The ‘classes’ are based on fighter / mage / rogue skills: each skill is governed by one of these, and a player can only have 125% total. To make this clearer – fighter specials (bash, cleave, and so on) require a 90 skill in a weapon, meaning you’d raise your fighter percent to 90 if you trained this skill. Thus, if you wanted to use sixth circle spells as well, you’d find you couldn’t, as these require 60 in magery skills (magery, sorcery, piety). All in all, EUO has a lot of skills – ranging from the usual fighting ones to enchanting, animal taming, tinkering and so forth, however, players can tailor their characters to their own wishes to a large extent.

All the spells can be cast using the Ultima V runes, or for the non-Ultima fans, through a simpler list. The dungeons, of which there are over 30, are player made and with 1.2.0 going live, now incorporate the LUA scripting language – meaning that like in Ultima V (where you could zap rocks with your magic axes) you can now influence the dungeons through switches, puzzles and spawned monsters Although, yes, there are a couple of randomised dungeons on top of these as well!

There are also over 100 custom-written NPCs, and over 50 quests with more being added all the time. Leveling is done by meditating at the Shrines, which use a variant of the Ultima VI method – for example, the Shrine of Valor gives +6 strength, and the Shrine of Spirituality +2 to all stats.

All in all, if you loved Ultima V, EUO is well worth a look – nostalgia mixed in with quirky nethack nods and a designer whose doing rather smart things behind the now archaic front end!