Development History of Ultima IX

The development history of Ultima IX: Ascension spans the years 1994–1999, and is generally categorized by the four distinct iterations through which the title evolved before its final release. These alterations to the course of the game's creation were brought about by a series of events that catalyzed significant changes to its engine and plot, including the sudden prioritization of Ultima Online and a tumultuous senior personnel upheaval that heralded the final eighteen months of development.

Initial draft and Crusader engine
To date, relatively few details of the initial proposal for Ultima IX are publicly known. Early interviews with series creator Richard Garriott, conducted prior to Ultima VIII's release, suggested that it was to focus on the Avatar's ascension in power as the Titan of Ether, obtaining the means of defeating the Guardian on the villain's home-world without becoming another such being. This premise is foreshadowed in Pentalogy, and is also consistent with the overview Garriott gave at the time he began this third trilogy, which was supposed to chronicle the Avatar's "return to the dark side." According to Jason Ely, a programmer on Ultima VIII and early participant in the design process of Ultima IX, the game had been slated to return to a ravaged Britannia by the time its predecessor's closing sequence was finalized.

Ascension began production in parallel with Origin's Crusader: No Remorse, with both games sharing the same codebase as well as a close working relationship between their respective teams. This engine was itself a refined and enhanced derivative of Ultima VIII's, and counted a 640×480 Super VGA display resolution among its improvements. The game's earliest design sought to expand upon the Avatar's capacity to jump and climb in Ultima VIII by adding abilities such as swimming and crawling. Throughout this period, the ninth chapter in the series featured a world layout akin to Ultima IV and Ultima V, with a similar dual-scale map system to distinguish the broader overworld from the more intimately presented cities and dungeons.

Public feedback following Ultima VIII was poor, however, prompting Origin to reconsider the sequel's direction. Included in the last patch for Ultima VIII was the FANS.TXT file, in which Richard Garriott wrote, "The design of Ultima IX (which is still in progress) relies heavily on this feedback and has resulted in a dramatic turnaround back toward classic role playing. Even better, it has resulted in a classic Britannian Ultima."

Garriott elaborated during an interview with Julian Schoffel in 1994:


 * "To my mind there really were some issues with Ultima VIII that I do want to address in Ultima IX. For example when you point to where you want to jump in Ultima IX, he jumps to exactly that location. You will have a set of attributes, like strength and dexterity that dictate how far and how accurately he (the Avatar) can jump. That gets it out of the ‘arcadey-ness’ that was probably an accurate criticism of Ultima VIII and puts it back into what it was really meant to be: a role-playing game."


 * "What I am about to tell you is literally days old. In Ultima IX it's the end of the Guardian, not only that but it's also the end of this whole Avatar business we've been going on about, so Ultima IX is actually the conclusion of Ultimas I through to IX. Ultima X will be a completely fresh start and probably won't even be called Ultima X."


 * "In many ways Ultima IX tears down the Avatar philosophy. After going through the gate at the end of Ultima VIII you are in fact back in Britannia, obviously things have changed significantly while you were away and you eventually discover that you and the Guardian are cosmically related. Don't forget that this is the end of Ultima as we know it, so something very profound happens at the end of Ultima IX..."



Bob White and isometric 3-D
In the wake of Ultima VIII's negative feedback, Ultima IX was fundamentally overhauled. To spearhead the game's new direction and lend it momentum, Richard Garriott brought on-board a childhood friend, Bob White, to assume the position of lead designer. The setting was confirmed to be Britannia, invaded by the Guardian during the Avatar's absence, and the first outline of an entirely new plot treatment was collaboratively written by Garriott, John Watson, and Brian Martin, the three of whom had previously worked together designing Ultima VII and Ultima VIII. White, along with Chuck Zoch, joined the trio of writers to assist with revisions and polishing.

During this time, Garriott spoke of his intention to ship Ascension in a sky blue box, as a conclusion to the minimalist theme established by the stark black packaging of Ultima VII and continued with the cover art for Ultima VIII, predominantly awash with orange flames.

The revised game was designed to feature a party system and pre-rendered cutscenes, as well as a skill system through which the player could develop proficiency—and certain niches of specialty—in up to twenty abilities, such as magic and swordplay.

Screenshots began to surface in early 1996 through various gaming magazines and conventions, showcasing the software-rendered, polygonal 3D engine that now powered Ultima IX. With the camera locked in an overhead view, the world—comprised of 256×256 screens—was represented through parallel projection. In addition to visually replicating the isometric perspective of Ultima VIII, bypassing true perspective calculation in a three-dimensional environment was also less computationally taxing and allowed for a smoother frame rate. The viewpoint could nevertheless be freely rotated about its vertical axis and zoomed in and out (similar to another Electronic Arts game, Syndicate Wars). It was at the behest of Richard Garriott that the design of Ascension return to the seamless, single-scale world previously seen in Ultima VI and Ultima VII.

It was considered for a while to port the game to the Sony Playstation console, with several Sony-related magazines even carrying previews.

By September 1996, dialogue recording sessions for major characters were completed at Magnolia Studios in Burbank, California. The cast included Kay Kuter as Lord British, Keith Szarabajka as the Avatar, Clive Revill as Iolo, Maurice LaMarche as Shamino, Cree Summer as Raven, Scott Bullock as Samhayne, Scott Cleverdon as Lord Blackthorn, and Michael Dorn as the Guardian. Owing to later recasts, none of these performances would appear in the final release.

Ultima IX had progressed to a relatively advanced state before Ultima Online drew an unexpectedly popular response to its alpha test. Seizing upon this newfound opportunity and hoping that an influx of extra resources would advance completion, Electronic Arts had Origin reassign the entire Ascension team to the groundbreaking MMORPG in December 1996. At this time, the cardinal Ultima was described to be on the verge of its alpha stage, with the world map approximately 80% complete—albeit in need of fine-tuning—and many fundamental game systems, such as conversations, inventory, and combat, either in place or in the process of implementation. Nevertheless, the integrated team was able to push the online game to release less than nine months later, to the detriment of Ultima IX; the latter title was largely neglected throughout this effort, and many of its original team members did not return to the project.

By late 1997, the game's visuals were beginning to look outdated, with the remaining members of the development team reportedly lacking motivation to continue after the preceding year's grueling schedule. According to Ultima VIII project director and Ultima IX programmer, Mike McShaffry, it was the growing prevalence of 3D accelerator cards that rejuvenated interest in the project. During the shift to Ultima Online, McShaffry secretly experimented in his spare time at home with porting Ultima IX to 3dfx Interactive's Glide API and, upon a demonstration of the considerable increase in performance this facilitated, Origin was inspired to proceed with an exclusively hardware-accelerated engine. 

Ed Del Castillo's Ultima: Ascension
With the implementation of the new, Glide-powered engine and further experiments with camera angles, it was decided that a trailing, third-person point of view fostered a more immersive gaming experience. While many at Origin were excited by the fresh direction, several team members—including lead designer Bob White—lobbied to retain the existing bird's-eye perspective, fearing contemporary computing power would not be sufficient to viably accommodate the game in its new form.

In late 1997, game designer Ed Del Castillo, of Command & Conquer fame, was appointed to oversee the project. Previews of the now simply-titled Ultima: Ascension (so-called for concern about alienating a potential wider audience) slowly appeared and were met by fans with skepticism, with the latest developments appearing to show a strong emphasis on action-oriented gameplay. The source of public trepidation arising throughout this period is perhaps best exemplified by the infamous "heavy metal" teaser made available by Origin for a short time during E3 1998. Furthermore, concurrent promotional material debuted the game's entirely new logo, and rebranded it as an action-adventure.

As more alterations became known, it was revealed the game was no longer to have a party of companions for the Avatar, instead reprising the single-character experience of Ultima VIII. To compensate for the lack of a party, it was intended to give the player opportunities to take control of other characters as required, such as Shamino, Raven, and even Lord British. This concept was ultimately scrapped, however, cited by Origin as weakening the emotional link between the player and the Avatar. Furthermore, space requirements demanded by the voice acting and pre-rendered cutscenes necessitated that the option to play as a female Avatar could not be realised.

The story of the game was revised by Del Castillo but remained largely identical to the previous version, albeit with some modifications to accommodate the lack of a party and the short-lived ability to inhabit other characters. Perhaps the most significant change came to the plot's penultimate moments, which abandoned a long-present casting of Armageddon in favor of a conclusion resembling the final iteration of the storyline, in which the Avatar sacrifices himself to destroy the Guardian.

Numerous screenshots from cutscenes and the game engine itself continued to appear throughout 1998. However, the project soon suffered an exodus of several key personnel: Dan Rubenfield and Marshall Andrews, two of the designers for Ascension, left Origin in April 1998, disagreeing with the company's alleged sacrifice of Ultima traditions in favour of mass-market appeal and profit. One month later, Bob White followed the two to Ion Storm, although in this instance the split was amicable. Attracting blame for many of the controversial changes in gameplay, Ed Del Castillo also resigned in July of the same year amidst a feud with Richard Garriott, publicly attributed to philosophical differences.

Garriott then decided to take charge over development personally, marking his first return to a director's role since Ultima VII. He felt the game was going in the wrong direction and wished to reduce the focus on action, later admitting this first fully 3D iteration was a mistake and that he let himself be influenced by the wrong people. As such, he decided to return to the roots of the Britannian series by writing a fresh story with new lead designer Seth Mendelson, the focus of which was primarily to be the Virtues and less about the war against the Guardian. Of symbolical note, the numerical IX suffix was also returned to the game's official title. 

Streamlining and final release
Following the development team upheaval, work resumed on the one final revision of Ultima IX that would find its way to retail.

Shortly after the beginning of 1999, Electronic Arts gave Origin a mandate that the game had to be shipped in time for Christmas business. However, the title was still markedly bug-ridden and it was found to be impossible to implement the ambitious scale of the world and story in the given timeframe. In an effort to salvage what material they could, the team drastically shrunk Britannia, rewrote the plot into a more simplistic form and used every means to make it cohere with the work they had already completed, requiring certain gameplay areas and cutscenes to be used in contexts for which they were not originally intended. Due to a lack of time to properly fix them, several major features were also eventually removed, such as traditional NPC schedules (which, as well as taking a toll on overall engine performance, reportedly sometimes caused NPCs to fall through the ground) and the concept of having some NPCs follow the Avatar for specific quests (designed to compensate in part for the lack of an actual party).

By 1999, the environment for 3D accelerator cards had changed considerably from its infancy: 3dfx had lost its absolute supremacy and the Nvidia Riva TNT chip, with its Direct3D support, had gained substantial market share. Ultima IX was not prepared for this situation; the game ran perfectly well on a Voodoo board under the Glide API, but suffered from major performance issues under Direct3D. Development time to rectify this problem had expired, however, and the game was shipped to retailers.

The end result proved to be notoriously controversial, being almost unplayable under Direct3D and still ridden with bugs. Many players were also disappointed with the size of the game world and lack of interactivity, but perhaps most infamous of all were grievances with the plot, with long-time Ultima fans citing multitudes of inconsistencies within the game itself and with its predecessors. While Origin did later address the technical Direct3D issues and the worst bugs by releasing a series of patches, the fundamental design of Ultima IX itself remained unchanged.

Due to the hasty re-tailoring of the game, old plot remnants can be found in numerous places. 