You can now make a party of four ala "Wizardry", and also enter a Heroes/Fire Emblemesque grid-based combat situations where you basically lead your party across a field but functions similarly to Ultimas I and II. Still demands a lot of grinding as well as arbitrary "collect the four items" to get to the final dungeon.

I have to say the mess that was "Ultima II" had one thing over III: It had a sense of direction, and you knew where you were supposed to go, because Ultima II was mostly linear. With Ultima III you are once again given the immense freedom you had with "Ultima I", but this time you can't just grind and exploit a single dungeon. This time you are required to visit all the places across the world to get the ellusive items and hints, but the game offers nothing in the sense of which dungeons to tackle first, how to differentiate easy from hard dungeons, but I assume there is nothing to lose here as the dungeons are sparse, and you only really need to visit three of the eight dungeons in order to get the essential items. The rest of the floors are not worth exploring, or trying to frustratingly map. It's a good framework with an awkward, half-baked content.

On the bright side, the classes in Ultima are more fleshed out than ever, and now spellcasters are glass cannons and thieves are dexterous trap-evaders they were always meant to be. Being able to play many of your desired classes at once brings a great and liberating feeling to Ultima, as now you don't have to conform to one type of strategy or getting by with a single, archetype-bound character.