This is currently my favorite strategy game. It lacks depth in some areas and the Ai struggles to stay compelling to fight against but it is also the best space empire role playing game out there and you will never find a game that can match it in that field. The true replay-ability of this game comes from the empire creation and the uniqueness of the empires you can create. Want to be the Empire from Star Wars? Go ahead, Space Communists? Yeah, The HRE IN SPACE? Yep!, the borg, the federation, the vasari, the TEC, the unity, any Sci-fi faction you can dream up or think of can be recreated in this game. THAT is why I recommend it so highly.

Man, the first time I realized that Altair was voiced by that fucking dude. All the time and effort that went into making it look as authentically like the twelfth century Holy Land as possible, and who do they cast to voice the main character? Fuck if I know, your roommate Trevor? The mid-00’s were a weird time I guess, where game developers were like “how are the kids going to want to buy our extremely strange stealth historical fiction sci-fi hybrid game that’s also explicitly about christian/Muslim friction in the Middle East while we’re still balls deep in an endless war in Iraq, unless we make the main character sound like the guy in accounting with long hair and a ponytail who teaches a yoga class on Thursdays and who your mom is cheating on your dad with?”

I would say that Ultima V was "ahead of its time", but the sad reality is that there are still hardly any games that can measure up to its qualities: a rich, living game world, where every single NPC has its own daily routine and can be engaged in naturally flowing conversations; the ability to interact with almost every object in the environment; completely open, non-linear progression instead of a "main quest line"; a deep, thought-provoking story that is still relevant today; and I'm not even talking about crazy things like the simulation of wind, moon cycles and planetal orbits. How they managed to do all this on an Apple II in 1988 is a goddamn miracle to me. Over 30 years later, Ultima V is still the most ambitious and perhaps the greatest CRPG of all time.