Okay, so I've had this morbid curiosity about Ultima IX ever since watching SpoonyOne's review of the game: is it only awful from the perspective of a longtime fan who would take offense to all of the story incongruity with the previous games (BETRAYAL!) or is it also an objectively terrible game when standing up on its own two legs? I can definitely understand hating the game as a finale, but Ultima IX was clearly designed with the first-time Ultima player in mind (WHAT'S A PALADIN?!). So since I'm relatively new to the series (I've only played a small chunk of Ultima 7 and a handful of hours of Ultima IV), I figure I'll play through Ultima IX before I go the distance with any of the others, and record my thoughts in this thread after each play session, whenever I find myself in the mood for a break from Eldevin (my current MMORPG addiction) or The Witcher 2 (which I may need a break from now and then because of how hard it kicks your butt when you make a mistake in combat).

I had a devil of a time trying to get the game to run properly on my Windows 8.1 machine, as although the game seems to play without any real hiccups, it initially would not display special effects such as fire, moongates, or magic spells being hurled at the Avatar's face. Now that I've worked that out, I can at least offer thoughts on the tutorial and on the control scheme.

Barring the obvious objection that it makes no sense for the Avatar to have returned home before going to Britannia and lost all powers/equipment since the previous game, I found this first segment relatively inoffensive. My main gripes are that this section throws gold and arrows and a few weapons at you and then takes them all away the moment you arrive in Britannia. Given the plotholey nature of this segment and the fact that you lose all your stuff, I can't help but think it would have been better treated as a dream sequence rather than an actual transition from Realityland to Britannia; this would have allowed the game to explain away the oddities of the training sequence, and the only thing that would have been lost is the ominous realization that creatures from Britannia have been leaking out into the real-world park next to the Avatar's house.

Side note: this game has a really nice look/feel, counting both the HUD elements, book-reading effect, and graphics/scenery. While the game has clearly aged like nobody's business, it's also still pretty nice to look at.

The controls are wonky as hell, though; this game very obviously predates modern conventions of how a keyboard-based control setup should be arranged, with a bunch of necessary buttons all scattered around the keyboard. I'm considering busting out my SplitFish controller and using Xpadder or something to arrange a custom layout for more comfortable movement and environment traversal (fortunately the game doesn't use THAT many buttons; they're just organized in a really wacky way all across the keyboard with Tab for switching to combat stance, arrow keys for movement (no WASD), shift/capslock for running, C for climbing, J for using your journal, Q for freeing up the mouse cursor to do stuff... yeah, it's about as intuitive and ergonomic as a boot to the head.

I don't have time tonight to dive headfirst into Stonegate, so I'll end this here. Whether I end up liking it or hating it, though, it's already a really interesting game to analyze and critique. A real gem of gaming history, albeit probably of the kind the developers would like to forget about.

Game session number two made it, uh, partway through Lord British's castle. Technical problems reared their head pretty early--the game crashed no less than two times, the first being right outside Stonegate, the second being partway through the exploration of Lord British's castle. I've taken to saving the game every time I do, well, ANYTHING, just in case the game craps the bed, because otherwise I'll have to retrace my steps a lot and that's just tedious.

A few oddities caught my attention:

1. If you jump over the fortune teller's table during the prologue sequence, you find a short book written by Richard Garriott (as in, from Garriott's own perspective, with his name as the author credit) about ethics and hedonism, basically a primer on what I assume is his own particular view on morality's place in society. It was a pretty interesting little book. There's also a sizable amount of gold hidden in the gypsy's things, but naturally you don't get to take it with you after the prologue, so... pointless.

2. What is the deal with that evil-looking mirror in the castle, which if you climb up on a table and look into it, you see the complete obliteration of a whole island full of people? It triggers a CG scene and then when you get back to the gameplay, you find that the mirror is broken. I didn't have a chance to ask anyone about this because within a minute of me checking the mirror, the game naturally crashed.

3. Ultima 9 classed me as Bard again, so I suppose the way it measures your virtues during class selection is unchanged from Ultima 4, where I always also land a Bard class when I answer questions honestly. I don't suppose it matters much here, though.

4. For some reason, although I could get the game to register most buttons through a gamepad in AntiMicro, the Tab key (necessary for switching in and out of combat mode) doesn't register unless pressed directly through the keyboard. So I can't actually use any control method other than keyboard and mouse for this, regardless of workarounds.

5. The game's movement is actually straight-up four-directional! It's weird: you have no diagonal directions at all unless you steer the camera with the mouse while running straight forward. Apart from that, you have forward, backward, left, and right, and that's that.

6. The Avatar's dog ran up to me like an idiot while I was swinging his sword at the training dummy outside his house, and I was left feeling rather uncomfortable as said dog instantly died and proceeded to melt into a generic lump of blood and gore. On that note, all creatures and people in this game look the same when they die. It's surreal.

7. The dialogue is relatively inoffensive and the voice acting is kind of humorous in how awkward the acting can be, but it's worth noting that most of the "The Avatar is a flaming idiot" dialogue lines are options included for the sake of newcomers being allowed to ask about things, which is not something Ultima IX is exclusively guilty of (for example in Ultima 7, the first character who joins you is Iolo, who the game assumes the Avatar knows, but this doesn't prevent you from asking Iolo about his "name" and "job" and getting somewhat tongue-in-cheek answers about them).

8. The Avatar's voice and lack of gender/appearance customization really hinders my ability to get into the game. It's also doomed to be disconnected from my own previous-game Avatar adventures, since in all games that give me the option, I tend to play as a female character in RPGs. (Up until Ultima VII Part 2, this series still gave you that choice.)

9. The Guardian is like the only character in this game with a good voice actor, but I kind of wish it was as ham-tastic as the ones from Ultima 7 and Ultima 8.

EDIT: I've installed a few patches and things to make life easier. The final official patch and the unofficial fan patch have the game running noticible smoother (no framerate jitters are present while playing the game now, although I haven't had time to test whether or not it still crashes) and I was about to use the Ultima 9 Extended Setup to change the resolution to something better for my screen and also to assign general movement to the WASD keys, placing them closer to the game's other critical action keys. It's a lot easier to play with this setup.

Believe it or not, the lack of gender customization is actually a dealbreaker for me. I always use a female Avatar for Ultima 4 through 7, and have never played 8 because of the lack of a female avatar choice. (I don't have 9 because the Ultima Collection, released before 9, didn't include it.)

IMO, I wish that the developers, having presumably had to choose either a male or female avatar, had gone with a female one. Way too many developers (and people in general) seem to assume male by default.

You can edit the file Default.kmp file in the U9 install directory using Notepad or another text editor and change any key binding in the game.

As it happens I've already remapped the controls using an Extended Setup thing. And I've applied a fan-patch, which seems to have fixed the crashing problem.

So that's nice.

One more observation: The Avatar can't sit straight in a chair or sleep in the correct position on a bed to save his life. I rested in the bedroom Lord British gave him at the castle to restore some health a piranha took from me on the way out of Stonegate, and he was sleeping halfway off the edge of the bed. What the heck.

So I've had more time to play the game and I have some conflicted feelings about the experience so far. Objectively it's still pretty bad, but I'm having a strange amount of fun in spite of that.

Taken on its own merits and ignoring the incongruity with previous games, the story isn't exactly terrible so far--the voice acting itself is more of a problem than the plot or dialogue, and even then it's on a case-by-case basis, as some of the NPCs sound just fine, while others sound pretty narmy. Once you're out of Castle British there's actually a lot of ground to cover in the town of Britain and the areas immediately surrounding it, and the environment has a lot of character. For that matter, so does the game itself. There's a lot of character. It's really depressing to know how unfinished the game turned out to be on the whole, and I'm kind of wondering what my impressions would be if I hadn't known what the problems with the game were beforehand thanks to Spoony's review and other sources.

That said, the game's technical aspects are still questionable--at one point I had to do business with a bow merchant who for some reason was pacing around and reading a book on top of his store counter. He also didn't bat an eye at me when I casually opened a chest behind his counter and took the gold inside as well as the Longbow that's notably better than the bow he sells as a shop item. Stunning programming, there.

Another thing I want to mention is that the combat is... kind of really bad. I did pay the 300 gold to get some sword training at Castle British, and as it turns out this gives you an extra sword move... you can swing your sword down instead of just stabbing with it. I think it deals a bit more damage that way. But enemies in general can deal a lot of damage to you per hit and it doesn't seem like having a shield helps a whole lot, nor did outfitting myself in full Leather Armor (which, somehow, is better than the chainmail-looking Avatar armor I started with?).

That said, while structurally generic as an Action RPG, the setting of Britannia, the virtue-centric plot, and the Ultima feel of the inventory system and journal really make the game feel weirdly unique, and I can only imagine how much immersive fun could be had if this same game were fully and truly realized as intended, and technically solid, with a more polished combat system and more attention paid to environment interactivity (for one thing the Avatar seems to have real problems sitting on chairs and benches in this game, for some reason).

EDIT: Since last posting, I've played through a large chunk of the dungeon Despise. I have to say that, in terms of environmental structure, the game is pretty damn good. But, combat is utterly unbalanced and to this point I still don't understand exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. Certain specific enemies (like the semi-boss-kind-of bandit kidnapper dude Tristan that you have to fight to rescue some farmer woman) take a ridiculous number of hits to kill, while others die in no time flat. For the really hardy enemies, I've had to exploit bugs and just pump them full of arrows until they die... there's no real logic or strategy to the combat in this apart from that, because the easy enemies just die when you click them enough times. Meh.

Interesting to see an unbiased perspective (to the most part), as I cam very biased, ready to hate the game, but I realise it is just an k action-adventure game like kingsquest 8 and redguard. But I will say that the music in this game is really good, best soundtrack ever in a ultima game. But the game is so buggy, that I counted 34 crashes and freezes in my play session of the game!

I have completed ultima 1-8 and am definitely a fan. I have had ultima 9 bug out on me 5 times and have re-installed it 5 times. The final straw was an inability to bind spells. When I tried to light the last candle, all candles would blow out.
I had bound all the level two spells except one, and then could not bind the last.

Since (despite the general criticisms) I was really enjoying the game, I uninstalled and reinstalled the game (this was the fifth time) and played it very carefully, not taking any chances with karma or what might be unexpected by the programmers. This time it was worse, the first binding after cleansing compassion. I bound heal and couldn't bind anything after that.

So I have uninstalled for good and give up.

Anyone out there have a solution or tip?

I remember the binding process being very finicky sometimes, especially around the reagents.
* Try moving the reagents to the middle circle of the pentagram and make sure there are no strays around.
* Also, mistyping the incantation will cause the bind attempt to fail
After a binding attempt, the candles will go out and you will need to relight them to try again.

BTW, there is/was a bug which was a great timesaver - when the textbox pops up during spell binding process to "enter the incantation", before entering anything, you can open your backpack and put all the reagents back in your inventory. Then enter the incantation and the spell will be bound without consuming any of the reagents.

I replayed this game a little while ago (last year, perhaps?), and while I retain major issues with the plot, I found the exploration to be a lot of fun. The world was just packed with things to stumble upon, and as a result wandering Britannia felt quite rewarding.

Indeed, I think that I'd go so far as to say that Ultima IX might have one of the best implementations of an "open world" I've thus far encountered, and one of the few that has really managed to catch my interest.

(Note, however, that by "implementation" I mean the design of the world, not the technical side of things--the game is still buggy.)

As to the combat... it's not great, but I do think that it's better than the combat in VII, at least!

Being better than combat in VII is very easy, though.

Agreed. In fact, I'd argue that Ultima 7 might have been better if they had ditched combat entirely, though I would also consider getting rid of the need to eat to survive as well. The resulting game would probably be classed as an adventure game rather than an RPG.

(Side note: I am also wondering something similar about a certain game in the King's Quest series.)

Hahah, this is true! XD;

That's an interesting idea.

It would change the tone of the game quite considerably, too, if combat were removed. For the better or the worse, I (genuinely) wonder? On the one hand, no clunky mechanics to deal with. On the other, less sense of danger and adventure...

The removal of eating might result in the loss of some neat features (baking, for example, would lose some of its purpose and thus might end up being cut). But even so, I think that it would likely improve the game to do so.

I played this one a long time ago from my disc, and remember having to use cheats to fix certain technical problems. One in particular was getting irreparably stuck while fighting skeletons. I remember loving the exploration component, might have been because I'd also played Gothic and wanted to see a Britannia presented in a 3D way.

The combat was not my biggest issue, but the platforming portions. Having already played other games that did it way better years before, I had hoped that at best they would be trivial, but some were just so arduous.

I am not a longtime fan like many. I was there for U7's release and loved the series since, but have some memories of Martian Dreams and U4, and the two NES versions. Because of how absolutely different U8 was from SI I was ready for pretty much anything, and didn't mind the game, but it was unremarkable. The lore ended with SI, which was fine. The U7 games will, from a narrative standpoint, hold a special place in my heart regardless of it's incompleteness.

Big speeches aside, the game's two biggest failings imo were that it wanted to be everything it didn't have to be, and it has so many bugs.

(I would've also preferred... more puzzles, if we're talking a more adventure-game-ish U7. I felt like Skara Brae was the only town with a significant town plot you really *played through*, and much of the latter half of the game is just doing whatever the Timelord tells you.

... I kind of wish U7's story had done something more interesting than "GIANT RED SPACE GORILLA IS ATTACKING!" too I guess).