Over at the Forgotten World subdomain, Iceblade has been busily working on additional reflections about Ultima 9, taking deep dive after deep dive into the game’s design, story, and systems. In fact, over the last week, he has published two new articles, one taking an extensive look at boat travel and the new Companion, Raven, and the other examining Buccaneer’s Den and the portions of the game’s plot that transpire there.

You may have noticed the capital ‘C’ used above; Iceblade is quite forthright in placing Raven in the company of the Companions of the Avatar in his essay:

While the major Companions from prior Ultimas do make an appearance in U9 and even contribute significantly to the plot (with one annoying exception – poor Gwenno); many of the less principal companions are absent from Britannia completely.  In fact, few NPCs from prior Ultimas make a return in this penultimate finale to the Trilogy of Trilogies.  While some of this can be explained by yet another 200-year time gap (stated only once in the entire game by the way), this still leaves the experience of Ascension feeling a bit hollow.  Traveling Britannia with your oldest friends for one final adventure is a sorely missed feature in Ultima 9.  You don’t even get to talk with your Companions extensively in game; and I mean either directly or through their regular, unsolicited, yet dearly absent commentary.

Despite this, it cannot be said that the Avatar is alone in his journey.  A new Companion has joined the Compantheon: the tough Pirate Action Girl Raven.  Raven mostly spends her time on the boat, but she does provide lots of plot-related dialogue as well commentary on your current situation at various points.  Actually, Raven has by the far the most dialogue of any NPC in the game – believe me, I compiled the transcript for Ultima IX on the Ultima Codex wiki.  Seriously, her dialogue rivals that of whole towns.

He also comments on the actual ship travel system that was implemented for Ultima 9:

Clicking on the ship when off of it, pops you onto the boat. This is quite useful if you are in the water or on a sandbar or just can’t simply jump onto the ship itself. Clicking the ship when on the vessel, transfers control of the ship to you and transfers the camera to the ship. Movement controls work the same way as for the Avatar including going sideways, though the speed is really slow for the motion. Turning is handled in the same way as well. If you hit the spacebar, you fire the forward cannon. If you wish to change from the overhead view (which can cause crashes or weird graphics problems), you use press the k-key to go to first-person mode – yes, the game can be played first-person (outside of conversations/cutscenes). Heck, you can zoom way out for overhead 3^rd person view with either the ship or the Avatar.

The slow speed does make travelling to places time-consuming, which is surprising given the small game world. The small game size also means that there is little to explore or find when travelling by ship. Still, there are a handful of things to find by ship travel: the ruins of Serpent’s Hold, some unexplained underwater city ruin with a training book, and a couple of tiny islands with goodies on them.

Overall, the ship system is functional yet underdone in terms of capability.  The biggest failing is the lack of content to make the ship a valuable in-game feature.  The slow speed is rather annoying, but almost understandable given the game size.  To be fair to Ultima IX, the Ultimas have not been seafaring adventures.  The ships have mostly been an alternative to travel with combat being an extension of the systems already used throughout the games.  Rarely, have the game worlds included islands just there to be found and explored.  Each island beforehand has contributed in some way to the major plot of the game even in Ultima 6 where islands were places to find the pieces of eight (map pieces).

The article on Raven and ship travel ends with a look at another character in Ultima 9, Samhayne, the commentary on whom serves as a lead-in for the article about Buccaneer’s Den. Iceblade singles out the design of several NPCs for praise in this essay:

There are some good (benevolent and decently designed) features in this town.  The cartographer is very friendly and not a con-artist.  He even sells you treasure maps, warning they may not be valid only for them to actually lead to treasure.  Definitely a nice exploration experience.  He also sells additional maps later in the game, which is nice given we return to this town after our visit to Terfin.

There is Herzog the provisioner who is quite happy about the whirlpools drumming up adventuring business for his supplies. Though you would think he would be losing more customers by the whirlpools killing off his steady business of basic supplies.  His prices are a little steep and he pays peanuts for gems, too.  Might want to hold onto those gemstones until you can get back to Britain.

There is more to the auctioneer as well. Katie was enslaved by pirates who took a ship she was travelling on.  You have two ways to handle this situation. If you explored the area before visiting Samhayne, you have the option to deliver her note to Samhayne.  Samhayne will deal with the issue (saving another of his many daughters from various ports).  Unfortunately, Katie’s subplot doesn’t conclude due to incomplete dialogue.  There is a second way to free her: “buy” her (automatically freeing her in the process) and then you can get her a job at Herzog’s.  One of the bug fixes I made was to have her end up working for Herzog if you free her using either approach.  It is a very unclean method involving messing with several plot flags to trick the dialogue output, but it works. 

He also heaps praise, again (and probably not for the last time), on the game’s truly open-world design:

For as many obstacles and blockages there are, Ultima IX is still a seamless, open-world game.  If you can make the jumps, build the bridges, and climb the bread-towers; you can go anywhere you want.  It might break the plot, but you can use and abuse the physics in this game.  As with U7, the world is seamless with no loading screens or multiple map-scales blocking your path and even the dungeon maps are a barely perceptible transition away.  Ultima IX’s world is further designed and built to encourage and reward exploration from the main railroad.  Think of this train less like a steam engine and more like Doc Brown’s time train.  Each segment of the plot is a different time period, which must be completed before you can move on; but within a time period, you are free to move around.

On the isles of Buccaneer’s Den, you can explore the town.  Fight the crabs on the little islets in the lagoon.  And hit the back country regions.  There are hostile pirates and an old, haunted lighthouse.  For a bit of rum, the ghost will tell thee where to find his old ship and its haunted crew.  You can loot it but be careful of ghosts and drowning.  A blue potion would help with this particular dive.

You also have a couple of encampments plus the cannonade defenses to find.  There are of course several secret areas that can discover by yourself or with the help of treasure maps.  There is the tunnel near Samhayne’s that leads down to the beach with a pirate cave (and a huge gemstone).  There is an old, barricaded tunnel that holds the Gauntlets of Fury – just fire a cannon at it to break into the tunnel.  And then the Guild’s secret Hideout complete with a pirate ship and sea access.  As you can see, there is plenty of potential in terms of interesting loot and hand-crafted locations.  Certainly not the kind of thing you see in Elder Scrolls. Quality over Quantity; Hand-crafted vs RNG generation.  There will be more of these little asides to good exploratory finds in Ultima IX – in case you missed it on your playthroughs.

As always, you are encouraged to read both articles in their entirety; Iceblade is well on his way to writing a book about Ultima 9, and he’s an engaging writer moreover. There are few people outside of the Ultima 9 development team who know as much about the game as he does, and even I find I’m learning things as I read through his missives (I didn’t know about the first-person view option until today, for example.)