Probably as there should not be any right issues so it's most likely only matter of time.

What is this Ultima 8 and 9 you speak of? I'm pretty sure the series ended at Serpent Isle! :)

To speak about Ultima 8 makes you a Pagan! ;)

Oh, you haven't heard of Ultima spin-off games Avatar meets Mario and Ultima - The Hack&Slash edition? ;-)

At least U8 has a decent plot and is playable with patches. I've never played U9, but I have no interest in it because it basically ignores much of what happened in the previous Ultimas. 8 can get away with that since it literally throws you into a new world.

The word "pagan" now always reminds me of that little skit Eddie Izzard did in dress to kill.
"We had the PAGANS in Britian. They were in to sex, death and religion, in a religious, nightime telly kind of way"

At any rate, pagan was a huge step down from U7, but it was tolerable for me personally. If it wasn't an ultima game it probably won't receive as much flak as it did. U9 though is an entirely different thing......

Soon I hope! I would love to see them in time for Christmas. Then my Ultima Collection would be complete! I must play them all! :-)

There is a fan mod that fixes this. It changes most of the dialogue in the game to make it more true to the earlier games (but removes the voice acting in the process)

Let me preface this by saying that Ultima 7 is one of my two favorite RPGs, ever. I'm sort of a fanboy.

This summer I decided to play Ultima 8, partially on a whim, partially in an attempt to work through my decidedly endless backlog.

I will say that I was immediately dissapointed by how much the interactivity had been reduced. Likewise, NPC schedules had been scaled back quite a bit, and there were fewer NPCs in general.

Beyond that, though, I didn't find anything else immediately offputting, so I pushed forward and ended up getting really into it.

Keep in mind that I never... played the unpatched version of the game, so I can't think of anything I'd reasonably call a "jumping puzzle." I'm also going to say that I don't get the Diablo allusions -- if you just button mash in combat, you'll die fast against all but some of the weakest enemies, and in most cases magic or finding ways to avoid combat is outright safer. Zelda is probably a much better comparison.

Anyway. Why I liked it. Despite the limited interactivity, the world is really pretty detailed. You tend to read about things in books before you either encounter them or read about them again in another book from a different perspective -- a diachronic view of a world totally alien to the Avatar. Even the gameworld reflects this -- layers of sprawling catacombs underneath of which are more tombs and altars to even older beings.

I also thought a lot of the puzzles were pretty interesting. Not quite physics based, but decidedly more environmental in a lot of way.

My favorite aspect of the game, though, was this... deeply surreal, harrowing atmosphere I had. It's very dreamlike, at times, and favors dungeons that move you further and further away from the game's only major population center in non-obvious and geographically obfuscating ways, thanks to the liberal use of teleporters and one-way pitfalls and the like.

It constantly isolates the Avatar into areas with not-quite-right geometry and situations that are in some regards inexplicable. By the end of it I was pretty attached to the few NPCs that actually were in the game because they came to be a brief bit of normalcy compared to the tension and murmuring unease of the dungeons.

So, no, it wasn't as good as Ultima 7, not by any means. But it left a pretty strong impression on me, and I enjoyed it a lot more than... a very large number of other old DOS games I played.

(That being said, Ultima 9 does sound legitimately dumb to me. Never played it so going on what I've heard here, but like... Not because of the continuity issues -- god knows that was never something Ultima was ever good at -- but because it doesn't continue with a lot of the interesting themes that 7 and 8 and UU2 established. Still. I am sort of interested in playing it if GOG ever gets it).

U8 is the only one that I have never played through. I keep meaning to give it a whirl, but I too have a huge backlog and there are other games higher in the list (like Arcanum and Ps:T).

Anyway, Ultima IX has always been a bit of an enigma for me. On the one hand, I don't think I looked forward ever to a game as much as I did it. Part of that is probably the length of time it took for it to come out and the other part the complete lack of RPG's from about '94 to '98.

I got it shortly after it came out, but my PC wouldn't play it and I was busy in grad school (funny thing is that about 6 months before that I picked up Baldur's Gate to just tide me over until U9 came out!). Finally about 2001, I had some free time and a PC that could finally play it. But I couldn't get it to run. EA/Origin tech support was actually very good and walked me through how to get it running over the phone. Got it playable, but had to tone down a bunch of stuff, so I put it away again.

Finally, in '08 after finishing NWN2 OC (and losing interest in MotB quickly), I figured I should give it a try again. Finally had a PC that could run it with all the bells and whistles. As I got into it, I marveled at a lot of things (like the sky/sunsets particularly) and thought "What's so bad about this game?"

I installed the fan patches to fix the bugs and change the dialogue. At first, I was having a great time. Then I realized why a lot of people didn't like it. It just felt....empty. The tens had at most a dozen people in them. Where before we had vibrant towns that you could see as being real, we now just had card board cut outs with a few actors that could never create a sustainable village.

As I went through the puzzles and such, I started enjoying it less and less. By the end, I was essentially angry playing it. I almost hated playing the game! Why continue? Closure I guess. I just wanted to see how it all ended.

The endings of games is as important to me as the playing. A decent game with a great ending is more enjoyable to me than a great game with a horrible ending. Nothing annoys me more than going through some big story, beating the end boss and then roll credits. I want some epilogue. I want to sit back and have a few more minutes of seeing it all wrapped up.

Well, I will give U9 credit that it did have an epilogue. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very good one. When I was done, I had a really bitter taste in my mouth. I ended up reloading BG and playing the entire 'trilogy' just to get the taste out of my mouth!

You can "thank" Electronic Arts for most if not all of the mediocrity showcased in the last two canonical Ultimas.

Ultima VIII was hampered by EA's decision to make the games "more approachable" for a larger audience that wasn't as steeped in the traditions of the CRPG. (In other words, they wanted Origin to dumb it down, let's not mince words here.) If the game seems incomplete with a rushed storyline, it's largely because the game was forced to go gold in a state where it was winnable, but only just; many subplots (including at least one entire circle of magic, Tempestry, and its associated questing) were deleted due to EA-imposed time and manpower constraints. As a result, several plot threads simply go nowhere and lead to dead ends in the game as shipped. An expansion pack, The Lost Vale, would presumably have added back at least some of the missing content in addition to the titular subquest (the hooks for which are already in the game code), but EA only saw disappointing sales of Ultima VIII and ordered that project killed despite being nearly ready for publication; sadly, the code has been lost and all that remains of The Lost Vale is a single mock-up box that's in the hands of an Ultima collector, as well as a giant door in VIII that can never be opened (as it was to have led to the expansion content).

Ultima IX did have a long development time, but what some people don't take into account is that this time must account for no fewer than three entirely different versions of the game. At first IX was to have a standard 2D isometric engine similar to the previous two games, but the advent of 3D acceleration forced Origin to go that route in order to stay "cutting edge" enough to be noticed in the marketplace. Even then, the game was still seen in an overhead perspective until EA stepped in and all but demanded the Tomb Raider-style viewpoint. Unfortunately, the technical requirements of the new world also required this incarnation of Britannia to be much smaller than in the past, so that it could run on the systems of the day. IX also suffered from the surprise success of Ultima Online and the reassignment of most of the Origin staff to work exclusively on creating new content for that game. As for the plot, it's clear that there were much larger plans for IX than what we ended up seeing, including a much more fitting conclusion to the twenty-year story of Ultima than the limp, almost deus ex machina version seen in the final game. Staff turnover at Origin, including at least one major falling-out with Richard Garriott over story direction, left IX without a workable storyline fairly late in development, forcing Garriott and his staff to rearrange the story elements into a new and much simpler narrative, one where they could reframe the already-rendered cutscenes so as to support this new plot (as EA's deadline left no time to render new cinematics). This is why there are elements in the cutscenes, such as the Avatar summoning Pyros, that make no sense in the larger context of Ultima; as originally intended, that scene was meant to be shown in an entirely different context, that of the Guardian trying to turn Lord British against the Avatar by showing him scenes of his very un-Virtuous activities in the world of Pagan.

In and of themselves, VIII and IX are not terrible games at all (though VIII needs the patch to be at all playable). It's when you realize the legacy they were supposed to be part of that they fall apart. They stand as perfect examples of what happens when bottom line-loving corporate types start mucking around in genres they don't understand and start treating a legacy series the way they'd treat one of their annual sports franchises, which are clearly motivated more by profit than any love of gaming. EA took one of the greatest CRPG series ever created, and destroyed it -- just as it was finally starting to reach its full potential.

I'm sure that 9's still infinitely more playable than Ultima 2, in any case.

I remember Ultima 8 fondly, though I never finished it. I played it on my first computer, up until then I had only played console games. Ultima 8 had an atmosphere that was completely impressive to me.

Ultima 9, well, I bought that and I regret that I lost the CDs. It was incredibly buggy, most enemies were boring/moronic and I never bothered going that far in it. Hell, you couldn't see the entirety of Lord British's room without some major FPS loss despite the fact that it had almost nothing in it! But U9 have a fun sense of exploration, and it was the first time I had seen a world this large in 3D - despite it being much smaller than U7. What is really interesting though is that the idiots at Electronic Arts forced the engine change which doomed the game because they wanted it to remain "cutting edge", but isometric Baldur's Gate was released around that time and it was a major blockbuster. Way to kick yourself out of tens of millions of dollars, EA!

I'm looking forward to 8 myself, it's next in line! :)