Ultima™ 9: Ascension

One of the best games of its time.

good classic! it keeps you going.

One thing I noted was that without exception the one star raters have not played the GOG version of this game. I have played the 1999 release version an uncompletable mess not deserving of one star, the final patched version that was completable but required a walkthrough to prevent game stopping plot bugs and finally the GOG version which I just completed and can definitely opine that in almost all respects is a Good Old Game. If you like an action/rpg game with an open, seamless, relatively large, varied and pretty 3D world, fully voiced characters, a decent storyline, a goody two shoes avatar, with not one but two love interests, easy and moderate puzzles galore, large and diverse dungeons, fairly decent combat mechanics, and good loots, then this may be the game for you. If you are hung up on retcon and whats a paladin and bugs that no longer exist, then just like the avatar I can only feel sorry for you. Thank you GOG for making this game available.

Yes, i know all the points critics have been bringing forth. They're all true. The story conclusion is worse than everything Bioware can think of, the US release version was technically an unfinished, buggy piece of crap. But my first experience with U9 was the german release version, which had most fixes included. I played the game on a Voodoo 3 card, so i had no issues with frame rates and glitches. It ran near perfect. Playing Ultima since Part 5 i was dissappointed when it comes to the story. In fact the story doesnt even make sense when you have no prior experience with the Ultima universe. But putting this aside ... The gameplay works, the landscape is beautiful and full of details. the dungeons are atmospheric und full of deadly traps to avoid and secrets to discover. You dont hassle with the interface like other early 3D-RPGs like Gothic, you just play! If you are able to ignore all the faults this game clearly have, you just might discover a beautiful RPG adventure.

Okay, so I didn't play this game when it first came out. So I'm not really sure how many of the glitches have been fixed (it says the game version is 1.19 in the journal), but I've really only started noticing things towards the end of the game, such as the War Bow of Blood not spawning. But that aside, Ultima IX is an open world game with lots of exploration. You can spend hours just wandering around, seeing what you can find. You get rewarded for exploration also, with various caves and monster camps to loot. Sometimes it's just fun for me to see where I can go, whether I'm supposed to be there or not at that time of the game (incidently, that's how I managed to get into Dawn without cheating because I have no idea how you're supposed to otherwise since Sir Robin never spawned, and he's apparently supposed to tell you about a secret passage). I really enjoy games that encourage exploration, and have a soft spot for early 3D games. If you're on the fence with purchasing U9, just know that some parts of it are prone to being broken. But you can still get many hours of enjoyable gameplay out of it, and to me that's worth the $6.