It wasn’t supposed to end like this. The Ultima franchise was supposed to go out in a manner most befitting the revered name it was. It had been around for almost twenty years. It had almost single-handedly defined the major conventions of the RPG-as-video-game. It made its creator, Richard Garriott, a bona fide celebrity in the newly-established gaming industry. It saw Origin Systems grow from a small enclave of game programmers (including Garriott’s own family) into a major software house in its own right, one that spawned the seminal Wing Commander space-combat series in addition to the Ultima lineage. And it spawned a large and faithfully devoted fan base, who bought into the mythology and history of Britannia to a degree generally only enjoyed by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, making it seem like a living breathing world of its own.

But ever since Electronic Arts bought out Origin shortly before the release of Ultima VII, the legendary series started to go straight down the toilet. Games started being released with increasingly more and more bugs, and major holes began do appear in the continuing narrative of the games. EA began to make more and more demands of each successive title in the series, insisting on more action and fewer puzzles to solve. An increasingly difficult schedule of deadlines, imposed by corporate types who put money over product quality, ruffled many feathers within Origin, causing many longtime employees to quit in protest of what EA was doing to what had previously been, in the main, a very programmer-friendly environment.

Ultima IX had been in development, to one degree or another, at Origin ever since the release of Ultima VII in 1992. It had been planned from the beginning to be the final chapter of a trilogy of games with a continuing storyline, involving a new villain – the Guardian – and his sustained war with Britannia in general and the Avatar in particular. Ultima VII was to take place in the familiar environs of Britannia, while VIII would see the Avatar banished to a world already conquered by the Guardian, and finally IX would have the Avatar escaping this exile and taking the battle to the Guardian in his own home world. As the games developed, however, Garriott and his crew became enamored of the idea of making IX the final chapter of a “trilogy of trilogies,” tying up all the loose ends left by the previous games in the series, and giving the story of Ultima that had been told since 1980 a proper send-off. (Indeed, as originally scripted Ultima IX was to have ended with the death of Lord British, the destruction of Britannia itself, and the Avatar sacrificing himself so that the survivors could live in eternal peace in a new land.)

But EA, as always, had to stick their fingers into the pot. First, they saw development on the game was taking too long – not realizing they themselves were responsible for that, by taking many of the Ultima design team and moving them to higher-priority projects within the EA bubble, including Ultima Online – so they ordered the entire original game engine (a slightly enhanced version of VIII’s) scrapped and replaced with an all-new realtime 3D world, optimized for the latest Voodoo cards (which at the time were considered the pinnacle of 3D rendering). Nearly everything about the game, from its storyline to its puzzles to its gameplay style, would be significantly altered from the original plan.

It was as if EA was actively trying to kill off the franchise and replace it with its own vision of Ultima, which emphatically did not jibe with Garriott’s. This left us, the gaming public, with the most controversial… no, you know what, “controversial” implies the game has its defenders within the Ultima fanbase. To this day I have never met anyone who was a fan of the series dating back to the Apple II days that’s admitted to liking this game! It’s the Highlander II of Ultima; as far as the fans are concerned, it never happened!

But the game does exist, and in the eyes of official history it is part of the story… so we must discuss it.

Ascension: Ultima IX (1999): Right off the bat, Ultima IX screws with your head if you’ve been following along. The final scene of Ultima VIII saw the Avatar becoming the Titan of Ether and escaping the doomed world of Pagan, only to be confronted with a Britannia that had seemingly been conquered by the Guardian upon his escape. That’s where the game ended, folks, with the Avatar staring down the barrel of a giant stone monument to Big Red… quite the effective cliffhanger. The first scene of IX shows the Avatar, ON EARTH, being woken up IN HIS OWN BED by a disembodied summons to Britannia! It was as if whoever came up with this scenario hadn’t even played the previous game to know how it ended!

There are similarly cavalier treatments of Ultima lore throughout the series. Despite being stranded on Serpent Isle at the end of Ultima VII Part 2, your companions (less Dupré, who met his end during the course of that game) show up perfectly fine in Britannia in IX… with no acknowledgement they ever went through the Serpent Gate at all, much less an explanation of how they got back! I expect this stuff from Voyager and its “beloved” Magic Reset Button, not Ultima, which has always prided itself on its cross-game continuity! In the same vein, while you’ll meet several old friends (and enemies) from your past adventures throughout the game (The Gargoyles from VI return, as does Lord Blackthorn from V), they act totally differently from what you might remember, and not in the “Time has changed them” sense either; it’s more like “The writer was given only a basic plot outline of the earlier games and was asked to extrapolate a character based on that.”

Anyway, here’s the plot. Skipping past the whole Earth non sequitur (really a tutorial section where you got used to the game’s new 3D interface, and even went through the Questions of Virtue once more for old time’s sake), you arrive in a Britannia that’s way darker and more depressing that you’ve ever seen it. As an old and enfeebled Lord British tells you, the Guardian’s influence has caused columns radiating dark energy to sprout up near each of Britannia’s towns, causing them to forget the true meaning of the Virtue they’re associated with and become, while not evil exactly, more self-important and definitely less trustworthy than in the past. Your task, noble Avatar, is to undo the damage these columns have done to the world and the minds of the people… but you’re also told that once you do this, you will “ascend” to a higher plane of existence, never again to return to Britannia or your native Earth. Thus, just saving the people is not enough this time; like the old adage about teaching a man to fish versus simply giving him a fish, you need to save them in such a way that teaches them to solve their own problems in the future, because you won’t be around the next time they need saving.

Okay, fair enough, and a pretty noble concept besides. But there are scarce few traces of this premise in the game itself, which is pretty much a connect-the-dots adventure from plot point to set piece to plot point, with very little opportunity for sequence breaking or even simple exploration. While past Ultimas allowed you to tackle your goals in any order you wished en route to the endgame, IX is very much a linear quest – almost on rails, considering you need to do things in a specific order to reach the final showdown with the Guardian.

And then, there’s Raven. Yes, EA, in their infinite wisdom, decided the one thing Ultima was lacking was character interaction and development within the games themselves… so they insisted on adding an artificial LOVE INTEREST for the Avatar into the game, to give him a sense of leaving behind something important when the time came. (As if leaving behind a liege lord and a world he’d devoted most of his adult life to wasn’t enough…) A female pirate named Raven, who had always been planned to be a character in IX, suddenly found herself elevated to female-lead status, with some really awkward scenes between her and the now hard-coded male Avatar (previously you could choose to play either gender) trying to establish them as a couple. It never worked; Ultima fans never accepted her as anything more than a plot device at best, she came off really annoying as a character, at times even sinking to the depths of a typical damsel-in-distress despite supposedly being a strong and self-reliant woman of the sea, and her scenes with the Avatar never failed to cause cringes down the spines of many gamers. In terms of Ultima fandom Raven holds approximately the same status as Jar Jar Binks does…

The game itself tries hard, but the interface is just too cumbersome and fiddly. It’s easier to control the Avatar here than, say, Lara Croft in the early Tomb Raider games (which Ulitima IX resembles greatly in terms of its gameplay), but you’ll still be cursing the game for the slow and awkward way it handles jumping and combat – especially in situations where timing is critical. The game also contains more bugs than probably all the previous Ultimas combined, many of which are fatal and can cause corrupted save data or even require a fresh installation to work around. Rather than actually debugging the game, particularly unstable areas were simply blocked off within the game world itself, but can still be accessed by cagey explorers… proving, perhaps, that bypassing the affected areas wasn’t enough.

As originally planned, a major plot element in IX would have seen the Guardian trying to poison Lord British’s mind against you by showing you some of your decidedly un-Avatarlike actions in previous games, including your regrettable-but-necessary killing spree on Serpent Isle and your calling upon the eldritch forces of the Titans of Pagan. Despite the Guardian’s evil nature, British knows these images are not lies, and that you have fallen farther from the path than he ever thought possible. This would have added a sense of urgency to the proceedings, and an overtone of uncertainity; in the end, would Lord British turn out to be your own biggest enemy? (Revenge, perhaps, for all those times bored players found ways to off the monarch in previous games?) However, the finished game completely discards this facinating idea; Lord British is never tempted to doubt your sincerity, and you are never really made to answer for your “evil” actions in the other games, despite the fact those actions were added to those games specifically so you’d have to face up to them in IX. Amazing.

Sloppy coding, a contrived plot seemingly assembled from those refrigerator-magnet setnence kits, a tacit denial of important historical plot points in the series, and a limp endgame sequence that raises more questions than it answers… This is how Ultima ends? This is how you give arguably one of the two or three most important computer game series ever a send-off, closing the books on twenty years of history? No.

There may be worse games out there, and honestly Ultima IX is not that bad a game when taken strictly on its own merits, without considering the rich history it was supposed to inherit. But frankly, I can’t think of any game that’s pissed me off quite as much as this one did. As someone who was a longtime Ultima fan dating back to the days of Ultima III on my C64, I was personally insulted by the way IX seemed to have almost contempt for those of us who go way back with the series… as if EA was trying to tell us “Get a life, it’s just another game.” It is not just another game. Ultima is a series with a long and distinguished pedigree, and its intent was always to push the envelope of what you could expect from a mere video game. At its best, it made you think about who you were as a person, and how you could improve yourself by living a selfless life, rather than just being out for your own interests. It challenged you to ask why the situation is what it seems to be, and to see if there possibly weren’t more than just the obvious solutions to whatever problems life presented you with. Even when it failed, as it did with Ultima II, it at least provided you with a memorable gameplay experience for its day, and pioneered innovations we now take for granted today.

That’s why Ultima IX is the worst game in the series. This is a game without heart, without a soul. It’s just another hack-and-slash, kill-the-foozle game like hundreds of others before and since, which is exactly what Richard Garriott actively turned away from while working on the series. Its only distinction is that it carries the Ultima name, but make no mistake about it – despite the Britannian setting, this is an Ultima in name only. Even if you’re a total newcomer to the series who’s never played an Ultima before, you should avoid this game at all costs. It will only frustrate you, and if you’re anything like me and have a working knowledge of (and respect for) the history of computer gaming, you’ll probably get as mad as I was when putting this article together.

Argh… I need a pizza or something now. Something to remind myself there are still things in this world that not even Corporate America can totally screw up.

To summarize: Ultima. A revered name in the history of gaming, and a series that’s still worth playing, experiencing, and writing about even today… but dear God, the final chapter was horrible. But if you treat it like The Chronicles of Narnia and just conveniently forget that C.S. Lewis wrote a final book that nearly undid all the good things he created in the preceding six, you’ll get many hundreds of enjoyable hours out of a Britannian excursion, and witness firsthand the evolution of role-playing games. And really, what better legacy could you ask for?

Not bad, for a game that started as a high school programming project…

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active Special: The History of Ultima, Part V: Lord British Takes a Holiday
2. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, Part VIII - Balance Game
3. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, Part VII - Of Black Gates and Red Skulls
4. Retro-Active: The Better-Late-Than-Never History of Ultima, Part IX: Super Avatar Bros.?
5. Retro-Active: The History of Ultima, Part VI: Prophet Motive

1 Comment »

1. 
   ningtang
   February 11, 2008 at 8:14 pm

   The best RPGs of all time are Ultimas 3-7… Each one innovated over its predecessor (until 8). A very good summation of the series and why it mattered (especially how it “created” jrpgs as we know them). I would say Ultima 2 was a little better (maybe cuz it’s the one I started with?) and Ultima 8 was a pretty good game, just not an ultima… It really is a shame to see the series gone, tho I hold out hope that EA would be smart enough to see there is an audience for an ultima type rpg (oblivion, with it’s npc “schedules” and time passage) and bring the series back… even tho it’s hard to imagine on a console….

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