Ultima IX: Ascension

What is it?: Ninth and last in the Ultima series, more of an action-adventure than an RPG, 1999, Windows.
What computer or emulator will it run on?: A Pentium II with either a Voodoo or Direct3D-compliant card.
Tags: 3D, 3Dfx Voodoo.

This game finishes the "trilogy of trilogies" and ends the Ultima main series. The old tradition of box goodies has been kept up: The traditional clothes map and eight tarot cards depicting the virtues accompagny the game. Unfortunately, it was full of bugs, as many 3D games of the time.

3D Hardware Compatibility

The readme has a section about this which, for various reasons, I will quote at length:

This product requires a recent 3D accelerator.  It supports the
3dfx family of chipsets (Voodoo2, Voodoo3) via the Glide API
(version 2.x required).  The Voodoo1 card is fully supported, 
but will run the game slower; see "Performance Tuning" for some
specific suggestions regarding this card. Use of the Voodoo2 card
in SLI configuration is fully supported.  If you have a 3dfx card,
be sure to select the Glide API when installing.  8-bit textures 
are also recommended for use with Glide.

Ascension also supports a variety of 3D cards via the Direct3D 
API (requires DirectX 7 or higher).  The following D3D cards are
specifically recommended:

  a) nVidia TNT2
  b) Matrox G400
  c) S3 Savage 4

The following cards are fully supported by Ascension.  However, 
these cards run the game at a slower frame rate.  See "Performance
Tuning" for some specific suggestions regarding these cards.

  a) nVidia TNT
  b) Matrox G200
  c) ATI Rage 128
  d) ATI RagePro
  e) Riva 128
  f) Rendition 2200

Make sure you get the latest drivers from your card manufacturer
or the latest reference drivers from the chipset manufacturers.

If you choose to run D3D with a 3dfx card (not recommended), you must
edit your OPTIONS.INI file, and change the following entry from:
  Force4444Alpha=0
to
  Force4444Alpha=1

For one thing, it shows that playing a 3D game was still not necessarily an easy thing in 1999. 3D accelerators now were what soundcards used to be five or ten years earlier: Pick well and know what you have. Had I bought Ultima IX when it came out, I would have been stuck with a lower framerate, for my otherwise sufficient Pentium II, an IBM Aptiva, had an on-board ATI RagePro Turbo.

It also shows that the star of 3dfx and Glide was waning; the star of Microsoft' Direct3D was on the rise. Sure, Voodoo is still fully supported, it was probably what the majority of gamers had. But with a Voodoo card, you are stuck with the 8-bit textures; with Direct3D, you got 16-bit. There were also compressed textures, which some cards supported; I don't know whether they were larger, or just designed to save harddrice space. For a complete install took up more than 1GB, an enormous amount of space at the time. My abovementioned Aptiva had a 4GB disk, at the time that was very large.

This rise of Direct3D, by the way, coincided with the rise of Internet Explorer, which at the time slowly began to surpass Netscape. Microsoft may not have been very popular in the late 90s, screensavers and minigames ridiculing Bill Gates abounded, but its star was definitely rising.

Reviews

This game is not an RPG, Oleg Roschin cautions, it simply is not:
"Duh",—say the critics,—"that's exactly the problem!" No, it is not. You can't say the game is bad only because it doesn't belong to your favorite genre. […] As the other reviewer said: this is a trade. We trade open-ended, flexible gameplay and party-based, strategic combat for more focus on the story,more immersion in the game world through advanced graphics and music quality, and more physical contact with the environments thanks to the jumping, climbing, and swimming abilities. The linear gameplay also reduces the insanely high difficulty level and lack of user-friendliness of earlier Ultimas.
This is Capitalism Gone Bad, Johnny B. decides:
Ultima IX is the legacy of gaming companies focusing more on the dollar than the quality of the product: an 'A' game murdered by an 'F' game's bugs. As this is the last single player game that Origin will ever release and the end of the Ultima series, it should have been a swan song. In our preview, we stated that Ultima IX was "destined to be a classic," and if they can ever manage to fix it… it still is. If you're interested, wait until the game is fully patched or wait for the inevitable 'Gold Version.' By then, the problems should be solved. Until then, the day this game was released prematurely lives in infamy in PC gaming history. Some things in gaming are sacred—Ultima was one of them. Don't give up on it quite yet, but for now… the Guardian has won.

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