Ultima IX: Ascension



Ultima IX: Ascension is the tenth (and most likely final) installment of the main series, and the fourteenth in the entire series, if Worlds of Ultimas and Ultima Underworld I and Ultima Underworld II are counted. It was released and published by Electronic Arts for the IBM-PC in 1999. It is the final part of the "Age of Armageddon" saga.

In many ways, Ultima IX is the most controversial of all the Ultimas released. It was released incomplete and buggy, requiring patches immediately to even function with Direct3D. Also, while the game's graphics and sound were good, many other aspects were bad. There is no party, the game is even more action-oriented than its predecessor. But the worst is, that obviously the team had no idea of Ultima (most likely because Richard Garriott himself didn't participate in the creation). Almost every details of the Ultima past is either ignored or wrongly interpreted, the characters hollow, the story horrible and clichèd to the extreme. It was, in short, an extremely big disappointment for everyone.

Ultima IX sold well in the beginning (when it wasn't known what happened to the game), but later became a "had been". Generally, fans disregard it as non-canon and many only want to forget this last installment as fast as possible.

Included with the game
The release of Ultima IX included these things with the game:
 * The Book "Journal".
 * The Book "Spellbook".
 * A cloth map of Britannia
 * The eight Cards of Virtue (same as in the game)

Differences between the ports
Ultima IX was exclusively produced for the PC, therefore other official ports of the game do not exist.

The Story
(A warning first: The plot is almost totally disconnected to the rest of the series, meaning that it actually makes NO SENSE AT ALL. You are warned. I will try to keep it short.)

The Guardian creates eight huge columns, which start to rip Britannia apart, and poison the virtues of the people. At the same time, he plans to let the Moons crash on Britannia, thus killing all life on it. The Avatar returns for the last time, to prevent this disaster, and destroy the Guardian once and for all. In the end, the Avatar casts Armageddon on himself and the Guardian, forcing their energies together, and creating a new life form of energy, saving Britannia for a final time.

Trivia

 * Richard Garriott himself stated, that he thinks of this game as a failure.
 * The story was radically altered many times, remnants of the old stories can be found in the game..
 * Ultima Online is in great part responsible for the disaster of Ultima IX. Electronic Arts dissolved the team and pushed them all to Ultima Online when it became a success, effectively killing the development of Ultima IX up to that point.

Upgrades
Due to a rushed release, Ultima IX pretty much requires an official patch to version 1.18f for improved D3D performance ... at the very least. There is also an "unofficial" patch to 1.19f (rumored to have been written by one of the original developers in an act of frustration) that provides increased performance, bug fixes, and removes the SafeDisc copy protection from the game.

Fan-made economy, dialogue, and monster patches are also available as a combined patch. These patches address economy issues, re-work the dialogue and plot to some extent to make Ultima IX more cognizant of previous Ultimas, and tweak monster settings. See the external links for downloads.