Daegen's Full Review: Ultima 9: Ascension for Windows
The long awaited end to a saga is here. Does it live up to its expectations after 5 years of development? How well does it fulfill its role as the end to a great saga? Hours and hours of hardcore game play have led me to the conclusion that Origin is an evil company.
I’ll start out talking about the graphics. Wow. The graphics are amazing. The engine renders in real time and in full 3d. The textures are extremely detailed. The geometric detail is great (its not blocky like most 3d games), and effects are realistic looking. This is, by far, the most advanced graphical engine to date (12/99). One thing I didn’t like was that the world is on a much smaller scale than pervious Ultimas. You’ll notice upon entering the game that Britain, the capital city, is more the size of a small town. The biggest downside is that current hardware isn’t ready to handle it. Direct3d is buggy. It is slow and choppy on even some of the most recent graphics cards. My system has both a TNT, and a voodoo3. The TNT was too choppy so I had to turn all the graphics options to their lowest settings to get a decent frame rate (8 bit textures, short range of sight). However, it seems that glide support was their main concern. On the voodoo3, I was able to keep all my settings fairly high; the game looked great and ran smooth. I played the rest of the game with my voodoo3 and enjoyed it. If you don’t have a voodoo3, you are in for some choppy style play.
The sound in u9 is pretty good. The music is great but gets old after a while so I just turned it off. All the dialogue is done in real spoken voices, which is neat, but the acting is sometimes cheesy and doesn’t always fit the situation.
I have mixed feelings about the game play in U9. You walk around in a third person perspective in the 3d world. This takes getting used to. At times it is hard to walk in certain spots and it is easy to get your character stuck. The interface is a bit tricky and has flaws, but once you get used to it you don’t mind as much. One of the biggest issues about game play before the game came out was the whole Ultima Interactive World thing. Back in the old Ultimas (mainly U7), you could explore the world and do whatever you wanted without dealing much with the plot. I remember I used to spend countless hours roaming the forests and dungeons even though it had nothing to do with my current quest. I also spent my fair share of time working for the baker by gathering ingredients, making dough, and then cooking it and selling the bread to the baker. That is what made the Ultimas great. Ultima 9 does do this to some extent, but not all the way. You can’t really roam the world until you are half way through the game, and most items are useable but not all. I didn’t feel motivated to spend much time doing these things, because, frankly, it just didn’t seem to fit with the game. The game seemed to be more plot driven, where you did things one at a time. “First go do this, and then go do this”. I didn’t think the plot really developed very well, it seemed quest driven. I really had higher expectations for the plot. I could be wrong, but I remember watching the cutscene at the end of Ultima 8 where the Avatar left pagan, and went straight back to Britannia to see the world had been taken over by the Guardian and mutilated. I thought U9 would start off there, but it didn’t. You start off back on earth where you go through the interface tutorial, and then a Gypsy tells you that you are needed in Britannia so you go through a portal and you start off with no knowledge of anything. Your character doesn’t remember anything from the previous Ultimas. This is all great if you are a newcomer to the series, but it doesn’t cut it for us die hard Ultima fans. Many game play elements from previous Ultimas were dropped in favor of more traditional, crappier RPG elements. When I kill something I can’t loot its entire inventory, it just drops anything important that it was carrying on the ground. Everything drops money on top of its rotting carcass as it dies, even animals for some retarded reason. Combat in Ultima 9 is extremely lame. You basically walk up to what you want to kill and start vigorously clicking the mouse until the thing is dead. A lot of times it is hard to tell if you are missing or not. The advancement system from previous Ultimas where you gain experience and then consult NPCs for training was dropped. Now it is some gay system where it advances over time and tells you how good you are in terms like “Poor”, “Good”, and “Excellent”.
You’ll notice that most of my criticisms of the game-play come from comparing the game to other Ultimas, which is valid considering this is supposed to be the final Ultima, but in doing so I also need to rate the game from a standpoint of no Ultima experience. If you are just starting out with the genre, you really will have much less to get upset about. In fact, this is a very quality game if you think of it as a standalone game aside from the series. I think I would have enjoyed this game a lot more if I hadn’t had such high hopes and expectations for it. Basically, if you are a die-hard Ultima fan, you will be disappointed. If this will be your first Ultima, I think you will be delighted with the game play.
I only recommend this game to RPGers if they don’t have high expectations for Ultima Quality, and if they own a voodoo3. If you own any graphics card other than a voodoo3, bugs will probably plague you. Even with a voodoo3, there are still a lot of game-play bugs. Origin ovbiously released the game early to get it out before christmas. They are working on fixing the bugs, and they have even offered to replace the cds of the registered users with patched cds. All in all, you may want to wait a while until all the patching is done. If you don’t have a top of the line system, don’t even bother buying this game as it won’t run at a playable speed. I suggest 400mhz+, 64 megs of ram, and a 16mb graphics card as the minimum requirements.
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