Linguistic Dragon evidently found time to get in another session in his ongoing playthrough of Savage Empire:

Y’know, it’s been an interesting venture attempting to balance actual play sessions with finding the time to scribble my musings about them. I’ve had a lot of days lately where I’ve found myself wanting to have myself a good long session of Savage Empire while simultaneously feeling hesitant to do so because I haven’t written up the last one. In fact, this particular post technically covers two sessions, partly because I didn’t get much done in the first one and partly because of the aforementioned “but I want to plaaaaay” urge winning out over self-imposed blogging obligations.

Which probably says something about how much I’m enjoying myself when it comes to Savage Empire, but I’ll get to that later.

In this session, he set about recovering blue stone from near the Sakkhra caves, which also gave him the opportunity to speak to the Sakkhra proper. And then he found a particularly fun part of the game:

I was in a bit of a hurry to investigate the oddly colored platform near the entrance to the caves, and wound up spending a fair amount of time figuring out the teleportation system I’d stumbled across.

It was, quite frankly, the most fun I’d had in the game yet.

I found a certain thrill from plunging into the unknown via a teleporter, having Triolo use a view spell to get an idea of my surroundings, and then comparing that tiny glimpse of nearby geographical features to the official map to pinpoint where I was likely to be. I’m considerably less familiar with Eodon than I am Britannia, which means that I’ve been consulting the map fairly regularly, but being able to use it in a manner like this was a real treat for a map nerd like me (seriously, I’ve got a pretty sizable collection of globes, both old and new). And it also had the side-effect of highlighting just how excellently done the Savage Empire map is. The cliffs, rivers, forests and such are all mirrored on the map just as I’d expect them to be, and the location of each teleporter is surrounded by a distinct enough set of features that careful scrutiny of the map is all you need to figure out where you are – stumbling into a patch of lava near a teleporter was enough to tell me I was in the southeast of the valley, near the Jukari, even though I’d never visited them before, because it’s the only place on the map where lava shows up. A bend in the river here, a particular series of cliffs there – it’s a fabulous “puzzle” of sorts that isn’t strictly necessary, but immensely enjoyable all the same, and brought up fond memories of sitting in the backseat with the map during family road trips, serving as my dad’s navigator. I felt like an honest-to-goodness adventurer, armed with little more than my wits and a map, trying to get my bearings based on nothing more than what I could see. It was gloriously exhilarating, and I wish it was a moment I was better able to replicate in more modern games.

He went on to do a number of other things in the game; click on through to read about that. In his summary section — where he stops telling the story of his Avatar’s adventures in Britannia (and beyond!), and reverts to commenting on the game from a real world perspective — he made an interesting observation that hearkened back to his Ultima 2 playthrough:

I made the assertion way back in Ultima II that every Ultima, and indeed every RPG, has a moment where the game truly opens up and engages, a turning point where what was once a struggle now becomes less of the hassle it once was. I declared the turning point of Ultima II to be the moment where one obtains a ship, but the more complex a game gets, the more difficult it becomes to point to a single, definitive moment where this particular shift happens.

I’m still not entirely sure what caused it, but I felt that shift during this particular session of Savage Empire. Something about the game finally clicked for me, and I’m not certain why.

Hopefully Linguistic will be able to find more time in the coming weeks to play Savage Empire still yet more…and, of course, write about doing so!