There was a great exchange that took place on Twitter back in September, between Richard Garriott and Kristian Bland. You can see the main body of the conversation in the parent and reply tweets to this tweet from Lord British, or you can click on the image to the right here to find an image of same.

In essence, Bland wanted to write an article about Ultima 9, albeit one that differs significantly from…certain other coverage the game has received in recent years. So he posted a series of questions to Richard Garriott, who not only cheerfully answered many of them, but also happily admitted to being a fan of Ultima 9. Garriott even defended the Avatar’s “amnesia” in the game as being a means of accommodating new players coming to the series for the first time (though he did opine, “in hindsight”, that they maybe could have “done less of that”).

The final result of the discussion was this excellent post at Bland’s website, in which he offers a surprisingly frank, and very staunch, defense of Ultima 9. Indeed, I’ve made many of these same points myself in the various debates about Ultima 9 that I’ve allowed myself to become embroiled in…but Bland is even more forceful in his presentation:

People hate this game. Like, way more than should be legal. And I’ve never understood why. It’s not a bad game, and it’s definitely nowhere near the “worst RPG ever” as some have described it. Nor is it a betrayal, as Noah Antwiler (in)famously proclaimed it to be. It’s just what it is: a good game wrapped in impossible expectations, with a side of french fried bad timing.

First up, the hate. It’s actually been building over the years, like an angry little snowball rolling down the side of a mountain in a Saturday morning cartoon. However, contrary to what people want to believe now, it wasn’t actually hated then. Not really. Sure, it wasn’t given glowing reviews, but it wasn’t universally loathed in the legendary way it has become. It was received with, at worst, mediocre reviews.

The biggest gripe fans had way back in 1999 when the game came out had to do with performance and compatibility issues more than anything to do with the game itself. People didn’t start ripping apart the plot and yelling about things like, “What’s a paladin?” until much later, after YouTube happened and taking giant dumps on other people’s hard work became a subscriber-fetching trend.

I’ve mentioned this in a few places, but I’ve come up with my own take on Godwin’s Law: “if an online discussion about Ultima 9 goes on long enough (and sometimes it doesn’t take that long), sooner or later someone will ask what a paladin is.” And in much the same way that “there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress” (as Wikipedia explains it), I kind of take the same view of those who invoke the paladin question. Or, at least, I know I’m dealing with someone with whom serious, rational, intellectual discussion on the topic of Ultima 9 is functionally impossible.

Bland’s post goes on at length; he describes his love for the game, and tries to avoid calling out Spoony even as he critiques Spoony’s critiques of the game. This part, I think, was really quite brilliant:

Ultima IX without Electronic Arts would’ve undoubtedly been one of those amazing games I mentioned at the beginning of this post, just like every Ultima before 8 was one of those amazing games that changed everything. Nobody likes EA. I get that. We all get that.

But…it’s not entirely EA’s fault.

Nor is anyone to blame for things that aren’t really problems, to begin with.

Yes, Ultima 9 severely retconned the previous fiction.
Yes, Ultima 9 basically gave the Avatar amnesia.
Yes, Ultima 9 catered more to new players than it did to returning players.

AND NONE OF THIS WAS BAD.

Why?

The hardcore market was also shrinking. People tend to get less “hardcore” about anything as they get older, and other demands for their time start taking priority over gaming. Careers, family, children, mortgages, student loans, etc… Things add up, and people start leaving the hobby, or at least abandoning the “hardcore” games for titles that are easier to slip into and back out of again after the baby monitor goes off and you’ve got to get a crying infant back to sleep. It happens.

This sword was especially sharp for something like Ultima, which not only needed to attract new players, but somehow still please the returning ones. Which brings me around to what I said I’d get to in a minute earlier: that Ultima IX was never intended to be the last Ultima.

Wait, what?

…as Richard said, Ultima IX was not always meant to be the end to the series – just the final installment of the third trilogy. The series didn’t end until he left, regardless of what EA might’ve had in mind.

So, yes. At the time it was being developed, Ultima IX had to adapt to the new gaming landscape. It had to bring in new players, and it had to go easy on returning players who might not have memorized every last little detail and event that happened over the course of a series that had been running continuously for the past EIGHTEEN YEARS.

Finally, Bland hammers home what might just be the most important point:

Which is why Ultima 9 needed to do something for everyone who wasn’t a member of the hardcore superfans club. In an era before the concept of rebooting a franchise ever occurred to anyone, Ultima 9 had to straddle the line between introduction and continuation, in a sort of quasi-reboot dance that a lot of players have since come to look back on with disdain.

Which, I think, is faulting the game for something beyond its control. Sure, it wasn’t handled as adeptly as we’ve come to expect from more recent attempts at doing the same thing (the Marvel cinematic universe comes to mind), but it was charting new territory. Again.

Because that’s what Ultima did…for every one U8 (or, I admit, the horribly misguided and woefully executed romance subplot of U9), I can show you 7.5 other Ultima games that nailed it, along with two others that took the adventure to the Underworld and did things no one had ever seen before.

That’s a pretty good track record, and Ultima IX is somewhere closer to the Good side of that number line than the Bad side. Yes, it’s closer to U8 – but only by way of it not being Ultima 4 or 7. It’s less good by comparison, but it is in no way bad.

As noted above, Bland’s post (do read the whole thing) makes a lot of the same points that I’ve made, and that Sergorn Dragon has made, in various debates about Ultima 9 over the years. But there’s something to Bland’s presentation — a certain forcefulness, maybe — that just seems to say everything better than I could have. And his comparison to EverQuest, when discussing Ultima 9’s graphics (which really do still hold up today, unlike many 3D games of that era), is really very apt.

You should also all check out Bland’s “Absurd Alternative Guardian Theory”, which is attached to his article discussing Origin’s acquisition by EA (a subject he also handles with rather…unminced words).