Ultima IX: Ascension

Ultima IX: Ascension
Developer(s)	Origin Systems
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts
Designer(s)	Richard Garriott
Engine	Ultima IX Engine
Platform(s)	Windows 95
Release	1999
Genre(s)	RPG
Mode(s)	Single player

Ultima IX: Ascension (1999) is the ninth and final part of the computer role-playing game series Ultima.

Following the Avatar's escape from Pagan, he is transported back to Britannia for one final battle with the Guardian, who is increasingly ruining the physical and moral fabric of that land. He must restore the Runes of Virtue, cleanse the shrines of the Guardian's taint, and restore the people to the way of the Virtues — now knowing that he will never again be able to return to Earth.

Development history and controversy

By the time Ultima IX was released in November 1999, over five years had passed since the release of Ultima VIII. Ultima IX was the subject of much debate among fans of the series during the years preceding its eventual release.

The first real news regarding Ultima IX came in a text file included with the final patch (v2.12) for Ultima VIII. In this now-infamous "fans.txt" file, Ultima creator Richard Garriott wrote that Ultima IX would be based heavily on the feedback Origin had received from customers, and that this feedback had resulted in a "dramatic turnaround" to being a "classic Britannian Ultima." In an interview from Dragon*Con 1995, Garriott began to reveal more details about Ultima IX. More details about the game were revealed in a preview in a 1996 issue of PC Gamer, including screenshots of the new game engine, which was revealed to be a full 3D engine with the camera at a fixed overhead angle, but with the ability to zoom in and out and rotate. Images from the pre-rendered CG cinematics also began to surface, as well as related story details.

With the unexpected success of Ultima Online, Origin moved most of the Ultima IX team to work on UO. By the time work was resumed on Ultima IX in late 1997 or early 1998, many of the original team members had left Origin, and the once cutting-edge 3D engine was already becoming out of date. 3D graphics accelerator cards had been on the market for a couple of years, but it was 3Dfx's Voodoo Graphics card that introduced an entirely new level of 3D graphics performance. Ultima IX had a technically impressive game engine, but it was completely software-rendered and would not be able to compete with newer engines taking advantage of 3D hardware acceleration.

There have been at least four distinct versions of Ultima IX in development, which have differed in both storyline elements and technological implementation:

Version One: 1990-1994 The first version of Ultima IX: Ascension was as it was conceived of by Garriott during his initial planning for the third Ultima trilogy as Origin began to work on Ultima VII. Unlike the previous Ultima games, Garriott planned a basic story arc and plot elements for Ultima VII, Ultima VIII, and Ultima IX at the outset. The plans for Ultima IX would have been vague and sketchy at the time, but Garriott had stated that he wanted to create a villain that would be around for a long time. He spoke of The Black Gate with a pure black box cover, Pagan with a red box cover, and Ascension with a sky-blue box cover. Before Serpent Isle went into production, the original ending of Ultima VII was to lead straight into Ultima VIII; presumably the villain Guardian would have grabbed the Avatar and pulled him into the Black Gate just before it explodes, instead of leaving the Avatar trapped in Britannia. The original concept for the third Ultima trilogy appeared to have focused on the Avatar's conflict with the enigmatic Guardian, each game taking place in a different world: Ultima VII in Britannia, Ultima VIII in the conquered world of Pagan, and Ultima IX in the Guardian's homeworld itself. The reddish, rocky, barren land in which the Avatar arrives in the endgame of Ultima VIII was not originally intended to be Britannia. The official Ultima VIII hint book, Pentalogy states that in the endgame cinematic the Avatar has arrived in the homeworld of the Guardian. One of the major plot points of Ultima VIII is that the Avatar needs to acquire the powers needed to confront the Guardian on his own homeworld.

The previously-mentioned "fans.txt" file distributed with the patch for Ultima VIII suggests that Ultima IX would be returning to a dual-scale map system (town scale and outdoor travel scale). It also notes that many of the new design features for Ultima IX were tested in the Ultima VIII engine, which lead to enough gameplay enhancements that they were collected and released in that v2.12 patch, a year after Ultima VIII was originally released.

Version Two: 1995-1997 When the 2.12 patch for Ultima VIII was released in 1994, it became clear that the feedback that Origin had received had dramatically altered its plans for Ultima IX and had caused it to re-consider the direction it is taking. In "fans.txt," it is stated that "The design of Ultima IX (which is still in progress) relies heavily on this feedback and has resulted in a dramatic turnaround back toward classic role playing. Even better, it has resulted in a classic Britannian Ultima."

At this point, the gameplay Ultima IX would have been re-located to Britannia, and a new storyline would have to be written to incorporate this change, as well as the changes resulting from a turnaround "back toward classic role-playing" and away from the direction that Ultima VIII had been headed. This story would have been what has been referred to as the "Bob White" plot and which is commonly called the "original plot" even though it most likely was not the original plot for the game.

By late 1995 or early 1996, the first screenshots of Ultima IX were starting to show up in gaming magazines and Origin was starting to reveal some information about the plot and gameplay aspects of the game. These previews of the game demonstrated the software-rendered 3D engine that now powered Ultima IX. The camera appeared locked into an overhead view that approximated the isometric point of view of Ultima VIII, but could be rotated about its vertical axis and zoomed in or out. Images of the pre-rendered cinematics also began to appear at this time. Some of these images showed the Avatar in a rocky, barren landscape with a red sky and it was at this time that it was first stated that the Avatar had actually arrived in Britannia at the end of Ultima VIII and that the Guardian had now conquered this world.

The unanticipated success of Ultima Online's pre-alpha and beta tests caught Origin and EA off-guard and it was decided that the best business decision would be to finish Ultima Online as quickly as possible.

Thus, almost the entire Ultima IX team was moved over to work on Ultima Online in late 1996, and progress on Ultima IX was essentially halted. By the time Ultima Online launched almost a year later, corporate interest in Ultima IX was at an all-time low. Dedicated 3D accelerators had hit the market in a big way during the year that Ultima IX was on hiatus and it was looking extremely dated, the software rendering engine barely able to crank out an acceptable frame rate. Programmer Mike McShaffry took the code home and experimented with replacing some of the software rendering code with calls to the 3DFX Glide API. As the story goes, when he showed the prototype to management at Origin, it re-energized interest in Ultima IX and the project started to take off. However, several members of the previous Ultima IX team had left Origin by this time and new team members were recruited to replace them.

Once Ultima IX had resumed production in late 1997, Origin hired Ed del Castillo, who had produced such hits as Command & Conquer as producer of the title.

Version Three: 1997 -1998 The Ultima IX team experimented with different camera angles in the now hardware-acclerated 3D engine and had decided that a third person over-the-shoulder perspective -- similar to that used in Tomb Raider or the then-upcoming Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 -- made for a more immersive gaming experience. As Richard Garriott said, it was now possible for the first time to actually see Britannia's sky.

News about the game's development started to trickle out much more quickly as 1998 began. Screen shots of the new camera perspective received mixed results from long-time Ultima fans.

Over the next few months, news of more changes leaked out. The game would no longer have a party of companions for the Avatar and would once again be a single-character game. The amount of art and voice recording work required meant that there would not be a female Avatar option. New previews of the game started to appear in gaming magazines throughout 1998, and it showed a dramatically different game than what was shown in 1996. Not only was the technology different, but the story seemed to have changed as well. Many aspects of the Version Two story still seemed to be present, but the Britannia of Version Three appeared to be a world much more firmly under the Guardian's grasp. Lord British seemed to be essentially a prisoner in his own castle, and Asylum (Buccaneer's Den) was the only city free of the Guardian's control. The player would control the Avatar throughout most of the game, but some parts of the game would put him in control of Lord British, Shamino, or the female pirate Raven.

Conflicts between the game designers and the producer were apparently escalating. In May 1998, Dan Rubenfield and Marshall Andrews, two of the designers for Ultima IX left Origin. It was a poorly-kept secret that conflicts with del Castillo were the primary cause for their departure. A month later, lead designer Bob White also left Origin. By the middle of 1998, del Castillo resigned due to "philosophical differences," Richard Garriott took a more active role in the production of the game, and Seth Mendelsohn joined the team as lead designer.

Ultima IX had already been in development for a long time and Origin had been advertising that the game would be released in late 1998. But the conflicts regarding the game's design and the departure of the primary game designers left the game in a dire state.

Version Four: 1998-1999 This is the version of the game that was actually released to the public. After del Castillo left the Ultima IX team, Richard Garriott and Seth Mendelsohn re-wrote the entire story for the game. The story would now focus on the Avatar's final visit to Britannia, and the reaction of the people of Britannia to this news. Some elements of the previous storyline were kept, presumably to make use of the existing (and expensive) pre-rendered cinematics, but most of them were either heavily edited or used in a dramatically different context than originally intended, and sometimes both.

Controversy

The game's release was initially complicated by a rather buggy first issue, with very advanced hardware requirements for the time; the design team had objected strongly to the timing of release, but the Electronic Arts management enforced it.

A few months later, a fixed version was released; a further unofficial fix was leaked on the Internet a bit later by an anonymous member of the team.

The game world was rendered in a detailed and seamless manner. Yet, with the technological constraints, Britannia was much smaller in overall area than previous games. For example, Britain, the largest city of Britannia, consisted of only a few buildings. One of the chief criticisms of Ultima IX was that the story did not do justice to the continuity of earlier parts of the series.

Many fans feel it is unfinished and not as polished as the earlier Ultimas were. It is notable that the plot was changed during the development. A summary of the original plot (often called "Bob White plot", after the lead designer at the time) was later released on the Internet.

One prime difference from previous Ultimas is that in Ultima IX the player has less control of what path to take in the game. In fact, most areas of Britannia are blocked off until specific tasks are completed, reducing the amount of initial exploration available to the player.

Combat is vastly different than previous Ultimas (save perhaps Ultima VIII). Fighting in Ultima IX is reduced to simply clicking the mouse buttons as fast as possible, with little strategy unlike the previous installments.

The game also does not link to earlier Ultimas as well as some fans hoped. The game was said to be made to attract a more general gamer audience with little or no knowledge of previous Ultimas, so many facts and events from earlier games are disregarded, while others are altered to suit the plot of Ultima IX. Some fans have found a considerable number of "errors" in the game.[1]

Because of this, many Ultima fans consider the game non-canonical, going so far as to completely ignore that the game ever happened and look to fan made replacements.

Another annoyance to some Ultima fans was the fact that the Avatar was given an audible voice. Throughout the history of the series, interaction with NPCs was accomplished through trigger words that the player would either type or select off a menu to get a reaction. Even though it was a technical step forward from the sometimes frustrating keyword system, the old interface was a major part of the old games and its removal was dubbed as just another step away from what had always been Ultima by some long-time fans. It should be noted, however, that many long-running series were also moving to fully-voiced dialogue during that time period. In addition, the game included an option for disabling the Avatar voice-overs which was independently configurable from the option of having voice-overs for the NPCs' dialogue.

Plot

Since the final release of Ultima IX in December 1999, there has been much speculation as to what happened in the five years since the original release of Ultima VIII. Origin Systems had released a number of tantalizing video clips in these intervening years, first in the Ultima Collection CD and intermittently in between. These screenshots and clips pointed to a totally different plot from the released version, which many longtime fans of the Ultima saga agreed was unsatisfying and unrewarding.

The definitive answer came on December 9, 1999, when a synopsis of the original script was posted to the Ultima Horizons discussion board and quickly spread throughout the fan community. The synopsis was written by Bob White and released with his permission. White worked directly with Garriott, John Watson, and Brian Martin in developing the game's original story before leaving Origin.

Summaries of both the official plot and the leaked original plot are given below.

The official plot

The game picks up just after the end of Ultima VIII in which the Avatar is transported to a Guardian-controlled Britannia, but somehow in the beginning of Ultima IX the Avatar returns to Earth for an unspecified amount of time before getting back to Britannia. He arrives in Britannia on a mountain overlooking the Guardian's keep in Terfin. Before he can overcome disorientation, a Wyrmguard takes a dragon up and incinerates him.

Then there is the dark throne room scene with the Guardian in shadow talking to Lord Blackthorn. Blackthorn is pleased after apparently seeing the Avatar's death but the Guardian realizes that he was teleported away just in the nick of time by someone, who must be at the castle of Stonegate. Blackthorn wants to go after him but the Guardian instructs him to wait because he wants the Avatar to see how he has been destroying Britannia and wants the Avatar to despair.

The Avatar is brought to Stonegate by Hawkwind the Seer (from Ultima IV), who gives him a brief rundown of what has happened since he left for the Serpent Isle. Great columns have appeared throughout the land, and their malign influence has caused plagues, famine, and other natural disasters. Under their power, the people of Britannia have twisted the Virtues into mockeries of their true meaning.

As the quest progresses the Avatar learns that the Guardian has stolen the Runes of the Virtues and twisted them into the glyphs that form the heart of the columns (also true in the original plot). Most of the game consists of traveling through the dungeons to recover the glyphs and to visit the Shrines of the Virtues to meditate and cleanse them, making the game not so dissimilar to Ultima IV in this respect, with the one difference that the game requires visiting the columns and shrines in a fixed order. Eventually, as the game progresses it is revealed that the Guardian is nothing other than the dark half of the Avatar himself, and the only way to save Britannia is for the Avatar to ascend to a higher plane, taking the Guardian with him, which is accomplished via an Armageddon spell cast behind a Barrier of Life.

As previously mentioned, this plot has many glaring inconsistencies that many longtime fans of the series have found offensive. Pieces of the original plot described below can be found peeking through in many places, most notably in the full motion video cutscenes that were produced with the original plot in mind.

The original plot

The beginning of the game is more or less the same as the beginning of the actual Ultima IX release, except that the Avatar never actually returns to Earth after his sojourn in Pagan in Ultima VIII. Just as in the official plot, there are also columns created by the Guardian with malign influence. Further, Lord British has become enfeebled and left government of the kingdom in the hands of a tribunal consisting of the lords of the cities of Moonglow, Britain, and Jhelom, but they have proved unable to deal with the crises and have fractured into mutually distrustful city-states that are, at the time the Avatar arrives, at the brink of war.

Of course, the Guardian is behind all of this, orchestrating these events, with the aid of Lord Blackthorn, but few within the kingdom suspect this. Among these men is a leader in the town of Asylum, formerly known as Buccaneer's Den, known as Samhayne, a benevolent underworld character who smuggles contraband food and supplies to the various cities. He enlists the aid of the Avatar to find proof of these shadowy manipulations that are causing Britannia to disintegrate. With the help of his longtime friends Shamino and Iolo and Samhayne's protegé Raven, they uncover Lord Blackthorn secretly advising members of the council and goading them to war. Blackthorn is unmasked just as the armies of the council have taken the field of battle. He is eventually caught later on at Terfin, and executed at Lord British's command, but the Guardian escapes.

The Avatar and Lord British then travel to Stonegate for the final confrontation with the Guardian, but after it appears that they successfully kill him, they are told that it is not enough. The columns that the Guardian created have embedded themselves too deeply within the very fabric of Britannia itself, and soon they will destroy the world, funneling the power of its destruction back into the Guardian, resurrecting him and making him stronger yet. The only way to destroy the Guardian now would be to extinguish the life force of Britannia itself, but the people may be saved by evacuating them to the island of Skara Brae and using the power of the Runes of Virtue to protect them. The Ritual of Armageddon is cast, Britannia is destroyed, along with the Guardian and Lord British, but the Avatar ascends to a higher plane by the power of the spell, and the populace that was evacuated to Skara Brae is protected by the Runes and they live on, to find another world to call their own. The "Bob White plot" specifically compares the destruction of Britannia and the island of Skara Brae flying off into space with the Roger Dean paintings from the album Yessongs.

Other editions

At the time of initial release, EA also produced a "Dragon Edition" of the game. It included an extra-large box, prints of in-game artwork, tarot cards, an ankh pendant, and special versions of the game books. Later, a "World Edition" was released containing copies of both Ultima IX: Ascension and Ultima Online: The Second Age.

Fan-made patches

Many fans have created patches to make the game more to their liking. Some of the most popular patches are:

• Patch v1.19 - which enhances the game's performance and fixes some bugs, released unofficially by an anonymous member of the development team. The patch fixed many problems still present in the last official patch (1.18).
• Dialogue Patch - which rewrites the dialogue for almost the entire game, fixes plot holes, and increases coherency with the rest of the series. The patch changes the dialogue text but not audio, so speech must be disabled to use it. The patch also allows the player to change the name of the Avatar character. This feature was found in earlier Ultima games, but was omitted from Ultima IX due to inclusion of voice acting.
• Economy Patch - which causes the in-game shops to stock more items and changes the prices of items.
• Monster Patch - which makes enemies stronger and harder to defeat.

Any combination of these patches can be used if desired, though the Dialogue, Economy, and Monster patches are distributed as a single package.

External links

• Ultima IX: Ascension at MobyGames
• Nitpick list for Ultima IX: Ascension
• Original Ultima IX, with history of Ultima IX before its release, screenshots from the in-progress versions, the Bob White plot text, and the remnants of the original game discovered in the released game. The original Usenet posting of the Bob White plot is here