Ultima™ 9: Ascension

Everything anyone needs to know about Ultima IX can be heard at spoonyexperiment.com in not only a 4-part retrospective of this game, but the entire Ultima series from the beginning. Only an avid life-long fan of the series can fully articulate how awful this game is. And from a personal perspective, the game is just insulting to one's intelligence. Much of the sub-par quality can be pin squarely on EA's poor handling of Origin Systems during that time. Ultima IX went through 4 builds and just as many rewrites to the plot until everything was so garbled and switched around, it no longer resembled it's original conception. "What's a Paladin?"

I'm not a long time Ultima fan. I've only just recently gotten into the series. After playing through PAGAN (which I didn't care for at all) I wanted to stop. But this was the last game in the series so I had to play it...to finish the storyline... Ignoring the sheer stupidity of the story, the horrid story changes they made, the ugly graphics, the incredibly boring, the atrocious voice acting and the characters they destroyed with this game, let's just look at the game itself... The game is your typical "open world" role playing game. You fight monsters, do tasks, etc. That's where the typical part ends though. Pretty much all you have to do to win at this game is mash the attack button. The combat has no strategy of depth to it at all. There is magic in this game, but apparently it doesn't work the way it should. For most of the game, you can only use magic from scrolls. In older Ultima games, you had a spell book where all your spells were or even a bag of runes to put together your spells manually. This is where the game's "classes" come into play. Since you can't really use magic for most of the game, the magic based classes are completely useless. There's a shepard class, which I still don't really understand. The only class you should pick is a warrior class, because all you'll be doing is clicking nonthreatening monsters to death. There are puzzles, but they aren't that great either. The puzzles themselves are the easiest things in the game, pretty much boiling down to flippin switches or pushing buttons. At the end of the day, this game is just plain broken. Every time I ran it, the game crashed after an hour, sometimes less than that. The game is an incredibly buggy mess too. I've found characters floating in the air, spouting the sounds of the rats you fight. I've been killed just walking around Britannia, with no mobs or anything trying to kill me around. Ok, so the game must have something positive about it? Nope... Well, there is one positive thing I can say about this game...and that is... I NEVER have to play this abomination of a game EVER again... Ascension shouldn't have been released at all in the shape it's in. If you are any kind of Ultima fan, stay FAR FAR AWAY from this game, unless you like pain...

This could have been a very solid entry in the Ultima series were it not for technical problems that made the launch version unplayable. Even the patched versions however are not stable, so expect restarting the game every 30 minutes or so.

What's a Paladin?

What i remember about ultima 9 is. that i played it and it was if not a great game still liked it. These is only if you saved your game often, also save your saved saves to another directory because it corrupted your saves often. Also you have to play it quite lineary. If you go from place A to place C without going first to place B nothing works in place C. NPC:s dont do anything but stand still in T pose? and nothing happen. But when you returned to place B to do something needed first and go back to C all works like it should and your game progress.