Twenty years ago today, Origin Systems and Electronic Arts released Ultima 9, bringing to a conclusion a lengthy and storied development process that had seen the game officially cancelled at least twice, resurrected both times at the expense of significant amounts of Richard Garriott’s political capital both within EA and within the development studio he founded, and subjected to multiple upheavals — team changes and reassignments, engine iterations and integrations, and plot rewrites. And it also brought to an end the seminal RPG series of the 1980s and 1990s — the Ultima series — which today can claim a host of Western, European, and Japanese RPG series as its descendants.

In many repsects, Ultima 9 was up against an impossible set of conflicting expectations. For starters, it had two decades of Ultima lore to somehow tie up, and it could be argued that there was no way to do so in a manner that would have been satisfying to all and sundry…and yet also fresh and relevant for the then-current generation of CRPG gamers. And astride this, it — per Origin’s track record to date — was meant to push the limits of what gaming technology could do. It was fashioned using an unproven 3D engine (a fork of Ultima 8’s decidedly 2D engine), presented its gameplay using a then-uncommon third-person over-the-shoulder perspective, and tried mightily to keep its game world as interactive and manipulable as fans of the series had come to expect after Ultima 6 and Ultima 7.

At launch, Ultima 9 suffered from a number of bugs and glitches. To their credit, Origin worked feverishly to correct these — and correct many of them, they did. That has not stopped a minority of Ultima fans from dismissing the game as an unplayable, crash-prone mess of a game, and that was certainly the experience that some people would have had of the game at its launch. But as of the version 1.18 patch — the last official patch released by Origin — the major issues preventing the successful completion of the game were removed, and subsequent unofficial patches have done still yet more to improve both Ultima 9’s stability and performance, on legacy and modern systems.

Additionally, some found Ultima 9’s story to be unfulfilling. Some — perhaps much — of this dissatisfaction is to be blamed on the number of rewrites that the game’s plot went through. From the well-known Bob White Plot (which can be thought of, more or less, as the first iteration of the game’s plot), to Ed del Castillo’s revised treatment of the game’s story, to the final plot of the game — which cribbed ideas from both prior treatments and also introduced some new concepts of its own — the tale finally told in the release version of Ultima 9 didn’t align with everyone’s expectations. To be fair, this is a common problem for long-running series in any media form; consider, if only briefly, the negative reactions to the new Star Wars films. It’s difficult to produce a single sequel that adequately addresses everything fans of the first ads title might hope to see addressed going forward; it’s probably impossible to produce just such a conclusion to a series whose entries stretch across decades; culminating the expectations of multiple generations of fans is a daunting proposition. Again, we see with Star Wars – which is about to see the release of its ninth numbered entry next month – just how there really is no pleasing every fan, or satisfying every fan’s expectations. And it was no different with Ultima 9.

Did Ultima 9 contradict – retcon, we term it – aspects of Ultima lore established in previous games? Like every entry in the series before it, yes, it did. It has been argued that Ultima 9 is signally bad for the degree to which is retcons what came before it, but this is a difficult claim to defend when one considers e.g. the way in which Ultima 6 fundamentally altered how we understood the identity of the Avatar with respect to the Stranger From Another World of the first trio of Ultima games, or the way in which Ultima 7 turned the village of Paws into a suburb of Britain, when previously it had been situated some distance away from the city. At least Ultima 9’s designers had the good sense to re-establish some distance between the two!

It’s worthwhile keeping Ultima 7 in mind as we look at another criticism of Ultima 9, namely the smallness of its game world. True, Britannia in Ultima 9 doesn’t feel as expansive as in, say, Ultima 6, but I submit that it presents Britannia to us in a way that at least feels larger than in Ultima 7. Granted, if one adjusts the settings file for Ultima 9 to increase the render distance, one can see e.g. both Britain and Yew from certain points atop the Serpent’s Spine. But equally, if one uses Exult to boost the resolution of Ultima 7 beyond its default (and small) game window size, one quickly comes to understand just how compressed Britannia is in that game, much more than is the case in Ultima 9.

Now, in any online discussion of Ultima 9, one can expect an unthinking troll to mindlessly intone “What’s a Paladin?” at some point. It happens with sufficient regularity that we could even propose a fork of Godwin’s Law specifically concerning its use. And while it’s generally best to not dignify the comment with a response – don’t feed the trolls, as the saying goes – it is worth digging into, just a little, here. In the main, one of two things is meant when “What’s a Paladin?” is cited: when it is not used as a perfunctory, perjorative dismissal of Ultima 9 as a whole, it is commonly intended either as a complaint against the presence of expository dialogue in the game, or it is meant as a criticism of the quality of Ultima 9’s writing.

The former case is easily addressed; most games – including most of the Ultimas – contain expository information that new players, those coming to a series for the first time, can avail themselves of to learn about previously established lore. And typically, in RPGs at least, much of this expository information is presented to players via dialogue options. Even Ultima 6 and Ultima 7 give new players keyword or dialogue options (respectively) that allow for inquiries about things the Avatar should already know (including the Eight Virtues!). And it is both good and necessary that these dialogue options exist, because every new game in a series is built — or should be built — at least in part to attract new players to the series. A series which caters exclusively to its extant fanbase is a series destined for extinction. So if the objection is to the presence of expository dialogue, we might reasonably dismiss this criticism as being both unreasonable and backward-thinking. (Perhaps “OK, Spooner!” could become the new default reply we could offer in such cases?)

The latter case has a bit more validity to it; it is well enough known that Ultima 9’s designers were writing dialogue for their scenes and often handing this over to the voice acting team with only minimal editing and iteration. There’s a lack of polish in parts of Ultima 9’s writing that speaks to the time constraints the game’s development teams were operating under in 1999. And similarly, there are voiceover lines that would have benefited from a few more takes. Such is the reality of development timelines, alas. Still, the majority of writing and voice work present in Ultima 9 is good, and some of it is quite excellent. When we consider that this was one of the first fully voiced 3D RPGs — if not the first! — we might reasonably cut Origin some slack; when you’re doing something bold and new, a certain lack of perfection is to be expected in the first fruits of your efforts.

But let’s move beyond looking at criticisms of Ultima 9, because an anniversary is not a time for airing grievances. Instead, we should consider the ways in which Ultima 9 shone, the ways in which it was groundbreaking and new, and the ways in which it remains a feature-rich technical marvel to this day.

When one is assessing any of the later Ultima games, it goes almost without saying that one expects to find therein a highly interactive, manipulable world. Objects — even those unimportant to the plot of the game — can be picked up, moved, used, and even broken because it makes sense that they, being present in the game world, should be. This is tricky enough to implement in a 2D engine, especially if you have to track (and maintain persistence of) the locations of each object in the game world. In a 3D engine, it is substantially more difficult to implement, which is why vanishingly few 3D RPGs released in the years after Ultima 9 didn’t even bother to attempt adding such a feature. (Making 3D game worlds static also allows developers to avail themselves of certain light-mapping features that can’t be applied as readily to moving objects by the engine.) Even fifteen years after Ultima 9’s release, finding a high degree of manipulable, interactive objects in a 3D game’s world was a rarity; twenty years on, the feature is a bit more common, but Ultima 9 still stands out for the sheer degree to which it permits players to, in effect, mess up its stuff.

It’s worth taking a moment, as well, to praise Ultima 9’s control system. In the present era, at least for PC games, the WASD control scheme inherited from first-person shooters has become the de facto standard. However, Ultima 9 was released prior to this standardization, and instead featured a more mouse-centric movement system that made use of some of the peripheral keys — Control and Shift, for example — thus leaving the letter keys free to be used for text input. Now, it could be argued that modern games have little need of supporting typed input from the user, but the philosophy behind this design was a good one: Origin didn’t want players to inadvertently trigger a game function when providing input to the game, and devised a control scheme that helped avoid this issue. As a bonus, Ultima 9’s control scheme — by dint of being more mouse-centric — happened to feature one of the better jumping mechanics implemented to date in a 3D RPG; jumps were highly targetable, and the movement cursor offered a helpful visual indicator as to whether a jump could be successfully made.

And then there was the view angle. Ultima 9 began as a fork of the Ultima 8 engine, and initially featured a more top-down view. When (software-rendered, at first, followed soon thereafter by hardware-accelerated Glide) 3D was implemented in the engine, the development team implemented six degrees of freedom for the game’s camera. And after some experimentation, Herman Miller moved the camera down to look over the Avatar’s shoulder. To hear Bill Randolph (and others) speak about the moment Miller showed off the change to the team, the decision to make Ultima 9 an over-the-shoulder RPG came quickly, and with much excitement. Ultima 9 might not have been the first 3D RPG to feature this view, but the view has become quite standard in the RPG genre in the intervening decades. And the change afforded Ultima fans an opportunity to do something in Ultima 9 that previously was only possible by means of imagination: we were at last able to look up into Britannia’s sky.

The soundtrack of Ultima 9 is also noteworthy; composer George Oldziey (a newcomer to Ultima at the time) created a series of musical motifs around the Three Principles, and counter-melodies based on the negation of each Principle. These were then mixed and matched to create motifs for each of the Eight Virtues and their negations, so that in each of the eight core towns, there’s both a continuity and a discernible shift in the background music after you defeat the nearby column.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t also praise the design of Ultima 9’s world, and in particular its seamless presentation. Although behind the scenes, the world was indeed chopped up into different areas, the game presented these to us in a contiguous fashion that never once interrupted us with a loading screen or an obvious transition. When entering a building, we simply…walked in. When entering a dungeon, we simply…walked in. And when getting on a boat and sailing, we simply…did just that. Britannia, as realized in Ultima 9, featured a rich variety of biomes, and different areas of the continent had distinctive terrain features that were beautifully realized. Each dungeon had its own flavour, its own character; there was nothing cookie-cutter about them. There’s a lot to just drink in and marvel at as you traverse Britannia and delve into its depths in the game…and apart from the occasional cutscene, that entire experience of exploration happens without interruption, seamlessly.

And like as not, the plot of Ultima 9 did do a quite decent job of wrapping up the story of the Ultima series. Plot points that were once controversial — the Avatar/Guardian duality, most notably — proved to have been intended from the start. Yes, not every question was answered, and not every plot thread from previous games was addressed. But this is, in the end, not a bad thing. The story of Ultima became the story not just of the Avatar, but of how the Avatar was ultimately a detriment to Britannia, a crutch propping up the people of the land when they should have been the ones solving their own problems. And Ultima 9 drove that point home ably.

It’s a shame that, post-Ultima Online, Origin was relegated to being a mainly online gaming company, and it’s a pity that the blood, sweat, and tears of the Ultima 9 development team didn’t result in a more fruitful future for the venerable series. Richard Garriott had grand plans, even going so far as to suggest that he would remake the earlier Ultima games using Ultima 9’s engine; would that we had seen this transpire! Still, Ultima 9 did serve, it can be argued, to inspire many of the design choices still present in 3D RPGs today, and achieved some technical feats that most modern 3D RPGs dare not attempt to emulate. It was not without issues, especially at launch, though even in that way it was in good company; Ultima 7 was similarly unstable and crash-prone at its launch, after all. And if we never see another numbered, single-player Ultima game released, Ultima 9 is a fine game indeed with which to cap off the run of the series.