Thunderstone: Well, the more games on here the better, and since they have the other games they might as well throw in the last game. The biggest disappointment that I can see about U9 (besides the bugs) is wasted plot potential. If I were on the writing team, I would have had the avatar turn evil from his time in pagan. While he did defeat the guy who took over Britania (forgot his name), he claimed the thrown for himself and now rules with an iron fist, fearful that evil will take over once again. He grew werely of how often it seems like Lord British allows evil into the realm and always expects him to clean up, and throws him in the dungeon. Lord British managers to escape and summons a new hero from our world to defeat the rogue avatar.
This would branch off nicely from the previous game. Since they wanted to make the game friendly to newcomers having a new avatar come in would have offered a great excuse to explain the lore and the virtues without making the characters look like thundering morons.
That is actually a good idea, sadly though given Ultima fans they would complain about that by saying "oh it ruined the image of the avatar" and all that like alot of them complained about having to do unvirtues things in Ultima 8 which I liked since you weren't in Britannia anymore and Pagan was such a hostile and cold place that you had no choice but to do questionable things to escape which was the Guardians plan, I mean he did say that you will be "a fallen idol of a pathetic ideal" what better way then banish him to a hostile alien where the only way of escape is do things he wouldn't normally do and then when he returns to Britannia which would be under his control show the people what their "saviour" did and have them turn on him.
Patryn: Oh come on, guys. Don't jump on the Ultima 9 hate bandwagon.
A couple of unofficial patches and Ultima 9 actually becomes a decent game - mind you, it's still not breathtakingly good or anything but playable.
For me it never was the small confined world and the meh graphics and such it was the awful story that felt like it was thrown together last second and the awful voice acting, dear god the voice acting...I can usually forgive bad acting but that was truly painful thankfully you can just lower the volume to ignore that.
Sadly there isn't any patches I know of that make the story more comprehensible and good, they fix what they can but man is it still painful.