Ultima™ 9: Ascension

I actually never played another ultima game, so I can't comment about how faithful it is to the previous games, but to me Ultima IX is great fun, with nice immersive setting, rich content and awesome musics.

So much potential, so much promise. A return to Britannia and the promise of the return of things like baking bread and a living environment like VII, but in 3D. And the chance to wrap up the Guardian and the series in an epic. Instead, it was this. This tiny world where you are on a rail doing the same set of things over and over and your Avatar seems to have suffered a head injury and remembers nothing. I've definitely played worse games, but nothing really compares to how disappointing this turned out to be.

What's a Paladin?

An inglorious example of lowest common denominator marketing and that trademark lack of effort by EA, The writing in this game is so lackluster it took the legs out from under one of the longest running RPGs of all time. The Ultima series withstood the test of time, the advancement of PC gaming and the unjustified backlash of the satanic panic but was felled by the Schemes of a single producer. In addition to all this the game in its original form was barely functional prone to crashing and freezing at random along with a list of glitches and errors, on the plus side we could finally feed Lord British bread lined with rat poison.

EA has left a trail of bodies in its wake and none are more legendary than the death of the Ultima series. By the time Ultima IX: Ascension was released in 1999, the series (despite already-declining quality) had maintained a degree of excellence and notoriety in gaming culture. However, this one game was enough to kill off the entire franchise and cripple the success and reputation of the Western RPG for several years. Ultima IX is a buggy, ugly, poorly-written mess of a game that most famously attempts to "reboot" the game by re-explaining everything that happened in the games before it while simultaneously expressing little knowledge of the events leading up to Ascension. Characters are inexplicably resurrected, aged or removed; story elements are changed; the Avatar is transformed into a laughably-poorly-written moron; character motivations make little to no sense; the plot is retreaded dribble and the game as a whole is just an unmitigated mess. The Avatar's ascension to the Titan of Ether (essentially God) is barely even considered in the progress of the game, forcing the player to start the Avatar off from square one with a weak weapon as if an established character were a level 1 noob. A lot of this is the result of the attempt to redesign the game in 3D with a new engine most designers were inexperienced in as well as the project development changing hands numerous times. Just like any project that is shuffled around for years, Ultima IX reflects this lack of cohesiveness. All-in-all, there is no reason to play this game. There are plenty of high-quality RPG's from the late-90's and early 2000's to pick up and this game adds nothing to the plot or experience of the previous games in the series. I do not think it would be a leap to call Ultima IX: Ascension one of the worst PC games of all time and, up until the release of the Sim City reboot (also from EA), could be considered the farthest fall from grace for any franchise in video game history.