Without a doubt the Ultima series holds a special place in gaming history. Despite his original intentions not even George Lucas seems likely to complete the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies, and similarly few novel writers have managed to finish as many as nine books in a single series. Yet after 20 years Richard Garriot and Origin have done just this, ending the Ultima cycle with the release of the ninth and final Ultima (or arguably the tenth or twelfth if you count Ultima VII - Part Two and/or the Ultima Underworlds).
Sentimentality aside though, over five years after its predecessor, Ultima IX was finally released and was nothing short of a bug ridden and often impossible to complete game that bore greater resemblance to a game in the alpha stages of testing than a finished title. However Origin promised a huge patch to fix all of the showstopper bugs that prevented completing the game and to also improve the abysmal Direct3D performance and barely acceptable Glide performance.
Giving Origin the benefit of the doubt we decided to wait for the remastered version of the game, bug fixes and all, before giving it a look. Did Origin manage to fix all the horrible bugs that plagued the original release, and more importantly is there a good game beneath it all regardless of any problems?
Graphically, the Ultimas have tended to be quite ahead of their time. When Ultima VII came out, 486 computers were top of the range yet pretty much necessary to fully enjoy the game, not to mention it requiring a 386. But even judged by the standards of its predecessors, Ultima IX is graphically pretty much ahead of its time. Origin modelled an entire world in full, seamless 3D with no load times whatsoever between locations. Textures are invariably rich and well done (if often reused) and the characters are also rather detailed and well animated throughout the varied and often stunning locations. Further graphical variety is added via a well-implemented day/night cycle.
However such visual splendour is not without a price, and as with previous Ultimas this price is a hefty machine specification. In fact, there are very few machines around today that could truly do the game justice. As it was written primarily for Glide, Voodoo cards will get the best performance but even a P3-450 with a Voodoo 2 yields only passable frame rates with medium detail settings on at 800x600. At best, Direct3D performance is dismal. At 640x480 with minimum detail setting, Ultima IX practically brought a GeForce DDR to its knees, a feat we can quite certainly say no other game has come close to. Of course the rather gorgeous pre-rendered videos run fine and provide nice interludes to the otherwise choppy in-game action. It's quite a shame that Origin probably won't release any further patches, as there doesn't seem to be any good reason why they can't squeeze better performance out of the graphics engine.