Ultima™ 9: Ascension

Ultima 9, changed me forever. It introduced me to RPG, deep, games. Although, the game at the time was buggy and had some technical issues, i pushed on through and kept playing hour after hour. Ultima 9 + Neverwinter nights (1) = made me an RPG gamer.

forcing it going into directions that are wrong

There's something about Ultima 9 that makes it worth playing. A hilariously stupid shield bug however is not part of it. This game is so goofy in its execution it begs to be bested. Is it frustrating? Hell yes. Is it sometimes extremly ridiculus to the point of madness. You betcha. However theres a weird charm that makes it fun.

Now as quite a young gamer (im only 21) everyone will probably moan that i dont know what im talking about ...but not to blow my own trumpet..i actually do.... ive played all the ultimas, all the forgotten realms games, all the old and new role playing games and actually found this one to be very enjoyable! when it first came out i loved playing it with my dad and am so glad that its on gog! yes ok, it had some draw-backs but if you forget that its an ultima game and just see it ass a stand alone game its really fun and very enjoyable....i think people were most annoyed back when it was 1st released due to the bugs that came with it...and thank god they have been fixed. i think that people should give this game a second chance because i am.

There are two ways to look at Ascension: as a game unto itself, and as part of the legendary Ultima RPG franchise. In terms of the former, the game is terrible. In terms of the latter, it's the worst game I've ever experienced. Just as a game, Ascension fails on so many levels. When it was first released, it was unplayable on most machines. The release was so bad that EA issued a repair CD with an apology to those who had purchased the game. Even with the patch, the game remained buggy and crash-prone. It was a resource hog that bogged down even the fastest systems of the day. It is entirely too easy to break the game in ways that shouldn't be possible. Every aspect of the technical design was incompetent. But you could live with technical difficulties if the game itself was worthwhile, right? Too bad, because that's not true, either. The plot is about as simplistic and linear as can be. The writing is bad, the voice acting even worse. Combat is positively putrid. There isn't a single thing about the game that is unique or innovative. Not a plot twist in sight. This isn't an RPG, it's an unimaginative adventure game. Where the game becomes an outrage is as an Ultima sequel. Ascension pretty much destroys all of the canon of the universe and makes a mockery of everything Ultima fans had come to love. Character customization that mattered? No. Open-world exploration? No. Ability to manipulate almost anything you can touch? No. Complex moral dilemmas? No. Significant choices that impact the outcome of the game? No. Interesting villains/NPCs with which to interact? No. What you will get is a game that seems to not actually know or understand anything about what happened in Ultimas IV-VIII. Any sort of continuity that was intended with the previous games is blown to smithereens by an amnesiac Avatar and the ridiculous retconning of major events. Never has such a lauded franchise so quickly been laid low by such a horrific sequel. I include MoO3 in that category.