Ultima™ 9: Ascension

This is how EA kills franchises. They buy them, and then release half-finished products and hope to soak up some money via the franchise name. This is a buggy mess of a game where the writers seemed to have little interest in keeping with the lore and story of the rest of the series. The whole product is amateurish from start to finish. R.I.P Ultima.

This is my future rating. If I'd had to rate it when I got it on my Pentium 3 in 1999, I would have given it 1 star. Once I got it on a computer that could halfway run it, I started enjoying it. It reminded me of an abstract of Britannia. Didn't feel part of the Ultima series, but in sort of a parallel universe that actually kinda creeped me out. But by then the music for this game (except the combat music) became the best video game music I've ever heard. I still listen to it, albeit uncommonly. But the game still had dull characters in a dull story (to me). But there was so much in it that was just groundbreaking, so at that point (2005), I would have given it 3 stars. Have started playing it again, am appreciating it in ways I never did before, and would give it 4 stars. At this rate, it'll be a 5 star game to me within 3 years. You can bank it.

EA has a way of ruining games they buy out. This game was published by EA, enough said.. They ruined Ultima Online also. I believe there is more people playing Ultima Online on free player ran servers than official servers these days.

All that needs to be said about Ultima IX's broken state upon release has been said - the question is whether in nineteen years since that point there's been enough patching, modifications and just simple nostalgia generated to redeem it. The answer is 'somewhat.' The game has been fully playable for quite some time - I was able to complete it after the original UK release which patched the game up to version 1.18 out of the box. The subsequent iterations of the 1.19 patch and the Beautiful Britannia mod have done a nice job in dealing with some of the game's lingering issues - and its surprising how beautiful it still looks in many ways in 2018. Unfortunately, none of the more ambitious mods which promised to try and fix the game's story and structure ever got completed. That means we're stuck with a game which has some really bright sections of RPG action, but stitched together in a way which is often awkward and non-sensical. Characters either spill too much information or not enough unless certain (often poorly scripted) triggers are met. The respawning of enemies on transition points between hubs is a constant annoyance as combat is such a chore. And most of the offensive spells are useless - there's little point in investing time and energy into the magic system. The vocal performance of the Avatar is as terrible - which hurts even more given that the character has been written as having no knowledge of the world around him. But on a recent playthrough I was surprised at the depths which the game has in its discrete chunks. The leadup and completion of the dungeon of Destard, for example, is a really atmospheric trip into a little corner of the map which truly seems quite alien and abandoned. The game ultimately fails because its purpose is to be a suitable conclusion to the Ultima narrative - remove it from that context and it's a pleasing, beautiful example of the last RPG of its type before Diablo and others really took hold of the genre.

I grew up and have loved ultima my whole life.