The CRPG Addict has continued his playthrough of Ultima Underworld, and has released three additional entries in his series of blog posts thereabout. The first may be the most interesting, and represents something of a break from form — or perhaps, the birth of a new form — for the Addict:

I don’t normally do this, but this entry will be a complete description of Level 4 and all of my actions and decisions within it. I think that doing this once per long game offers a better sense of gameplay than the summaries I usually provide. I’m going to split this into two parts, but with only a short delay between them. There’s a brief summary at the end.

Here’s a taste of what the “complete description” reads like:

I leave the troll area through an unlocked northern door, which leads into a long corridor. The first chamber off this corridor is empty. The second opens to reveal three giant spiders. They take forever to kill–much longer than the ones on previous levels–and they leave me poisoned and my short sword and helmet degaded to “serviceable.”

A few things occur to me relative to combat. First, I tend to fight with a mix of chop, slash, and thrust, even though I suspect that each attack is independent and that the enemy AI doesn’t respond to patterns or anything. Second, it’s really hard to gauge the effective range on attacks. Enemies constantly dart in and out of the range, whatever it is. Third, I think this is the first game to offer the experience of seeing your weapon clearly make contact with an enemy and yet somehow still “miss” because of the underlying statistics. This is a common criticism of Morrowind, but the discontinuity exists every time you blend action combat with underlying probability rolls.

I have no way to cure poison, so I have to tough it out. I boost my hit points with a few castings of In Bet Mani and hope the poison fades before it kills me. About this time, I notice that my character is “famished,” having apparently forgotten to eat after he woke up on the previous level. I’m relying on catching fish and In Mani Ylem for food these days, but I just spent all my spell points and I’m nowhere near any water that I know of.

He then pauses to consider the eight artifacts that the player must find during the course of the game:

The artifacts are a near-but-not-perfect fit with the eight virtues of the Avatar: honesty, compassion, valor, justice, honor, sacrifice, spirituality, and humility. The manual’s use of “Book of Truth” was a bad idea, because not only is truth a “principle” of virtue, and not a virtue, but there was already an artifact of that name, used with the Candle of Love and the Bell of Courage to enter the Abyss in Ultima IV. If all three artifacts had made a re-appearance here, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea, but it’s clear from the backstory that these artifacts are a new set.

Though it doesn’t say so anywhere, Caliburn is clearly supposed to be associated with justice. Spirituality, however, is nowhere to be seen. Instead, we get the “Cup of Wonder.” It supposedly comes from an ancient oak in Skara Brae, so it has that connection to spirituality, but I question whether “wonder” and “spirituality” are truly synonyms, and even so, whether a cup is the best way to depict it. Yes, I sometimes see weird things and get a sense of awe when I’m drunk, but I wouldn’t exactly call that “spiritual.”

And his most recent entry is basically a second part of the “complete description” of Level 4 of the Abyss.

As always, click on through to read each entry!