Ultima IX: Ascension

– 191299

The final Chapter in the Guardian Trilogy, quite possibly the most anticipated game of all time. Ultima is, after all, the most successful gaming series there is – this is the eighth sequel, for those who haven’t noticed.

But.

Most people cannot play it.

No game should release a patch a week after shipping. A hundred thousand players on Ultima Online and Origin assumes everyone has a net.connection ?

To add insult to injury, the Dragon Edition, with all the nifty stuff, is available only in the US.

I’m going to wait till the dust settles before even attempting to play it. You should too, but don’t just take my word for it…

Such problems are so numerous and apparent in Ultima IX that they cannot be overlooked. An almost immediate patch fixed dozens of problems in the retail version but put just a small dent in all the technical problems that plague Ultima IX to its very core. Quest problems notwithstanding, the game is prone to crashing, the Avatar is prone to getting hopelessly stuck on objects, and his enemies, no matter how big or how powerful, are consistently mindless. – GameSpot

Beyond the performance problems there are a number of bugs, including memory leaks, interface glitches, problems with spellcasting and inventory management, and inconsistent graphics. The longer you play Ascension, the worse your performance will be. System resources seem to fluctuate dramatically, which appears to be a problem with the game being unable to clear its cache. There are countless problems with the interface that I will discuss on the next page as well as a number of components such as spell casting that seem prone to causing crashes. – The Adrenaline Vault