Ultima™ 9: Ascension

There are two positive things to say about this game: one, it's graphics were awesome at the time. 3D was the big hype and this game was at the forefront of it - so much that they forgot about everything else. The second good thing is the soundtrack, which manages to create quite a nice atmosphere for the first one or two hours. It even makes you forgive the first few bugs. Then you encounter the first plotstopper. Then the next. And the next... The fan-made patches helped and made the game playable, but not really enjoyable. A lot of bugs still remain. Even without the countless bugs it remains an extremely linear, boring game with very boring NPCs. So far for the game without Ultima context. If one ignores that this should be an Ultima, this game would be worth 2 stars (three if graphics are really important for you). But alas, it is supposed to be an Ultima and it ignores everything that made the Ultima-series great. Whoever wrote this obviously never played any other Ultima before. But even ignoring the awful plot, everithing else is missing too. The world does not feel alive. The NPCs are servicable at best and the game is far too linear. So if you are an Ultima fan, this game will be zero stars. So, as a fair compromise I'll give it one star and advise anyone to stay away from this game.

First off I'm sure this is going to be buried and lost in the massive pile of other reviews on this game but if one person sees this and helps them make a decision on buying or not buying this game then it is worth it. I'm not here to say that those who look at this game favorably are wrong, that is their opinion and if I am totally honest I am actually a bit jealous because I wanted to like this game, I really did but man I just can't. So what is so bad about this game, well for me it was the wasted potential due to missteps by both sides it represented. Shortly after Ultima 8 was released Origin set to work on a few other projects such as Crusader, Lost Vale , a enhanced CD version of Pagan that would of fixed many of the issues with Pagan such as adding in the cut and unfinished content, make the world more interactive and so on or so the story goes and somewhere in this time frame was Ultima Online and Ultima IX, now due to the outcry over Pagan the enhanced CD version was scraped in favour of a patched version of the current floppy version of the game with the speech pack added and Ultima IX went though it's first change, the game which was supposed to have been in the Guardians homeworld was changed to Britannia and development started proper. But half way through EA decided that UO was taking too long and decided to pull all of the IX team to finish up UO so by time the team came back the game was outdated and Richard decided to scrap what they had already and start fresh from the ground up instead of just taking what they had already and porting it to a new 3D engine, years went by and the game underwent four re-writes and a few changes including the majority of the orginal team who had left for other studios and jobs. Seriously four re-writes and then the final accepted plot which was the Bob white plot was drasticly altered into the incomprehessible mess we got again during final development as you can see the cinemas that were made for this version of the games plot in the game.. Finally EA got sick of this money sucking project and stepped in a placed a ship it or kill it deadline on it, forcing what those on the project to make do and finish the game up and what we have is the results of that and what are those results? Well the results were a game with a mess of a story, numerous re-cannons, potholes big enough to drive a fleet of semis and the whole of the US naval fleet through and bugs oh dear god was this game buggy. Granted most of the bugs have been patches out though the what 19-20 patches this game had? but this game is by no means completly bug free, yes this includes the GOG version guys I don't care what these games defenders say this game still has some crippling bugs even after tons of patching and some work arounds to ensure comptability. Now the only really major bug that still can crop up is the floating rune bug. This bug is caused by the games engine you see the game due to being rushed out thanks to both EA and Richard Garriott's decisions which I already covered, needs to run on a very paticular set up and that is a set frame rate using a certain 3dfx card and at a set and locked frame rate of 30 fps, now thanks to Nglide we got that but if you have issues with Nglide(which is still in active development) you have to run it under Direct3d rendering which is glitchy to say the least as it's poorly optimize so unless you have a Nvida card and you set the driver to run the game at 30 fps your going to run into this bug which happens after cleansing a shrine and the rune inside the column is stuck in the air preventing you from completing the task unless you cheat and float up to reterive it. Now I will admit this is a rare occurance in the GOG version since as I said it should only happen if you can't run the game using the 3dfx render through Nglide and your graphics card driver wont allow you to cap a programs frame rate. But the point is this game is not 100% bug free and is a testament to how badly made this game really is. Now that is out of the way what else is wrong with this game, well again the story is awful and I do mean awful and the terrible voice acting and poor writing doesn't help it one bit. Often times your asking farily stupid questions that make know sense, granted this is to help those who never played a Ultima before understand the world your in but we had that in past Ultimas as well but back then they were handled alot better and you never felt like your stupid for asking a questions about things that the avatar should know about such as Gargoyles, the Codex, Mantras, the virtues and so on. Here it's just painful for example in Ultima 7 if you ask about Gargoyles the game would say something like "To tell you that after the war of the false prophet and you sent the codex to the void, our people have settled in the isle of terrafin after our homeworld was destroyed. To still contuine to struggle to be accepted in Britannian society and erase the scares of the conflict between our two people" and say you ask about the Codex "To tell you that the sacred book of both our people is safe were you left it, To know that at any time we are free to consult it's many pages for it's wisdom" or something to that effect the point is it tells you these things in a way that you learn what something is while still making sense and keeping the illusion that this is someone who already knows what this thing he's asking about is, now in Ultima IX it's just "The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom?" "To be dissapointed to know that the Avatar doesn't know the great sacred book of both of our people" there are better examples but they allude me right now but you get the point. Another issue again due to how bad and troubled the development was and the need to slap something together last minute was the world, the game world is much smaller and linear now it's obvious this was never the intention the game has moments where it feels like you should or were intended to move freely around the world and in parts you can and in others your hit a invisable wall. Then there's the combat again it's obvious they had something more grander planned as you can do various tactics to win the fight for example you could flip a enemy with a hard shell over to hit them in a more vulnerable spot or pull skeletons apart and so on, but it's never fully realized and the AI is hit or miss sometimes the AI is pretty good to serviceable to awful at random times, sometimes enemies can spot you and attack accordingly other times they just stand there and look stupid as your close in on them and beat the tar out of them. So yeah in short the game's flaws and faults just far outweigh what it does right and hence why I gave this game such a low score. So I can't honestly recomend this game at all but if your curious or if you look at gameplay videos and are one of those that can look past all it's glaring flaws and short commings then give it a shot, just don't say you weren't warned..

Ultima 8 was previously the red-haired stepchild of the franchise, but worked as canon anyway, and set up an amazing introduction to Ultima 9 ... which was then just ignored. U9's story made no sense and the game was fraught with technical problems. Yet, the engine looked amazing, and all everyone really wanted was Britannia in 3D. What we got though was a broken terrible Ocarina of Time knock-off courtesy of EA's meddling.

Ultima IX is a tough game to write about. As the final chapter of one of the greatest RPG sagas of all time, Ultima IX is undoubtedly disappointing, filled with retcons and devoid of what made previous Ultimas great. Towns are absurdly small (Brittania consists of Lord British's castle and like three small buildings; this is par for the course in this game), the world is not very big or conducive to exploration, the plot is meh, it's filled with series retcons, and calling it an RPG is a HUGE stretch. Ultima IX lacks what made previous games special and is undoubtedly disappointing. However, at the same time, I think Ultima IX is an entertaining and pretty alright game divorced from the rest of the series. The combat is pretty shallow but is certainly fun, going through dungeons is pretty damned entertaining, the jumping is probably the best I've ever seen in a video game, it looked great for its time, and it can be really fun to mess around and, while the voice acting is pretty terrible, it can be good for a laugh. They did a great job with the art design and it's fun to see what they did with certain areas of the world. So, Ultima IX is actually not a bad game. While I wish it could have been another Ultima VII, a beautiful, deep RPG that would have sent the series out on high note, and while I resent the retcons this game makes, I can't help but enjoy it. As an Ultima game, it's a disappointment. As a game in general, it's not half bad.