Ultima™ 9: Ascension

Ye gods... the abomination returneth. First, let me make it clear that what follows is no slight against the fine folks at GOG. They didn't design or code this game and it does make sense to have it here, for completion's sake if none other. Herewith a open letter/blog post of mine, from early 2004 when EA shuttered Origin Systems for good: "I owe Richard Garriott & Origin much thanks for many, many hours of wonderful gaming and adventure. They was responsible for what many people (including me) consider the best computer rpgs ever made: Ultima 4 & 7. And I do wish them well - along with the other folks who got the boot. However, I cannot excuse them for the Ultima 9 debacle - especially Mr. Garriott. He personified Ultima, for better or worse, and the buck stops with him. In the state it was released, Ultima 9 not only did not work - it could not work. The listed system requirements were simply fiction; U9 ran like a slideshow on state-of-the-art gaming PCs. My own computer well exceeded the "minimum specs" to run the game and it was unplayable until I installed a new 3dFX video card. On the programming side, U9 was buggier than a termite mound. We're not talking subtle, arcane glitches here but rather what coders call "showstoppers." Lock-ups, desktop dumps, graphics corruption, destroyed save files, memory leaks and scripting errors which made the game unfinishable if players visited location X before location Y or Z. Remember the initial release of Sierra's Outpost? Ultima 9 was even worse. Don't play it without installing every available patch, or you will be sorry. I'm not even going to tackle the non-technical, narrative and story content issues of the game: plot, characters, voice acting, etc. I could go on for pages about that. The original release state of U9 was nothing less then an outright shafting of the very people whose loyalty and customer patronage made Origin famous and successful. I suspect that the 'suits' at EA pushed it out the door far too early so as not to miss the 2000 Christmas season. However, this was Richard "Lord British" Garriott we're talking about; not some low-level company flunky. Also recall that, whatever his most recent corporate duties, Garriott is himself an ace programmer and game designer; this man knows a broken game when he sees one. I find it hard to believe that Garriott did not know what was going on with Ascension. And because he was "Mr. Ultima," the final blame is his. If Garriot had absolutely put his foot down and said, "This game is a mess. It's not ready. I'm not going to pay my fans back for twenty years of support with this," would anyone at EA have dared to overrule him? Instead he publicly defended it, including comments about the game's release build being "well tested and debugged" which defy understanding. (As Jeff Green asked in his CGW column, "Lord British, do you even play your own games anymore?") And then... silence. As U9 was slammed in review after review and store returns piled up, Garriott seemed to drop off the face of the Earth... leaving others to defend the company line on the U9 Discussion Forum webpage. Now that he's free of EA, I hope Garriott is able to talk about what happened. I would like to hear his story, and I know I'm not alone. It would be no exaggeration to say that I grew up with Ultima, beginning in 1980 with my father driving me to a local software shop (remember those?) on my 13th birthday to purchase Akalabeth - then published by some unknown outfit called California Pacific. Twenty years is a pretty good run, all told. I just wish it hadn't ended by running off a cliff."

This game has problems but it is far from as bad as people claim. The game has some of the best designed dungeons of any games since its release. Also, maybe I'm riding the crazy train here, but I think I enjoyed Ultima 9 more than I enjoyed Ultima 8.

I started the Ultima series with this game and I fell in love with it because it had very beautiful environment and the music is superb! There were some bugs in the game, but it's not a big deal. You maybe have to use the fly cheat to get the virtue stones from the altar when merging the items together because it sometimes get stuck in the air, but except from that I didn't really find any relevant bugs. I actually love almost everything with this game so I don't understand all the haters out there. When I finished this game I started from the beginning with Ultima 1,2,3,4 and 5 and I finished them all. Very good games all of them, though I used walkthrough most of the time since I didn't want to spend 1000 hours. I just wanted to see what happened before Ultima 9. When I came to the 6:th game I couldn't stand the graphics. That made me never complete 6,7 and 8 which is a pity. However, this is a great game with fantastic music and I really like the story and the puzzles as well.

Although there are many disappointments, the world of Ultima is constructed in a stunning 3D space, and just being able to freely explore within it is satisfying. Even though the story has been simplified from the original plan, I think it is a fitting final chapter in the series.

This game is just... awful. Besides numerous errors in the series own history, it had broken gameplay and broken quests and a story that just didnt make sense to anyone familiar with the prior games. Think what EA did with C@C4 was bad? you have no idea compared to what was done with this series.