Development
In this part of the series, Garriott delegated most of the work to others. Garriott later explained, "... I sacrificed everything to appease stockholders, which was a mistake. We probably shipped it three months unfinished."
A patch was released to correct the game's bugs as well as fix some plot holes, and eliminate most of the problems with jumping (the original release only allowed jumping over a fixed distance in eight directions while the patch enabled jump distance to be targeted; the original release also contained many moving platforms to be jumped across, the patch stopped their motion). Long-time Ultima fans jokingly referred to Ultima VIII by the nickname 'Super Avatar Brothers', in reference to the abundance of platform-jumping puzzles.
The Ultima VIII engine was later reused in the Crusader game series.
Being a DOS title, Ultima VIII has problems running on modern systems such as Windows 98 and later; however, it works reliably under the DOSBox environment. Unlike Ultima VII which used Intel's undocumented "Big real mode" which became known as Voodoo Memory at Origin, Ultima VIII used a more conventional DOS extender. An open-source project called Pentagram aims to create an engine capable of running Ultima VIII on modern operating systems, most notably Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Read more about this topic: Ultima VIII: Pagan
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