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Oh, and specifically concerning the Ultimas. They went downhill, IMO, after peaking with Ultima 5. The biggest and worst change was they went to a single size scale, so the game universe feels myopic. Remember how cool it was to go inside the big castle, that was just a dot in the big city, that was just a dot on the map! That ended with Ultima 5.
I find them tedious, slow and trite, compared with the quality of something like Wizardry. Still, after that giant step backward, they did improve. Ultima 9 was released way too soon, full of bugs and suffering badly from the same budget cuts that Wizardy developers were forced to suffer. Now that most of the bugs are fixed, however, Ultima 9 is a fun game. They improved a number of interface problems from the immediately previous games, and the game play is through lots of cool, high resolution, environments. If you are really nostalgic for Ultima in particular, I recommend 9, the last one.
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