Ultima III Day 1

Woohoo Ultima III! I freaking LOOOOOOOOVE this game! This is probably THE game of my childhood, at least the 0 to 10 years old portion of it. I love everything about this game...or maybe I should say loved. We'll see when I finish it again as an adult :)

One thing I always like about western rpg's are their really in depth character creation system. I love it and I swear that I spent a good two hours yesterday thinking about my party in Ultima III. It's quite complicated. The typical party in a game like this is a Fighter, a Thief, a Cleric and a Mage. However there are problems with that configuration. I don't like having only one front line warrior. So what, he's supposed to plunge head deep into danger while the others stay back? I don't like that. Also I don't like pure mages because I'm not a mage type. I'd much rather have a good archer than some dude throwing magic missiles. I like thieves and clerics however as the game progresses they start to feel limited because of their equipment limitations. So it was complicated.

At first I had decided on a Fighter, Paladin, Ranger and Cleric party. That would have given me three characters capable of healing, three characters capable of throwing down (the cleric would have been able to throw down also in the early game) and the ranger would have had some thieving abilities and able to do some sorcery. Seemed perfect...except for one problem. The ranger is limited to +2 weapons and I want everyone in my party to eventually be able to equip the strongest ranged weapon there is. Now I know that the Exotic armor and weapon can be equipped on any character regardless of class but the weapon is not ranged so that bugs me. That meant that my ranger would have had to use a weaker ranged weapon or an exotic and I didn't like that. So I decided to switch it up.

My final party is two paladins, one barbarian and one lark. The two paladins will act as my twin healers although one of the two will be more combat oriented while the other will be more clerical in nature. The barbarian will be my thief, a thief that can use every weapon out there that is. And the lark will be my replacement for a mage, being able to use every weapon and a good amount of mage spells. My party is a bit weak on magic but so far I'm pretty happy with it.

The two paladins are dwarves while the other two are elves. The logic behind the dwarves is that their weakest stat is intelligence which isn't needed for a paladin. At first I thought about making one of the paladins a bobbit since the bobbit is maxed out on wisdom. However they also have poor dexterity. So I don't know. I might go back and revise that to be honest since one of my paladins is supposed to be magic oriented so it would be logical to have him as a bobbit.


The other two are elves. For the barbarian it was a logical choice since his job is to be the thief in the party. For the lark it was a bit more complicated, I thought about making her a fuzzy which has maxed out dexterity and intelligence however he has a piss poor 25 STR max. That might have made her useless as a fighter in the endgame. I don't want to have to rely on her magic, that's not really my style. I mean if I'm going to have a lark with 25 STR might as well have a Wizard no? So I decided to pick the elf instead. That one was a hard choice but I can't really go back on it without gimping my lark. I want her to use the strongest bow and kick ass with it, not throw wind arrows.

So overall I'm pretty happy with my bunch of miscreants. I'll go play my heart out :)