[buzzybee]

It's definitely a different taste in what folks want out of their RPG. Being able to bake bread and stack crates is exciting as a "world of possibilities" sort of deal, but it's also narratively dissonant from going on a big adventure where you are the Hero. It sucks up a lot of time and once you're done, you've forgotten what the adventure was about - kind of proving the point Sid Meier took home from Covert Action.

However, at the time, again, it was definitely something new and different. Games in the 80's were more often conceived of as puzzles to solve, rather than worlds to explore: adding lots of surface detail was how Garriott perceived possibilities for immersion. A lot of games followed similar-yet-different paths of piling on stuff that made the games tedious in the early 90's. By the middle of the decade people were calling the whole genre dead, which is hyperbolic, of course, but reflective of the move towards streamlining and thinking about UX across the whole design, which left "traditional-looking" games out in the cold.

[QSIITurbo]

Yeah, the western RPG genre had become these "inventory management" or "taking notes" games. They made up for the lack of enhancing and balancing combat and developing AI with these gimmicks. Ultima series is one of the worst: you have to manage food, light sources, runes, mantras, finding spells, spell ingredients, spellcasting, moonstones, moongates, gems, two extra alphabets, mapping yourself, and so on and so on. When you start to think about it, it's like having a second job just to kill the bad guys.

[musha68k]

As a kid I loved all of that though. I had enough time, skipping on homework while probably still learning more through games like Ultima :)