Ultima III: Exodus
About
Exodus: Ultima III is a party-based fantasy role-playing game and the third entry in the Ultima series. After the defeat of Mondain and Minax, earthquakes and renewed monster attacks disturb the land of Sosaria. Their mysterious progeny, Exodus, has established itself on the Isle of Fire, prompting Lord British to summon a party of adventurers to discover its nature and end the threat. The player creates a roster of characters and forms a party of up to four. Each character is assigned a sex, one of five races, one of 11 professions, and points divided among strength, dexterity, intelligence, and wisdom. Race affects the maximum values attainable in each attribute, while profession determines available weapons, armor, magic, and thieving abilities. Fighters and barbarians emphasize physical combat, clerics and wizards use separate schools of magic, and hybrid professions combine martial, magical, or thieving skills in different proportions. Characters gain experience and advance individually. Sosaria, its towns, and its castles are explored from a top-down perspective, while dungeons use a first-person view. Towns contain shops, healers, taverns, oracles, and inhabitants who provide clues, while travel across the world requires managing food and may involve horses, ships, or periodically appearing moongates. Dungeons must be illuminated with torches or spells and contain traps, fountains, treasure chests, hidden passages, and special marks needed to complete the quest. Progress is comparatively open-ended, requiring the player to explore, interpret clues, improve the party, and locate the objects and knowledge needed to reach Exodus. Enemy groups appear on the world map and can sometimes be avoided, while dungeon encounters occur without warning. Entering combat opens a separate tile-based battlefield where every party member and monster is represented individually. Characters act in sequence and can move, attack, cast spells, or attempt to flee. Melee weapons generally require an adjacent target, while bows, thrown weapons, and spells can strike across the battlefield. Defeated enemies award experience to the character delivering the final blow and may leave trapped treasure chests behind. The NES version, titled Ultima: Exodus, is a more extensive adaptation with redrawn graphics, a menu-driven interface, expanded dialogue, new music, revised puzzles and dungeon contents, and an additional ending sequence. The Windows release packages the DOS version for modern systems through emulation.
Description and score courtesy of MobyGames ↗