Graphics

Oh My Gosh!

There's a reason we waited for Ultima IX so long. All those years that passed by were not wasted on frivolous things. More than any game we've seen to date, Ultima 9 has content. All of Britannia is done in amazing 3D. Cities, towns, villages, open roads… all there. OK, ok, so it's a bit smaller - Britain isn't a quarter of the size it was in Ultima VII. Britannia can't be as large as it used to because of the 3D, but it's so much more detailed. It looks all hand-made, none of that repetitiveness that prevails in tile-based games. The game world feels about as realistic as you can get.

Don't molest that swan man

You're the Avatar, not Batman

The textures, the models, the structures - it's just all there. They're done with painstaking detail and no two parts of Britannia are alike. From the wretched huts and sludge of Paws to Buccaneer's Den - the city on wood, Britannia has a different flavor no matter where you go. Lord British's castle is an impressive, expansive structure that is too big to see across from the inside if you have the minimum view distance set! Dungeons are no longer boring either. Old ruins, the labs of crazy old alchemists and deadly traps pervade Ultima's dungeons. If anything, they almost feel like Tomb Raider, though simpler and with less action for the most part.

With all this colored lighting, you'd think it was D3D native

Get a napkin son, you're drooling

There just isn't anything you can pick on in the graphical department. It's all stunning. Despite being such an old project, Ultima IX has kept up and even beaten the latest and greatest. What other game has a town with a castle and detailed people running around? With a mill that has a working water wheel? How about a dragon hovering over a pass, cutting off your access there? The dragons are amazing - so detailed and yet so smoothly animated…

But There's Always a Price

If you want the best, you pay for it. Ultima IX has a very high price of admission. Those system requirements they give are a joke. To play with that kind of system would mean turning everything down and the game is just plain ugly like that. Fog would limit your view distance severely to save on polygons and CPU crunching time. Low-end video cards won't be able to handle high resolutions, and even high-end D3D cards have trouble with the game. Despite all the patching to improve performance, Glide is still the best way to run it. A $90 Voodoo3 2000 outperforms a $200 GeForce.

Odd words for a monk...

Britain is no longer the city of Compassion I see

Despite the fixed memory leaks, the game is a RAM hog. For kicks, we tried it out on an otherwise identical machine that had 64MB instead of 256MB of RAM and things got pretty ugly. While initial performance was the same as the game kept reading scenes from the hard drive, whenever you went back to an area you'd visited before, the 256MB machine ran smooth while the 64 megger continued to suffering from HD access.