Customer Reviews

Ultima 9: Ascension

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I first played Ultima I on my Apple II back in 7th grade, and enjoyed it immensely. Since then (and the subsequent Ultima II - VIII games) I've always wanted to see a full 3D version of Ultima... and now Origin has released it. It's a mixed bag though... while the graphics and game-play are amazing, there are definitely some problems. Here's the good, bad and ugly of Ultima IX:

The Good

The game designers of Ultima IX spared no efforts in creating a rich world of fantasy and adventure. Every character you encounter has a story, and every town, hill, valley and beach has a unique feel. The game keeps you wondering what's around the next corner, and what new adventure might be lurking in the next cave. This is one of Ultima's strongest points... it really is tailored to someone who like to feel like they're adventuring and discovering new things. It'll take you right back to your dungeons & dragons days. The attention to detail that went into the plot/environment of this game is unparalleled.

The world of Ultima is beautifully designed, texture mapped and rendered. Trees, hills, mountains, beaches all look beautiful and realistic! Thanks to the fact that the Ultima world loads as you explore it, you really do get the feeling that the world is huge, and that you can go anywhere. You can walk out of a town, into the hills, through valleys, into a cave, down into dungeons, and back out again without ever encountering a "loading next level" screen.

The plot behind Ultima feels somewhat linear. While there are subquests, and small adventures you can embark on, the main plot to Ultima feels rigid.

The Bad

Unfortunately the visually rich world of Ultima IX comes at a high price. It's obvious from playing this game that the Quality Assurance teams at Origin didn't have enough time or people dedicated to ensuring the release of a quality product.

Ultima IX fails when it comes to the details... characters are inconsistently animated (some move their mouths when they speak, some do not), character animation is poor (why can't game designers use real-time 3d motion capture for animated characters?-animating them by hand looks awful), and the game has tons of little bugs/quirks. You'll come across weird things like floating daggers, wolves hovering over the landscape, arrows that you shot at monsters somehow magically suspended a few feet from their bodies and other such annoyances. While these are minor, they detract from the game and decrease the quality of the product. There are also more severe bugs which you may encounter which may cause you to lose your saved games, or simply cause the game to quit on you unexpectedly.

The Ugly

Origin made some big mistakes when designing and implementing this game. Rather than create a game which worked well on all graphic cards, they chose to focus all of their efforts on creating a release for the voodoo chip set. This basically means that half of the people who have TNT2 cards are unable to attain reasonable performance levels when playing the game.

I have a Viper v770 Ultra and have been unable to attain performance levels above 10-15 frames per second. So regardless of how beautiful the graphics may look, the game is almost unplayable. Origin continues to promise a patch to increase TNT2 performance, but has yet to deliver it (definitely check their site before purchasing to make sure they've delivered on that promise).

So all in all, I believe Ultima IX is worth the money, but prepare yourself for performance issues and a myriad of bugs... hopefully Origin will learn from its mistakes and not rush the release of future software titles until it has done an adequate job with Quality Assurance.

When I first got my Ultima IX, I set it to a resolution of 800x600, with the options set for 16-bit texture graphics, highest performance and highest quality. It crashed on me every 5 minutes.

Then I changed my resolution to 640x480 with all the rest of the settings left the way they were, and it worked beautifully! I almost concluded the software was buggy, but I guess it was the gamut of graphic components in my CPU that wouldn't cooperate with each other.

Anyway, I like the interface -- very easy to use. If you have played Ultima Online, you will find this game more interesting than people who haven't due to the similar objects in the game (e.g. backpack, pouch, music).

I have played the latest of Might and Magic, a definite competitor of Ultima IX, but I feel Ultima was much more immersing due to the more realistic weather, lighting, and sound effects. I found myself oftentimes enjoying the sky and the scenery! It is an experience one should go through to appreciate! The dungeons were wonderfully made, and creepy!

However, the manuals weren't very enlightening. For example, it says bringing up the map shows your location with a red push-pin. I didn't see a red push-pin for the longest time, causing me to get lost often in the game. I could've sworn I didn't see the red push-pin appear until I got a sextant, but the manual makes no distinction or warning on this.

I have to tip my hat to Origin though. Despite the frustrations they caused me in Ultima Online, I have to say they did a superb job with Ultima IX! If their coming Ultima Online 2's interface will be anything like Ultima IX's, I will definitely play Ultima Online 2!

I haven't finished the game yet, but I am certainly enjoying it immensely!:)

This game is breathtaking...graphics are beautiful, sound is as realistic as it gets, storyline just as good as the other Ultimas. This game would get 5 stars from me, however I had to buy a 3D accelerator and Sound Blaster Live sound card to get the game running without crashing (which is what I probably should have anyway) and the grand total of hardware additions alone set me back more then a couple of hundred spots...

Ultima 9: Ascension, is undoubtly the slowest game engine I have ever seen. I have a p2 450 with 382 megs of ram and the Diamond Viper 770 and the game is painfully slow. Also Ulitma 9 is extremely buggy even after you install the 1.05f patch. Featuring random crashes and lock ups. (See Gamespot's news) There are numerous errors that prevent the user from completing quests and thus finishing the game. All this being said Ultima is an amazingly detailed outdoor environment, and beautiful graphics engine. The game is very fun and engaging, well worth the money. The bottom line is if you have the patients to dealer with an absurdly slow game engine, and frequent crashes get this game now. If not wait until Ultima has finally fixed most of the problems (I don't think they will ever get all of them fixed), and there is a system on the market capable of playing game reasonable well.

I bought this with the hopes of a fun, addictive and diverse roleplaying game. Unfortunatly that didn't exactly turn out to be the case. The only way I see fit to best describe this game is by listing the pros and cons.

PROS:
1. AMAZING graphics, makes you really feel like your in an actual world.
2. NPC's have sets of speech that actual actors speak.
3. Easy to play
4. Fully Useable Terrain, climb mountains, swim, get lost in the forest.
5. Day and Night Cycles and Rainstorms

CONS:

1. Huge Requirements, This required(s) a beastly system to play on otherwise it's really choppy or in some cases doesn't even work.
2. BUGGY, There is tons of bugs that managed to make it on here that can make you very frusterated while playing.
3. The main quest is almost always boring! Even worse most of the side quests pertain directly to the main quest. This makes almost everything seemed forced. When your doing something, your doing it because according to the quest your on you have to.

4. Combat is also very boring, Archer,Staff fighter, Swordsman, its all the same (just run up to what your fighting and click away BORING)
5. There is no "working up skills" The only advances your character gets are from completing part of the quest. ONCE AGAIN VERY FORCED PLAYSTYLE.
6. Sure the magic spells are neat, but most of them are useless. (I easily got through the whole game using minor heal and fireball)
7. The game is often to challenging to be fun, I cant count how many times I absolutly HAD to refer to a walkthrough because I was stuck. Most of the time the solution to being stuck was something i truely would have never found without looking at the guide.
8. Dungeons are almost all based on puzzles, Sure the puzzles were cool but with the exception of a few rats you might have to kill here and there the puzzles are all you do! BORING
9. Your Virture you get in the beggining of the game had nothing to do with anything! It may say you start on the path of a druid, but all that actually means is you will start with different equipment than that of a shepard. (I was a tinker, {did hat i start with have anything to do with a tinker NO})
10. I thought the ending was terrible, I played the game for about 80 playing hours for this!
11.. I Save the worst for last. ITS QUITE EASY TO SCREW THE GAME OVER. You have to do the quest exactly as your told or you can screw up the game and have to reload (this should never happen in a game.) In worst cases you may be following the quest and do something wrong withen it which causes the game to screw up. I vividly remember having to reload way back in time because i did the Sacrifice quest before the Justice quest, even though the option to do the Sacrifice quest was given to me, The game apparently wanted me to do the Jusstice quest first.

If you want a good roleplaying game I really wouldn't recommend this. This game was hardly diverse, boring and virtually everything you did in it was forced.

I've been a big fan of the Ultima Series ever since Ultima III on my C64. Pre-release publicity for U9 sounded great, so I was eager to get my copy.

Unfortunately, there are many technical barriers, and a few gameplay barriers, that stopped me from playing this for very long.

First on the technical side: I have a PII 400, 128M memory and a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra (which uses Riva's TNT 2 Ultra processor.) The game ran more like a Powerpoint presentation than anything else. Even with the more recent patches improving speed, it still drags. If you have a Voodoo card, you may get better results, because Origin designed it around Glide. The graphics would be gorgeous, if only the frame rate weren't abysmal!

As far as gameplay, the world feels very alive and vivid, tho it feels a lot smaller than previous Ultima's. Being able to stand inside a building and get a real view of what's outside is stunning though. The interface is simple and well done. However the second and final killer to my enjoyment of this game was the voice acting. The Avatar sounds like he took ten too many quaaludes, and most other voices are poorly done as well.

Someday if Origin puts out another performance-improving patch, I may try again, because the world is beautifully rendered, and I want my last experience in Sosaria/Britannia to be a good one. In the meantime, after reading other reviews, I've just started playing 'Planescape: Torment', and it looks like that one's going to be a winner.

If you're like me, you (unfortunately) put lots of faith in brand-name awareness. Having spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in this fantasy world throughout my high school and college days, it was a no-brainer to buy the grand ending of a great group of games. I mean they wouldn't burn us again, right? (Can you say Ultima8)

Wrong.

This game is pretty much unplayable, even with the best hardware. You are guaranteed to see a crash with this game even after the 2 patches available (after roughly 3 weeks in the market) are applied.

I've got tons of memory (256meg), tons of processor (p3/500) and a voodoo2. It leaks memory and crashes a LOT.

Still, I give it a 2 for the nice graphics, but that's it. The game play is very basic and non-imaginative; the puzzles are a joke (ahhh I see match the colors); the quests automatic... I'm wondering if this is the death of the RPG.

It's frustrating, to say the least, to find out that a game you highly anticipated wouldn't run if you kicked it; even on your new PIII 600 w/ 256mb RAM and a Diamond Viper 770. In my honest opinion, this game is in no way worth the headaches it delivers. patches or no patches

However, Gamespot had the foresight to see through this act with their"What Happened to Ultima IX?" exclusive a couple of yearsago, interviewing one of the key disgruntled dissenters from the Ultima dev team. It would seem that Origin's glory day had long passed us on the wayside, and we had been listening to a charismatic apparition insist otherwise.

No introduction need be made for the myriad of technical migraines that await the intrepid gamer attempting to run this beast on his machine, courtesy of other exasperated reader reviews here. However, if you do get it to run quasi-decent, probably due to something along the lines of a Pentium III chip, 256 megs of SDRAM, and a Voodoo III card, still brace yourself for clipping issues, swimming snags, and progressively boggy performance due to a pathetic inability of the program to unload its own cache.

Ah, and now on to the review of the game's artistic merits! Or lack thereof! The bugs make Ultima Ascension an atrocity as it is without adding aesthetic insult to injury, which this game's design unabashedly indulges in. If you're a long-time fan as I am, prepare to return to your beloved Brittania and witness it bastardized and twisted into a grotesque tourist attraction for the Action/Adventure gaming crowd. Except that no respectable Action or Adventure gamer would waste their time or money on such a half-assed pile of code as Ultima Ascension, not with a laughably simplistic combat system with bogus "progressive tier" skill levels, idiotic enemy AI, and blatantly derivative Tomb Raider mechanics in its multitude of dungeon crawls, except not nearly as fun as the Lara Croft romps. Outside of that, the game's design is definitely Ultima-lite. There will be no camaraderie of one's party as in past Ultima's, thanks to its "new and improved" lone wolf approach. There will be no sense of personal identity with the Avatar, due to male-aryan typecasting and the inclusion of impersonal and histrionic voice-acting. There are also no pure prose descriptions of your adventures to simply read since everything has to be voiced off to you, giving the meat of the script a very eviscerated feel. Lastly, there is not nearly as much of an expansive landscape to explore, thanks to the "new and improved" 3D engine, which compared to its isometric ancestry, scales back everything enormously. To sum it up, it's a painfully small world after all.

Ultima Ascension introduces its own unique faults in its present incarnation. An inferior inventory system based on slot allocation is used instead of the more realistic and welcome weight and volume system of before. I spent more time worrying about what to carry than what dangers I might have faced on the road. There is a belt pouch, ala Diablo, but it's little reprieve. The interactive cursor undergoes some equally unwelcome changes from its previous version in past Ultimas, for no good reason. Be prepared to irrevocably use potions and scrolls before making the negative transition.

The plot consists of a linear itinerary of shrine-cleansing in order to purge the land of its anathemas, with some rote moralizing thrown in, as opposed to the complex sociology of past Ultimas. It's the worst type of RPG advancement cliché that wouldn't be out of place in the 8-bit Nintendo's Dragon Warrior. So much for those shades of grey Garriot supposedly professed his love of in storytelling. During the game, I felt like some character actor dragged in to reprise the Avatar role one last time, take my cues, affect heroism where needed, and basically act like the stalwart hero needed for OSI's marketing machine, with none of the soul of my past adventures. Shortly into the game I started regularly consulting a walkthrough, because in my apathy I couldn't be bothered to solve the game's contrived puzzles on my own. I never had to resort to such measures in past Ultimas, not even with Pagan, my enthusiasm for the advancement of the plot speaking for itself.

All hail Beast British and his tyrannical virtues, the Sosarian Sell-Out Extraordinare. The real king-of-the-hill in the CRPG world is Interplay, their Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Planescape: Torment franchises speaking for themselves. Interplay is the gaming company today that Origin never aspired to me; let its epics speak to you, and leave Origin's Ultima ruination in the dust.

Here's hoping you have a fly-swatter by your side before journeying onward into this now ill-fated, infested continent of Britannia. The sinister Guardian plays vanguard to an endless host of compelling malignancies here -- Wyrmguards, bugs, betrayals, DirectX Errors, dark magic, and an apparent deficiency in competent speaking skills plaguing the inhabitants.

All joking aside, I've never been so wholly offended by a piece of software in my life. In a setting where life now pivots on the bereavement of its 8 major towns' respective virtues, one would think a game with this ambition would offer a little more than 1-dimentional pseudodramas a la, "The formerly honest town is now home to all liars." ; "The once humble town is marred by pride," etc. The presentation of the basic story is blunt, and told from a condescending "Good deeds are good; bad deeds are bad" perspective that was clearly aimed at the lowest common denominator any audience could share -- the crowning achievement of a 1st grade education. Old-timers familiar with the hallmark of the series, Ultima VII, will be dismayed by the lack of continuity and respect for formerly developed characters Ascension throws out; for example, Gwenno is a cardboard character bearing no resemblance to the influencial ever-pupil that she was portrayed as in Serpent Isle. Nystul, and other once crucial characters, are simply omitted with no trace nor explanation. New-comers will simply be misled into thinking Ultima was never great, deep, or noble in the first place.

Without dissecting any more subdetails, the most holistic adjective one could use to define Ultima IX would be "rushed". Not only in factual truth, but in spirit, as well. Even technical issues aside, there is a severe lack of creative passion that groans through all of Britannia's non-synergic communities, thus detracting from any mental immersion the product may have simulated.

That said, in all honesty, one cannot completely neglect its good points. The graphics and sound are assuredly outstanding. But via this criteria, you'd be better off with an Ultima Screensaver. While the physical landscapes are well-crafted, complex, and intruiging, the game entails too many other shortcomings to justify buying a $40 sight-seeing tour. Where the engine is indeed "cutting edge", being that it fails to do what any engine should (that is, simply be the unsung foundation for a game of this type), it actually obtrudes upon the gaming experience with generally slow framerates and unnecessary awkwardness. A game doesn't really "push the envelope" unless it succeeds and can be viewed as a model for other competitors; the ambitious tragedy of Ultima IX may do just the opposite.

Furthermore, while not inherent in the product itself, but significant nonetheless, customer support for this product is notoriously nonexistant.

So, for those interested in the genre, you'd be well-advised to check out Planescape:Torment or even Might and Magic VIII, the former being a superb story-driven RPG, and the latter being a genuinely fun and non-frustrating RPG. In essence, with such qualities, they both make up for everything that Ultima 9 is not.