Let's Play Ultima VIII Extra #01: The Avatar's Training Secrets, Exposed!
333In Ultima VII, growing stronger is an integral part of your progression through the story. It's true that you can use any equipment that you can carry, but without a high strength you just won't have the carry capacity to heft around a full suit of platemail and a backpack full of everything Iolo stole while you traveled Britannia. You gain levels as you defeat enemies and complete quests and those levels gave you training points which could be spent at a variety of trainers. They increased your stats through intense training, with each having a certain stat focus and cost (and one that's free if you take him along in your party), allowing you to tailor the Avatar to how you like to play and your party to a lesser degree. Even though said training took place in a few sentences of dialogue, the things you had to do to reach that point took time and effort, not to mention the danger in facing foes in combat.
Of course, in The Forge of Virtue you could get all the Avatar's stats maxed out and his strength to double the maximum, but that in itself required a baseline of levels, equipment and stats to achieve easily.
Ultima VIII does away with all of that however. While you can gain strength and dexterity through fighting enemies and there's a training hall in Tenebrae - if it actually provides a way to improve your stats we don't yet know - you don't actually need to fight anything to improve either of those stats to maximum. In what I can only imagine is an oversight when making the game, Ultima VIII takes into account every swing you make in combat, with a weapon or not, for the purposes of improving strength or dexterity. If you're fighting a foe or not doesn't matter; swing enough times at anything - Devon at the beginning is a good candidate as he's invulnerable, but the air's just as fine - and you'll reach 25 in strength and dexterity sooner or later.
Remember when I said that I thought it'd take an hour to reach maximum strength and dexterity? It actually took me only twenty minutes of swinging at the air with a dagger, in an empty house with not a single foe in sight. This not only means I can carry more and hit harder, but our maximum health has increased by two thirds, a huge boost for the start of the game. We're still devoid of any armour and wielding only a dagger, but with only one stat left to max I'd say that we're off to a good start already. If only the Avatar had used this method of training in the other Ultima games, he'd of been a powerhouse of destruction right from the beginning.
You may be wondering how training and raising your stats works in the sequel to this game, Ultima IX. I won't go into detail about it here, save that it's entirely different to how its worked in any other game and in many ways, is even worse then how it functions here.
We'll get to seeing that one day, I'm sure. One day.
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