I just tried playing Ultima 9 for a bit. It was, well, not great.

Because they were fucking great until 8 came out. That was okay, then 9 sucked.

Fuck off.

Because every game sold more than its predecessors.
You might be asking why they stopped after 1999 and the answer is EA.

What's a paladin?

>>3172154
I am not entirely sure.

>>3172113
Looks comfy

>>3172113
U7 was great and U8 was decent, also there was Ultima Online.

U9 didn't look well both technically and from design standpoint, even disregarding the plot, areas were cramped and small, special effects were shit, and all this ran as utter shit at the computers at the time (sometimes even worse than Morrowind on the same specs)

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>>3172157
Your knowledge of the land shall be great.

>>3172113
I think it was because of being one of, if not, the first open world game franchises

>>3172113
Watch Spoony's Ultimate retrospective series. They're good education on those games. And his whole thesis indeed was it was a great series that went to total shit with 9.

>>3172162
My first thoughts also. I have to try this out some time.

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>>3172113
That was when Lord British had his stroke

>>3172113
>starts with the worst game in the series
>hahah how did this shit series even EXIST! hahahahah

fuck off /v/

>>3172164
Ultima 9 looks amazing if you have a computer that can handle it.
>areas were cramped and small,
That's Ultima 7 if anything. 9 managed to finally find a proper scale again after 6 and 7 were completely screwed in that regard.

>>3172154
>>3172157
>>3172165
>>3172174
Why must this shit haunt every Ultima thread?

>>3172980
Yeah, you can up the draw distance and stuff to ridiculous amounts on a modern machine.

>>3172113
Ultima 9 restarted development multiple times for a variety of reasons. Ultima Online distracted the company from pursuing Ultima IX when it was still viable to use the old engine.

Then they tried to go for a 3D engine, and it was all downhill because fuck early 3D.

A lot of things went wrong. EA is somewhat to blame.

>>3173007
On the other hand you had Serpent Isle and Pagan rushed out unfinished due to EA as well.

Underworld used 3D for greatness. Ascension is kind of more the Underworld series going above ground than a continuation of the party based entries.

>>3172174
Spoony is pretty stupid when it comes to old RPGs and has some terrible complaints on U6 and UU, making them out to be worse than they are (and they're pretty fucking godlike), when they're some of the best in the series to get into, and he still didn't do shit about Worlds of Ultima except for a random blurb. He also is a retard who couldn't get past the starting area of Fallout 2, and that's in spite of supposedly having played shittons of RPGs.

>>3172113
If you want a proper Ultima 9, play Gothic. It was made by a bunch of German students in breaks between eating bratwurst and drinking Bock on a budget of a single Opel Corsa shared between all five developers, and it shows, but it also expands on the ideas brought forth by the best Ultima games, such as unique NPCs with their own daily routines, lots of shit to do just for in-game LARPing, certain degree of open-endedness and great exploration.

>>3172991
Because most of the people in these threads haven't actually played anything in the series.

>>3172536
Wait, did Garriot really have a stroke?!

>>3173202
I don't know about you, but I have about 1 or 2 strokes a day. :^)

>>3172174
>Watch Spoony's Ultimate retrospective series. They're good education on those games.

No they're not. They're a grown man throwing a tantrum because they got the color of a tunic wrong or some shit. The man is a legitimate nutcase

>>3173252
Sometimes I feel like a loser with few friends, but when I come here and see people that worship these youtube losers, it makes me feel better.

>>3173252
>he cares about consistency
>what a nutcase

Remember that reviews are opinions, and like arseholes, everyone has one and they all stink

>>3173264
He doesn't. He complains that the castle doesn't look the same as before, which it never did in the eight other games it appeared in.
He plays like a retard and then blames it on the game.
He complains that items have different sizes in the inventory in one game and the complains when all items have the same size in another.

You end up with a complete warped image if you watch those reviews instead of simply playing the series yourself.

>>3173264
>>he cares about consistency

Spotted the guy who never played an ultima game. Final Fantasy has more continuity between games than this shit does.

>>3173107
>If you want a proper Ultima 9, play Gothic

This really brings me back, fucking everybody used to say that back when Gothic came out, I guess the dismay with Ultima 9 was that big.

Not like they were wrong mind you, Gothic came in an age of famine for CRPG and it really managed to deliver what other games didn't, even by being plagued with poor programming and a shitload of bugs, and to this day it's still what I consider a top tier RPG together with Gothic 2.

>>3172113
>implying this isn't the adventures of ken and his quest to rescue ye olde barbie

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>>3173107
>tfw we will never get a third person open world RPG as good as Gothic 1 and 2 again

>>3173107
>Because most of the people in these threads haven't actually played anything in the series.
>Implying
I posted one of those memes, and I have played Ultima from 1 to 9, spinoffs and all. Except Online, I don't care for MMOs.
My favorite would be Exodus, which I played in a CGA 8086 back in the day and I still play from time to time. I know well stuff like "what's a paladin" are entirely optional choices in conversations (a pretty lame way to deliver exposition really).

The thing is, I don't care if Spoony is a retard, I found that shit funny because Ultima 9 is pretty terrible and deserves some mockery. Most of the points he addressed already were made fun of in many corners of the internet before he made the videos, what makes me think posters such as >>3173328 or >>3173252 are just dismissing the videos because they don't like the guy. Fair enough, but if you are dismissing the points just because you don't like the reviewer, that's rather petty. If you feel you can do a better review of the overall series, please do, I'll definitely watch it.

Damn, guys, there are plenty of games you can claim to like for nerd cred, but Ultima 9 is definitely not one of them. It visually looked pretty good for the time, but that's about all the praise it can get. It was rushed, had plenty of bad choices, stupid retcons and fanfic-tier plot points (Blackthorne...). It doesn't matter if previous Ultimas had poor consistency because they didn't come at a point when standards where higher, like when U9 did. When U3 ditched most of the scifi elements it was still the 80s, it was excusable, but U9 isn't the 80s anymore. If you are claiming to like it just to spite some internet reviewer, that's just pathetic, and if you genuinely like it, you simply never cared about Ultima to begin with.

>>3174742
It's not just about Ultima 9, I wouldn't really care if it was just that. He misrepresents the whole series and it's a horrible way to experience it and nobody should be recommended to do so. If you want to watch it, do it after you played the games.

He completely pissed on Underworld 2 for made up reasons.
In Fallout 2 he kept trying to do aimed shots instead of avoiding a fight altogether.

>>3175448
I don't know, I got a different vibe from it, more like making jokes with the game than legitimately shitting on the game like he did on 9. He only seemed to actually hate on 8 and 9 (and most of us can agree on why).
Then again, as I said, I was already familiar with the games so I was just looking for "entertainment related to them" more than "education" so to speak. The series came at a time where, by now, it's forgotten by most people, so any sort of media that talks about it more than 30 seconds is attractive to me.

>>3175634
Compare the reviews for UW1 and 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYTit60G6Hk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4quvLSIX4Yc
Most of the criticism for 2 would also apply to 1, in some cases even worse. Complaining that the game forces you to speak with people or use notes and manuals is weird considering that it's a key aspect in the entire series.
Pretending that the entire game takes place in sewers isn't making fun of it.

>>3175448
>In Fallout 2 he kept trying to do aimed shots instead of avoiding a fight altogether.

Isn't the point of an RPG the ability to approach situations how you want to approach them?

>>3175727
Not normally for retro RPGs at least, Fallout is more an exception than the rule.
But even if you had to fight it wouldn't be impossible if you simply used common sense instead of going for the 5% chance to hit the eyes.

>>3175634
>I got a different vibe from it, more like making jokes with the game than legitimately shitting on the game like he did on 9


Humor or not youtubers have an awful tendency to misrepresent and spread false information. Something even satirists take care not to do.

regardless of what I think of these assholes they still somehow managed to amass a following and they're really not using this clout responsibly. People who haven't or really can't play these games will take his word as absolute and spread it around.

>>3174742
The point is that every single Utlima thread ever dies without any interesting exchange of information or discussion, it's just bogged down in Spoony memes.

>>3175727
He tried to punch 6 HP ants [they die to normal punches easily] with aimed shots that had almost no chance of connecting. He didn't diversify his tactics when it obviously did not work, he didn't try hit 'n' run which can consistently eliminate the Temple of Trials, he glanced over dialogue with Cameron and was raging that his non-melee character can't beat him [when there's at least 3 ways to pass Cameron easily], and he kept yelling the game was shit which is disappointing that he is supposed to be this authority on old games yet can't complete a very simple turn based segment.

Spoony is just a retard.

I could not fucking believe how bad spoony was at fallout 2. Like fucking holy shit.

For some reason, You think he would be like a fucking fallout master. What the fuck. Dude clearly never played it in his life.

>>3174742
>It visually looked pretty good for the time, but that's about all the praise it can get.
It had the best gameplay in the series, which doesn't mean the gameplay is amazing but it's telling how poorly most of the predecessors played.
The combat, platforming etc all worked out a lot better than in the Underworld games all despite the rushed release. Compare that to Pagan where basically everything went wrong.
Ascension has issues aside from the lousy plot and performance problems but it's not the worst thing imaginable.
Some of the continuity issues only arise because they tried to connect it to previous games whereas those just brushed everything away that didn't fit in their narrative.

>and if you genuinely like it, you simply never cared about Ultima to begin with.
That's just no true Scotsman.

>>3173837
Risen 1 was alright

On launch it was actually fairly playable if you had a high end voodoo card, like a 5500.
Anything else was shit though because the d3d port was broken as fuck.

If you dont look at it expecting modern gameplay and dont care that it shits on the mythos and can run it well, its not a horrible experience. Its not great though.

>>3176079
The 5500 was released half a year after the game came out. 3500 would have been your best bet.
Then again it had a lot of bugs on release and waiting for the 5500 to come out would have helped.

>>3176756
I played it just fine on a Voodoo 2. Not the highest settings, but still ok

some stuff from Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffrey (Origin programmer):

"Richard wanted to move Ultima to a 3D engine for Ultima IX and it was a real nightmare. Ultima games have always pushed a little too far with scene complexity and Ultima IX was no exception. The original design was going to use a third person ca,era in the same vein as classic Ultima games, but this time the camera was going to be able to swing around and show you the north and east sides of all the buildings! Richard really wanted to have a point of view camera, so the team obliged and put the camera right on the Avatar's shoulders. For the first time since Richard had been making Ultima games, some 18 years, he was able to walk right up to Lord British's castle gates and look up at the tower. It was nice to have a castle taller than 64 pixels."

"The first texture manager I ever wrote was for Ultima IX. That was before the game was called Ultima: Ascension. I wrote the texture manager for 3DFx's Glide API, and I had all of an hour to do it. We wanted to show some Origin Execs what Ultima looked like running under hardware acceleration. Not being the programmer extraordinaire, my algorithm had to be pretty simple. I chose a variant of LRU, but since I didn't have time to write the code to sort and organize the textures, I simply threw out every texture in VRAM the moment there wasn't any additional space. I think this code got some nomination for the dumbest texture manager ever written, but it actually worked. The Avatar would walk around for ninety seconds or so before the hard disk lit up and everything came to a halt for two seconds. I'm pretty sure someone rewrote it before U9 shipped. At least, I hope someone rewrote it!"

"Every Ultima from Ultima I to Ultima VIII used the same random number generator, originally written in 6502 assembler. In 1997 this was the oldest piece of continually used code at Origin Systems. "

>>3176138
>best gameplay
Well, it's definitely not as bad as Pagan, I'll give you that, but I'd rather take the turn-based gameplay of Exodus/Quest of the Avatar. I mean, it sure is more modern and realtime in 9, but it's kind of....bland.
If it had some movement skills or advanced tactics it'd have been pretty salvageable even with the broken lore. Enemies having more varied/involved attack patterns would have been nice too.

And well, call it "no true Scotsman" if you will, but if you are going to rate it entirely outside of the context of nearly two decades of Ultima, there's not much of a point on it being the last of the series. Sure, if it was a spinoff or a standalone game it'd definitely be rated more positively, but as the climax of the series it's pretty bad.

"I recall a truly excellent hack we encountered on Savage empire (...) Origin was using Borland's 3.1 C compiler and the runtime module's exit code always checked memory location zero to see if a wayward piece of code accidentally overwrote that piece of memory, which was actually unused. If it detected the memory location was altered, it would print out "Error: (null) pointer assignment" at the top of the screen. Null pointer assignments were tough to find in those days since the CPU just happily assumed you knew what you were doing. Savage Empire programmers tried in vain to hunt down the null pointer assignment until the very last day of development. Origin's QA had signed off on the build, and Origin Execs wanted to ship the product (...) Steve, one of the programmers "fixed" the problem with an amazing hack. He hex edited the executable and changed the text string "Error: (null) pointer assignment." to another string exactly the same length: "Thanks for playing Savage Empire.""

"Ultima VIII had an interrupt driven multi-tasking system, which was something of a feat in DOS 5. A random crash was occurring in QA and no one could figure out how to reproduce it (...) Herman, the guy with perfect pitch, turned on his pitch debugger. We followed the steps exactly, and then when the crash happened Herman called it: a B-flat mean that the bug was somewhere in the memory manager."

"Ultima IX was supposed to be the first Ultima in 3D. The problem was that no one had any 3D experience whatsoever. We thought, "How hard could it be - we're all pretty smart." What a horrible mistake! Back then, we had to write our own software rasterizers, polygon sorting algorithms, mesh optimizers and object culling. This was not a job for inexperienced programmers, even if we were somewhat brilliant. It certainly wasn't a job that had a specific ship date; and the project ran late."

>>3176840
>>3176875
Sound like 3D programming was legit black art a this time and were fucked if you didn't have a Carmack style whiz on bankroll.

>>3176862
You need to learn special moves and switch between weapons and tactics for various enemies. Until you get the blackrock sword at least.

My opinion is that Ascension was the lackluster finish to a badly designed storyline.
I had been massively disappointed by Serpent Isle and Pagan was even worse than I imagined so Ascension ended up as a positive surprise.
I liked that you could go around explore stuff again. It's a shame they didn't give you more freedom since there was no practical reason to restrict movement.

>>3176764
Hmm I wonder what part of my memory is faulty then. I thought I had played it shortly after release on a 5500.

>>3176805
Maybe I did play it on a voodoo2 then.

Point being by that time a lot of people upgraded to something like a tnt and were stuck with d3d but the game only ran decently with glide.

>>3177757
Or get the shepherd's crook as the starting weapon and kill everyone super fast.

I actually one shot the first dungeon's boss, which sucks if you played the game.

>>3178427
I used shepherd's crook to flip giant enemy crabs and hit their weak points for massive damage but I don't recall it being that powerful against other enemies.

I used the Rock spell abusively in the beginning because autolock enabled it to safely dispatch enemies despite the weak damage but it quickly lost effectiveness.

>>3178497
Unless they patched it (I beat and was done with the game before the d3d fix patch came out, the one where they gave out uo and/or ultima collection for free) it was damn near the most powerful weapon in the game (the bar that indicated attack power was about 9/10ths full). At least the one you got for being humble with the fortune teller. Not sure if there were other ones in the game.

http://lparchive.org/Ultima-VII-The-Black-Gate/Update%201/