You laugh but this is the exact thought process that goes into smoking. “I’ll quit before I get addicted”

Well literally that’s what happened. It’s an item called “Skribbane,” it boosts your health and energy over the normal limit and powers you up until you get addicted, then you need it just to stay at normal stats, or you take damage & are weakened until you detox.

I was always fine with the food mechanic in Exile, but it doesn’t matter that much most of the time. The spot where it affected the game most, and where I missed the suspense that it generated, was on the journey to the Vahnatai in the second game, where you loose food going over the waterfalls and have to find more.

In the Eye of the Beholder games you need it at first, and then you just get a spell called “Mana” that basically replaces the need to find/eat food. By the second game your party starts at the level you were at in the first one (and you can import your party from the previous game) so the entire mechanic is pointless.

You raise attributes in Ultima 2 by, you guessed it, buying it from a trainer.

You do this in Exile too. And in the D&D Gold Box games. Btw, if the combat isn’t one the big selling points of Avernum to you, then you probably wouldn’t enjoy the Gold Box games.

Speaking of WASD, I’ve been playing some “blobbers” (first person dungeon crawlers with the party all in one square) recently, and I hate how in the old games 4 & 6 strafe and 7 & 9 turn, but in the new games Q & E strafe and A & D turn.

Ultima 3 solves the major problem of multiple characters – combat on a limited number of tiles with terrain – by the grid-based combat on a separate screen, thus being the spiritual forebear to FF Tactics

In Exile you had 6 characters and when you weren’t in combat your party took up one space and was represented by whoever was #1 on the party order. When you went into combat mode you expanded into 6 characters. TBH, I miss having 6 characters, but it would be unweildly the way the non-combat town/dungeon mode works in Avernum.

I don’t really remember if there’s anything special in the New Formello quest that you’ll get later. There could be.