At the end of Serpent Isle, Guardian grabbed Avatar and whisked him away to a world of Pagan he had conquered long ago. Upon arrival to this world, anyone familiar with the Ultima series is in for their first shock: there is no way of choosing your avatar. Away are the customization possibilities, as from now on, you are locked as a blonde-haired man. The next shock is the lack of a party system. He is now all alone in the world, for the first time since Ultima 2. Walking is the only form of transport, as there are no horses nor carts or boats. The world interactivity has been cut out, so no baking bread or even sitting on chairs. The character development now happens by doing stuff, like using your weapons, which in turn increases strength and so on. There is no experience point-based levelling system. And finally, there is jumping, which caused a lot of problems during the initial release, as there were several moving platforms that were overly difficult to hit. The jumping was made easier in the later patches and as I've only played the patched version, I've never really experienced the full clunkiness of it.
It is easy to see why some Ultima fans were and still are disappointed by Pagan. It changed a lot in order to get a bigger audience and ultimately that ended up not really happening, despite it now resembles more of an action-adventure rather than an RPG. Initial shock aside, I do think Ultima 8 did a lot of things right too. Graphically it looks rather nice and the music is great. The story is darker and the atmosphere is brooding, even sinister, which quite suits what Avatar actually has to do in order to get home.
The tone of the story is set right on the opening, when after speaking to his saviour fisherman Devon, Avatar heads towards a nearby city of Tanebrare, the only big population centre of Pagan. He witnesses a brutal, bloody execution and is promptly threatened by the local guards. Constantly mocked by the booming voice of Guardian, Avatar begins to find people to help him get out and the solution to this problem is to learn the different magic schools of Pagan, like Necromancy and Thaumaturgy. These skills he then has to use to defeat the Titans of Pagan in order to get the powers he needs to get home.
But if you think for a moment what this means, you come to a terrible conclusion of Avatar actually destroying centuries-long practices of the world where he is trapped in. And ultimately, he is also destroying the world itself by removing the Titans who governed it. Like I said, the ideas behind Ultima 8 are a lot darker.
Interestingly, or unsurprisingly, enough, Ultima 8 didn't get any other additions besides a speech pack, which added speech for the Titans. There was a planned expansion called the Lost Vale, but it was cancelled in the end. This is a shame, as it would have added new playable areas for a game that somewhat suffers from a scaled-down world as well as all the other cut stuff. There isn't much that is known about it other than it would probably have introduced some of the story elements that were thrown around in Serpent Isle.
Surprisingly enough, Ultima 8 did get some pretty positive reviews, many praising it for its atmosphere, while pointing out it was more of an action game than an RPG. The engine ended up being utilized twice in non-Ultima, or even RPG, related Crusader games, which were through and through action. That probably tells a bit about the somewhat misguided focus of the engine itself, although I'm not personally too convinced of its fluentness as an action platform.
It doesn't take long for the Avatar to learn the lay of the land. Guardian has twisted the virtues and even Lord Blackthorne has returned. So Avatars task is to, again, collect all the virtue runes and cleanse the shrines after which he can finally take on the Guardian, who is revealed to be the dark side of Avatar he was separated from when he became the paragon of Virtue. The only way to win is rather bittersweet, as Avatar has to sacrifice himself with the Guardian and rise to the higher plane of existence, thus removing both of them from the world. Not that it comes as a big surprise, as the fortuneteller does blatantly tell you in the beginning, that this would be the last time Avatar would travel in either Earth or Britannia.
The development for Ultima 9 was paved with problems. Firstly, the criticism for Pagan altered the approach towards the design and the virtues and familiar Britannia were back in instead of the originally planned visit to Guardians homeworld. As the development for the game started after Ultima 8, around 1995, the original plan was to use a similar isometric 2D engine, but as time went on, it ended up using 3D instead as the technology was becoming more common. But when 1997 came, Ultima Online pushed the development of Ultima 9 into the back burner, making it a b-product when the Online iteration of the series became a huge moneymaker.
As time went on, the originally intended RPG elements began to shed and again, the game would be a single character instead of party-based. The companions are in the game, but only to talk with and to be rescued as they have fallen under the dark powers of the Guardian. Interestingly enough the gipsy fortune teller that had not been seen since Ultima 6 made a return, allowing some amount of character customization. But other than that, you are still the blonde-haired male. Some of the world interactivity made a return as well. You can, again, sit on chairs and bake bread if you want, but considering how limited the rest of the game is, the interactivity feels shallow and an unnecessary addon to fool people to think the game is more complex than it is.
In the end, Ultima 9 was a sales disappointment, reaching roughly 75 000 sold copies by August 2000. Ultima 8 had already sold less than EA hoped, but the failure of Ultima 9 was the final nail in the series coffin. Ultima Online was still going strong, but there would be no new single-player games. While the game itself isn't disastrously bad, it even got some game of the year-award nominations, the fans noticed the story ignored almost everything from the previous Ultima games. I'd even go as far as to claim it doesn't even feel like an Ultima game. All said and done, perhaps it was just natural for a game that had changed so many times during a couple of decades it was relevant just to fizzle out after it couldn't find its proper footing in a modern environment and changed business practices. The series did get its start in the early 1980s after all.
Soon after the release of Ultima 9. Garriott left EA and Origin. A bit later EA closed down Origin and is now using it as a name for their digital distribution platform, having nothing to do with the games series it was once home for. As for Garriott, he still dabbles in games. After Ultima, he worked on an MMORPG Tabula Rasas, which lived from 2007 to 2009. Currently, he is working on a rather lacklustre MMORPG Shroud of the Avatar. The game was meant to be a single-player/MMROGP hybrid and while it can be played as a singleplayer game, it is quite obvious there was no genuine thought put into it, as the world feels empty when there are no other people around to fill the world with their own housing. And the gameplay isn't much to celebrate either.
And thus ended the final saga of the Avatar and Britannia. While EA did announce Ultima X: Odyssey after Garriott had already left, that one ended up being cancelled despite development being pretty far. What remains of it are a couple of pixelated gameplay videos from 2004 and a relatively nice soundtrack that found its way to Youtube.
I don't really know if this is truly the end of Ultima as a series. Who knows, maybe Garriott will get the rights back or he has a lapse in his judgement and rejoins EA. Or perhaps some other developer is tasked in re-creating the series. But for now, all development, besides Ultima Online that is, of the series is modding done by the fans. So in my final piece for the Ultima series, I'll take a glance towards how those who actually play the games have improved them over the years.
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