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.
