Ultima IX: Ascension

• CPU: Pentium II 300 MHz
• RAM: 128 MB
• 2 GB hard disk space
• 3D - accelerator with 16 MB
• 8x CD -ROM drive

Ultima IX: Ascension is a role-playing game by Richard Garriott's Origin Systems Developer Company, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, for the Windows. It was released in 1999 and received despite strong criticism of the many bugs of the first published version, and the high hardware requirements also good to very good reviews. Ultima IX is the last part of the Ultima series for solo players.

Action

Ultima IX is part of the Ultima series, the third part of the story arc Age of Armageddon. The player takes on the role of the avatar who travels for the eighth and final time to Britannia. He has to save Britannia, by cleaning the corrupted shrines of the eight virtues and defeats his opponent, the Guardian.

History of development

The development of Ultima IX was characterized by several redesigns and engine changes. Ascension was planned as the third part of a trilogy beginning with Ultima VII called Age of Armageddon: the first part was to play in the world of Britannia, the second on Pagan and the third part on the home world of the Guardian. After the mostly disappointing feedback from the fans of the series to Ultima VIII: Pagan, located Garriott decided to realign for Ascension towards classic Ultima parts with a renewed return to Britannia. The decision was announced in a communication accompanying the patch of 2:12 Pagan. The development was already far advanced when it was decided that the trend and new technical possibility 3D graphics to follow and develop the game instead of isometric new as real 3D game. All this led to a long development time and at the end to forced under pressure from EA release a faulty game.

With the last patch version 1.18f most critical bugs have been fixed, the problem of poor performance over the Direct3D interface instead of Glide remained but. Later, the patch v1.19f was available, possibly came from former Origin programmers and improves the Direct3D performance. After the end of the effective support through Origin, due to the departure of Richard Garriott and many developers to NCsoft Austin, the fan base of the game through community patches trying to fix the remaining problems themselves.

Reception

The reviews of the game were mixed and ranged from high evaluations and slating, the negative voices predominated ( GameRankings: 63.32 %). The U.S. computer game magazine Computer Gaming World awarded only 2.5 of 5 points, with tester Stefan " Desslock " Janicki especially criticized the technically unfinished state of the game.

"If Origin had taken the time to Properly complete this game prior to release, it june well havebeen a worthwile finale to the series. But They did not, and it's not. "

"If Origin had taken the time to finish the game before the release carefully, it would certainly be a worthy finale for the series has become. But they did not, and therefore it is not. "