The magical city of Moonglow is a good example of the unmatched visual splendor
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On a hill in the woods near Austin, Texas rests a colorful covered wagon. In it sits a gypsy, who calmly arranges illustrated cards on a table. Across the table from her sits an executive for a major software publisher. "The game you've been working on for four years is nearly complete, but still has numerous bugs," the gypsy says. "Dost thou release it in time for the holiday shopping season, Sacrificing your company's reputation to improve fiscal quarter reports? Or dost thou Honorably fix the problems, even though it means missing out on holiday money?" Anyone who has played Ultima IX Ascension knows what the publishing executive answer is. The final chapter in the Ultima saga has all the content necessary to be a classic RPG, but it's so full of problems that it often is quite hard to enjoy.
Ultima Makes the 3D Transition
Ewoks eat your heart out
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Ultima IX Ascension is the last game in a "trilogy of trilogies" that extends back to the beginning of computer gaming. Very few game series have made it through nine installments, each one anticipated more feverishly than the last. Many users feared that the transition to a 3rd person 3D engine would transform a deep RPG into a shallow Tomb Raider clone. We've even made more than a few "Ultima Raider" jokes ourselves. Ultima fans can rest at ease—this is definitely a true-blue Ultima, and none of the cosmetic or game design changes seemed to have any impact on its "Ultima-ness." Not once did we feel there was less of a game for the lack of an adventuring party. The companions never really travel with the Avatar nor do you get to play as any of them, but that's all worked into the plot and doesn't bother us at all. Like other recent Ultima games, Ascension is conversation-heavy at times. It's not unusual to spend an hour or two running around town just talking to people, but this is part of Ultima's charm—individuals have personality and history, lending meaning to your heroic actions. Gabbing in town is nicely counter-balanced by dungeons full of combat and puzzles. Some of these puzzles are quite tricky, but none are illogical. Usually it's a matter of being observant, and examining the environment carefully.
The plot is uncovered early in the game. The Guardian has summoned eight great columns, which have risen from the ground near the eight shrines of virtue and corrupted them. The nearby townspeople have become twisted as well, acting opposite to their sacred virtue (the honest mages of Moonglow lie constantly, and the valorous knights of Valoria are all cowards). Thus, the Avatar is summoned once again to Britannia to cleanse the shrines, restore virtue to the people, and defeat the Guardian once and for all.
The creature AI is actually pretty good on the rare occasions when it works
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The game starts off linear and "opens up" as you progress. To start with, you'll have to brave the dungeon of Deceit and cleanse the shrine of Compassion. Then you're taken to the next shrine, and the next, but soon you'll have the freedom to roam the world and do what you want, when you want to. Similarly, the real-time combat starts off simple with only one move available for each weapon type. As you progress, you'll find people who can train you to learn new moves, and combat gets a little more complex. Each of the eight spell circles is available only after you cleanse an additional shrine, so your magic options grow with time as well. This is all for the best, as Ultima IX is probably too much for most players to handle all at once. It's absolutely massive, full of side-quests and optional areas. It would probably take an honest 60 hours or more to finish just the essential parts of the game, and the average player who does some of the optional stuff will spend 80 hours or more playing through the whole shebang. When most games promise such extensive gameplay, they typically provide it with a stream of randomly generated dungeons full of random monsters and random combat, all to earn a little more money or experience. In Ascension it seems like you're always doing something of major importance. It drives you to play "just a little longer" and there are times when the game presents so much content that you simply shake your head in wonder.
Interfacing with Britannia
The Avatar's final trip to the fantasy world of Britannia begins humbly enough, with a gentle voice urging him to wake up from his bed in his home on Earth, and prepare for a new adventure. The small Earth scenario serves as a tutorial, introducing the game interface one aspect at a time. It takes a little getting used to, but it's one of the best 3D interfaces we've ever seen. Games like Heretic II or Drakan have great 3rd person action controls, but such a scheme would never work in a game with as much world interaction and item manipulation as Ascension.
Beautiful and interesting locations abound
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It is, in many ways, the same interface we know from Ultima VII, where the right mouse button moves you and the left mouse button "uses" things. Simply placing the cursor on any item lets you move it, and dragging it onto yourself will add it to your inventory, or equip the item if it's a weapon or armor. The cursor moves between three colors, showing how far away objects are from you. You can freely move objects to or from any location where the cursor is green, and such items are also in the Avatar's "usable" range, for opening doors or flipping switches. Yellow locations are a little to far to directly use or grab the item, but you can usually still jump to it. Red locations are simply too far away for you to affect with anything other than an arrow or spell. Jumping was the bane of many Ultima VIII players, but it's not an issue at all this time around. Simply press the space bar and the Avatar will jump, landing exactly where the cursor is, as long as it is green. You'll usually make the jump even if it's yellow, and this works just as well for jumping up on top of objects as across chasms. The jumping interface works so well we actually found ourselves jumping to places as a shortcut even if we could walk there.
The Tapestry of Ages tells the tales of all Ultimas past
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Though the general "world interaction" interface is excellent, it does have two major snags: inventory management and swimming. The handy toolbelt provides twelve slots to place items or spells, so that they may be used with the single press of a function key. There's a compass readout, a journal for taking care of all the "game" options, and a map of Britannia (which shows your current location if you have a sextant). Wisely, gold and arrows have been handled in an unrealistic manner. Neither one actually take up space in your inventory. Rather, you can freely carry up to 9999 gold pieces or 999 arrows without fear of taking up too much room or weight. The problem is the backpack—it's just too small. You'll find bags as the game progresses and these help ease the inventory constraints, but you still have to make too many hard choices about what useful items to take and what to leave behind. There's really no good reason not to allow some items to "stack" in a single inventory slot, such as potions and reagents. Even allowing limited stacks of 1-10 items per inventory slot would greatly ease the pain of trying to manage a very limited inventory in a world full of stuff you want to take with you.
Beautiful sky, beautiful terrain... just plain beautiful
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Swimming is slow and cumbersome at best. You'll frequently get stuck on walls, and the screen tinting, though a nice effect makes it incredibly difficult to see anything underwater. Compound this problem with numerous difficulties climbing out of the water, and you'll find that you drown a lot. Swimming is rarely fun in a game to begin with, but it's especially cumbersome in Ascension, and it's not at all optional. There are quite a few occasions where doing a good bit of swimming is necessary, and it's downright frustrating the way Origin has implemented this activity.
A few other interface concessions would have been nice. Changing keyboard commands via the in-game options menu would be a lot easier than editing the default.kmp file, and there are quite a few things in the options.ini file that could go in an in-game menu as well (such as the ability to change the Avatar's default movement from "walk" to "run").
A Visual and Aural Treat Like No Other
There isn't much left of Skara Brae after the Guardian has his way with it
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Britannia is more beautiful now than ever before. The 3D world is simply the most lush and beautiful we've ever seen in an RPG. Where most 3D games resort to either dividing the world up into relatively small "levels" or dotting the landscape with identical features ("oh look, there's tree number seven again!"), Ascension provides one huge seamless world full of unique and interesting locations. There is a small loading point as you enter each dungeon, but it's rather short. If you want to get nit-picky, you could point to the obvious joints in some people's clothing (particularly women's skirts) or the excessive camera movement during conversations. But any visual gripes pale in comparison to the sight of the sun setting over the distant horizon, just after a thunderstorm has cleared. The visual splendor of this game is head and shoulders above any competing product.
I can see your house from here!
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The sound is of equally high quality. Origin is obviously committed to having great sound in their games, as they're the only game developer to have their own THX-certified recording studio. Music and sound effects are stellar and help set the mood perfectly. Fans of the Ultima series will recognize mainstays of the series such as "Stones" and "Hail Britannia," but there are plenty of new musical themes as well. Voice acting accompanies every single word in the game, and while it's rarely superb, it's always adequate. The option to select full text and speech, just speech, or just text is available if you prefer. 3D sound is included and is pretty good, with EAX providing nice echoes in dungeons and caves.
Restoring the shrines is quite a show
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All this audio/visual splendor comes at a price, though. Ultima games are famous for being incredible hardware hogs, and the final installment in the series is the biggest one of all. In fact, it's downright unplayable on most of the machines out there. Partly this is due to the scope and grandeur of the world, but it's also partly due to plain old technical problems. If you have a Voodoo2 or Voodoo3 in your machine, you can expect the game to be playable if you have at least 128MB. Even then, you'll need a fast processor, and will likely want to tweak the distance of the landscape and item clipping planes in the options menu to get better performance. If you have any other video card, you'll need to run the game in Direct3D mode, which is simply broken. It functions, and it looks good, but it's beyond slow. The game will frequently turn into a slide show in D3D mode, and the best solution for improving game speed is to severely limit every detail option you can find. It's one thing for a game to be optimized for Glide, and to be a little faster in that mode (as with Unreal Tournament), but such incredibly bad performance on the vast majority of video cards is simply unacceptable. At the time of this writing, Origin has just released the first patch to fix a compatibility problem and handful of bugs, but they still have a long way to go before performance becomes acceptable in Direct3D. Let's not forget the hard drive footprint, either; the game proper requires some 600MB to install, but the full install is over a gigabyte. Saved games will take up a lot of space as well. They start at around 2MB and grow to around 6MB or so by the end of the game, so don't be surprised if you end up creating 300MB or more of saved gams.
Call the Orkin Man, We Have an Infestation
Docking in Buccaneer's Den... you eventually get to sail the ship yourself
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Even with a pretty optimal machine (A 600MHz Athlon with 128MB of RAM and a Voodoo3 card), the game exhibits speed problems that can only be attributed to memory leaks and other problems in the code. The longer you play, the slower the game gets, until it finally just crashes or it's time to reboot. In fact, we tested the game on three very different machines and had it crash at random moments on all of them. Besides simple crashing problems, there is a veritable legion of other bugs that don't completely ruin the game, but sure make it hard to enjoy at times. Sometimes the Avatar will simply get stuck, unable to move or perform any action, making it necessary to return to a previous saved game. Objects will sometimes hang in the air when they should fall, cursors will sometimes disappear, a walking person will mysteriously warp to a new location, and certain conversation and plot events can sometimes misbehave.
The Guardian is back and…whoops... somebody forgot his suncreen
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One of the more frustrating technical problems with the game is the broken creature AI. On the rare occasions that it works, it's rather good. Smarter enemies will run away when wounded, archers will try to stay out of reach of your sword, and you can even get some monsters to fight others. Most of the time the enemies just blindly run at you, swinging their weapon every few seconds. Sometimes they don't activate at all, and you can safely shoot them full of arrows or blast them with spells from a distance while they stand there oblivious to your assault. Thus, combat strategy is a matter of discovering "what weapon works best." Skeletons fall quickly to blunt weapons, ghosts are greatly harmed by magic, and sea creatures can't stand lightning. The combat portion of the game is rather easy, but would certainly be more challenging if the enemy AI were fixed.
All's Well that Ends Well?
Evil columns burst from the ground and corrupt Britannia... film at 11
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Underneath all the bugs and technical problems lies one of the greatest RPGs of recent years. Most players will probably have the whole experience ruined for them, though. Was there a marketing decision made to get the game out in time for the holiday season? If so, it hurt the product's quality in a major way. Some bugs are technical in nature and are related to DirectX, drivers, and compatibility problems, but over 100 bugs were found in the first week of release—nobody's QA department is that incompetent. If and when Origin manages to fix the bugs and improve performance, Ultima IX Ascension will be our most heartily recommended RPG in recent memory. In its present state, it's a game only a serious Ultima fan can tolerate.
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