Ultima™ 9: Ascension

I absolutely enjoyed this game when it came out. I was lucky and had the hardware to play it well. Since I had only played Ultima 8 before I didn't stumble across the many problems, real fans of the series have with the story and characters. Like after playing Gothic I absolutly fell in love with exploring a rich 3d enviroment from the third person perspective. Playing it today gave me surprisingly great fun. The GOG-release runs flawless on my rig 3 hours into the game and it brings back many of my old adventuring memories. If you are very strict about the Ultima lore, then this might not be your game. If you like exploring a great fantasy world it shure is...

There's no denying this is a bad game. It's so bad its good. Ultima 9 was an extraordinarily ambitious attempt at a true open world experience in full 3d years before Morrowind came along and showed the world how to do it right. Yes its the death of Ultima and the original crashed so much the risk of not saving every ten seconds began to add a new terror to gameplay. It is, however a rewarding game to play through, it has its quirks and twists and can at times be quite beautiful.

Those of you who have never played an Ultima, and the earlier games are a little too dated for you to play, have a go at this one. Despite what everyone says, it contained a lot that made Ultima games Ultima games. It has a good story and characters (compared to other RPGs, if not other Ultimas), great music, and the gameplay is also fairly good (especially if you prefer your games to be story oriented rather than action oriented). If you enjoy the game, you might then find yourself more able to play the earlier games as well (I'd start on 7 after this one), having some background knowledge of the world, story and characters. Not that the older games don't hold up well, but some gamers aren't used to games being about the story, not the graphics.

"What's a Paladin?"

do not believe some haters here, Ultrima 9 is an excellent game. Awesome graphics for that time and a really lovely and well designed world, full of secrets and wonderful spots. The story is quite good actually, and I like that its always clear, what to do next. Yes it had some Bugs at release, but they had all been fixed with the latest updates. The machines of that time were nearly not able to display the grafics with a smooth framefrate, but nowadays you can enjoy the full detail level and play U9 how it should have been in that time.