lot of time, lately, to continue his playthrough of Savage Empire. However, he did recently find a bit of time to press on a little further in the game:

…it took me some wandering about to get my bearings properly. I don’t know Eodon anywhere near as well as I do Britannia, so it was very easy to get myself lost while trying to figure out what part of the valley I was in, and more to the point, how to get where I needed to go. I did, however, stumble across some interesting sights in the process, including a fight with a gorilla (surprisingly easier than I expected it to be), a rather elaborate fountain tucked away in a secluded part of the jungles, a placid triceratops plodding by, and yet another Myrmidex ambush. After dealing with that last, in which Jimmy proved his mettle rather well, I finally stumbled my way back to the Kurak village and familiar territory. Intanya did his shamanistic healer thing, and the five of us geared up to do some bushwhacking in search of Rafkin’s lab – it was supposed to be somewhere to the southeast of the village.

Linguistic also explains one of his main frustrations with the game (from which his post draws its title):

…shuffling things around in my inventory. Weight issues were rearing their heads something awful this time around, and I think they’re contributing to why I don’t find myself enjoying the game quite as much as Ultima VI. While certainly a factor I had to keep in mind in the latter, it felt balanced enough that it wasn’t an annoyance. Sure, I had to shuffle things around every now and again, but between my entire party I had a decent enough carrying capacity, and the cumulative weight of everything I figured I might need (not necessarily DID need, mind) felt manageable as a result. Here in Savage Empire, my party size is considerably more limited, not many party members have the sizeable strength to serve as decent ‘pack mules,’ and it’s nowhere near as simple a matter to boost strength – Jimmy was the first of my party to gain a level, and it took until this session for it to happen. And even then, I was only able to boost his strength by one point, which didn’t increase his carrying capacity very much. All those factors combine to mean that I have considerably less wiggle room when it comes to carting things around, and things in Savage Empire can get very heavy very quickly (although that may just be a perception thing). The atl-atl doesn’t feel like a very viable weapon for my ranged characters, because spears, their necessary ammunition, get very bulky very quickly, and that’s weight I need for other things. I remember the immense relief I felt when I found a boomerang for Rafkin to use, because I could barely keep two or three throwing axes on him and I certainly wasn’t going to send him onto the FRONT lines to fight. It’s crossing the line a bit from annoyance to frustration, and I suspect my next session is going to involve a re-evaluation of what all in my inventory that I strictly need. (I’m going to have to get over inventory problems eventually, after all. They’re present in some form or another from here on out in the series.)

There is more to read; as always, do click on through.