Ultima is one of the greatest RPG series of all time, so it seems ironic that the last two games in the series are not really RPGs, per se, but are games of different genres.
Ultima VIII was the first in the series to really annoy fans by changing genre. It went from the deep role playing experience of UVII to an action or arcade RPG that requires more action reflexes than role playing. While the game is often seen as a terrible disappointment as part of Ultima, it was one of the first major action RPGs and it helped pioneer a genre. Still, going from a game that was a world in itself to an arcade game was a serious step down.

Ultima IX promised to be the game that would finish the series in glory. After years of pre-release hype and explanations of how the game would redefine the RPG field again, the real game turned out to be a 3D adventure game rather than a true RPG. The game does not have an open world, but is definitely linear and chapter-based, including cutscenes which often clashed with the actual story. Of course for players waiting for a true epic role playing experience, and adventure game was not what they were looking for or expecting, and the game killing bugs were insult to injury.

As far as replaying these two games, I've tried it with VIII and I really can't get into it with all the jumping, falling into holes in the ground, dying when touching water, and never-changing weather. As for IX, however, playing it not as a true RPG but as an adventure game, it really is not as bad as I remember. Both of these games are definitely worth $2.50 each though, even if only as part of a historic series.

Never changing weather? You didn't play long enough :-) I think what you want to say is that while there is "time", but not day night like ultima 6.

It's been a while since I played IX, so I don't remember clearly, but I seem to remember there was a line of dialogue to the effect that the Avatar was disoriented after his arrival in Britannia, because of the unconventional nature of the summoning this time. If true, that at least provided a perfunctory reason for the Avatar's apparent cluelessness on these matters when he should already know them quite well indeed.

Also, you have to remember, EA was always on Origin's backside to make their games more "accessible" to people who might not have played every game in a long-running series. Or, let's not mince words, they wanted Origin to dumb it down as much as possible. EA at this time was never a huge fan of complex RPGs or simulations, and yet those were precisely the genres Origin always excelled in.

Luckily, VII was mostly completed by the time EA assumed full control over Origin, so they couldn't interefere too much with that one, but this explains why the series began to slide downhill afterward. It really began with the depressingly linear Serpent Isle, particularly with all the cut material in the plot that would have made things much more interesting, but at least that game still had deeply thought-provoking themes and the great Ultima VII gameplay engine. EA's interference wouldn't really be felt until VIII, with its simplistic interface and (at least in its original form) timing/jumping puzzles straight out of a SNES action platformer.

I had forgotten about that. I'm surprised that no one has made a mod using Exult to restore the cut content.

The cuts in SI weren't all due to EA trying to change the plot. Some of it came down to the limitations of the game engine (Moonshade would have been much more elaborate, for example), and some of it came down to time constraints (Monitor's "people" would have still been somewhat interactive after being transformed into their totem animals, for one).

While it's possible that EA leaned on them to release at a given time, cutting content to meet a time constraint is fairly standard practice, and in the end, the devs actually felt that having most people killed by the banes was a better outcome than the original plan in that it was much more of a shock when the player gets back and finds out what's happened.

Yeah, U9 is definitely more of an adventure game: King's Quest meets Ultima. And is that rabbity standing stone near the Yew moongate circle supposed to be Max?

One thing that was annoying to me about U9 was that the Avatar is a semi-defined character rather than being a blank role that you can project yourself onto. (U8 was similar, although you could at least name the Avatar.) That was very annoying, especially if you've been accustomed to think of the Avatar as being female, and now you're expected to take the Avatar as a hetero male Nordic type. OK, I get the technical limitations of pre-rendered cutscenes, and I have no real problem playing male characters in proper adventure games (like Manny, or Guybrush, and even Larry), but U8 and U9 stole my Avatar from me.

I could be misremembering, but I think the primary reason you couldn't have a female Avatar in IX wasn't necessarily due to technical limitations; if the cutscenes had been rendered in the first person, for example, the actual appearance of the Avatar wouldn't have mattered. Hard-coding the Avatar as male was more the result of the Raven and Ailuj/Julia subplots in the finished game, when someone decided to not only give your character a bona fide love interest, but suggest that one of your longtime companions had been harboring a secret love for you throughout the games. Because neither Origin nor EA felt the gaming public was ready for a same-sex couple in a 1999 video game (Frigidazzi and her bisexual advances toward you in Serpent Isle being handwaved as a relatively minor plot point), that became the tipping point in creating the male-only Avatar for IX.

...At least, that's what I've been led to believe over the years. Of course, these snags could have been worked around easily enough if you took the time to think about it, swapping Raven's gender as appropriate and transferring Julia's crush on you to one of the male companions if you happened to be playing as a woman. But then again, perhaps deadlines were the enemy here as well, and Origin had no time to make the necessary gender-appropriate changes to IX's already re-re-re-revised plot.

The dialogue patch, available here, also includes the ability to rename the Avatar, albeit only through an external utility. So at least you have that freedom. But sadly, if you want to play as a female Avatar in IX, or just someone that's more representative of who you are instead of this "Nordic Superman" type, you're out of luck. So much for the clever double-entendre behind the term "Avatar"...

I think you are probably misremembering. It's certainly the first time I've heard such a theory. Since the cutscenes were never going to be first-person, why even bring that up? Since the cutscenes were always going to be third-person, being able to choose your biological gender would have required two versions of every cutscene that included the Avatar. That would involve more time, more expense, and possibly requiring a third CD. Or more if you had been able to choose among several appearances as in U6 and U7-2. I would very much hope that resistance to same-sex romantic subplots were not a factor.

I would disagree with the characterization that Frigidazzi was a minor subplot. That encounter is unavoidable and a necessary step in advancing the very linear plot of that game. If you are playing as female, and are uncomfortable with a lesbian encounter, you can resist Frigidazzi's advances (not that I ever would), but you can't avoid the scene.

In U9, you can choose not to trust Raven. It's funny, but I've never gone that route to see what happens. I assume that the branding doesn't happen. Playing as female, and being confronted by another woman in a diaphanous nightgown, might be uncomfortable for a hetero, cisgendered woman; but as in the Frigidazi episode, refusal to play along is still an option. It's an option as it is with the male-only Avatar. That would/should have been enough to deflect any worries about teh gay inside Origin and EA.

It clearly wasn't a problem earlier, and it can't explain the lack of a female option in U8. So I still would have to go with the technical explanation, unless you can link to anything more or less authoritative to back up the alternative theory. I'm not trying to be combative; I'd just like to see anything more definite if possible. Since the ability to customize the Avatar to any degree in U9 would have involved multiplying the number of pre-rendered cutscenes, I'd need something solid to dismiss that as the real sticking point.

I'm all but certain that it was technical in U8: the game made a big deal of its 1200 rendered frames of animation for the Avatar, and doing another 1200 for a female Avatar would have bumped up the already high floppy disk count (which it originally shipped on) even further, to say nothing of the additional development time and expense (which we already know was in short supply due to pressure from EA).

+1

UVIII is the worst by. I called it Super Avatar World back in the day and still think of it that way. I suppose it may have been OK, IF you didn't think of it as a primary Ultima series game and instead more as a Worlds of Ultima type game...

UIX. This was one of those unfinished games that got shipped. I vaguely remember getting a CD in the mail at one point and wondering WTF is this thing? Open it up to find ah, they mailed out a patched copy of UIX... It was nice as 3D but beyond that I don't recall much as by that time I had less time for gaming, and it was originally borked on arrival so when I got the patched up version in the mail I had already moved on to playing other games in my limited gaming time and just never got around to going back to extensively ever since...

One thing about UIX that I DO recall is that I did NOT have what a POS feeling like I had IMMEDIATELY gotten from UVIII(this is before all of that "fun" "jumping" around mind you). It, as I mentioned above, was just broken when I received it(pre-ordered). Not ENTIRELY broken like Sword of the Stars 2 or Legends of Pegasus, but broken enough that I stopped playing it to wait for a patch. IT MAY have been that it came out around the same time as Baldur's Gate and I was playing that by the time it was reasonably patched up... (they still never fixed everything...)

I know what you mean. I remember the guy screaming in a perfect Woody Allen NY accent, "Stop the wawwwwulls!" After that he began babbling in a voice that sounds exactly like Morte from Planescape. It seems between their 1950s Manhattan bus driver hats and accents that many of the peasants of Britannia were a little too New Yorky for what is supposed to be a cross between Medieval fantasy world and some kind of version of Ancient Greece.
Also The Avatar sounds a lot like Stallone. Julia has the wrong accent, at least one character sounds just like Gary Sinese, and there is a drunk with a voice like Bob Dylan.
Actually, the silly voice acting at parts is one of the most entertaining parts of the game, come to think of it.

I played 8 last summer and loved it. Not as good as U7, but... come on, what is? Never had issues with the jumping at all -- most of those issues were addressed in the patch. It has an original and well-developed setting, doesn't hold your hand, and most of the puzzles have multiple solutions (both intended and emergent).

U9, on the other hand, has you fighting giant rats and pirates in Texas.

I'm with amccour on this one.

When I first played Ultima VIII, I had never experienced freedom quite to that extent with other games so far in terms of doing things the devs probably hadn't fully anticipated (the crazy stuff you can do with all the magic, explosives and the environment... heck, I created stairs that allowed me to go above the world boundaries and crashed the game, I threw an explosive at Lady Tempest and then teleported myself away before she could lightning strike me, I threw skeletons in water to prevent them from raising again, I set up elaborate explosive traps to kill ogres early in the game, etc).

I played U8 first amongst the Ultima games. It was one of my first PC games as well and it surpassed pretty much anything I had ever experienced on consoles in terms of depth.

Then, I played Ultima Underworlds, Ultima 7 and Ultima 8 again and my opinion remains unchanged.

The game was unforgiving, it's engine would have greatly benefited from some polish and I'm sure the game would have alienated RPG purists, but if you can look past those things (and save often :P), you'll find a veritable gem in the rough.

I got the game on GOG recently, played again and found myself enjoying it almost as much as when I originally played it, which is more than I can say for quite a few games I revisited.

That's actually one of the things I found really, really neat with Ultima 8. It had a lot of emergence. Like, in the early necromancer quest, I noticed that nearly every puzzle you encounter has at least two intended solutions, and potentially more. I liked searching out really obscure patches of mud for the sake of using the golem spell.

I tend to look at U8 more like a Zelda game than the kind of game that the other Ultimas were. I think it works really well in that sense. And it does still have that classicist DOS feel which is so hard to emulate.

Then again, I never played the unpatched version. If I had, that really may have negatively impacted my opinions a lot. First impressions DO matter.