Arcania - Preview Extract

Strange coincidence that you mention that game, a friend of mine just gave me a copy of U9, and I was debating whether or not it was worth playing...

If you can live with how it has aged, I'd say definitely.

It gets a lot of flak - but I think it's one of the first good 3D free-roaming games out there. The dungeons are particularly great.

These days, the world will seem extremely small and compact - but the engine was pretty impressive back then.
 
Ultima 9 is a solid game. By far not as bad as some reviewers made it. Its biggest problem is that it's relatively similar to Gothic - and simply not as good.
 
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Not only relatively similar. Ultima 9 is the most similar game to Gothic. But of course it came out two years before Gothic, so PB had all the time in the world to learn from the mistakes made in U9.
One of the German print mags wrote in their review "Gothic is the game Ultima: Ascension should have been". (or "could"? Who cares. ;) )
If you try it google for the fan patches. They repair quite a bit. And bring a lot of time. U9 is as long as G3.
 
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I don't think I ever tried ultima IX either . . . at the time it came out I think it was too high spec and i never went back, is there anywhere it can be legally downloaded or purchased?
 
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Only eBay I guess.
 
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And bring a lot of time. U9 is as long as G3.


Really? :( I was hoping that wouldn't be the case. With all the games I still have to play, as well as the deluge of releases we're about to face, I don't have time for a game of that size right now.
 
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U9 might be a solid game, but it wasn't an ULTIMA in the opinion of most fans!!
 
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Just got done playing U9 for a few hours. Can you believe it *still* runs like crap?!

Shouldn't be that bad.

I seem to recall the mouse speed being extremely sluggish - so you might have to adjust it outside the game.

What else is wrong with it?
 
Yeah mouse speed is terrible, you have to slide the mouse 2-3 times just to do a turn. The game just seems somewhat unresponsive all around though, and every time I click on a book, including my journal, there's a 2-3 second pause.

The UI is also terrible in this game, I would probably use a key-remapper if I was to seriously play it. I can't believe they didn't include an option to remap keys.
 
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Yeah mouse speed is terrible, you have to slide the mouse 2-3 times just to do a turn. The game just seems somewhat unresponsive all around though, and every time I click on a book, including my journal, there's a 2-3 second pause.

The UI is also terrible in this game, I would probably use a key-remapper if I was to seriously play it. I can't believe they didn't include an option to remap keys.

Yeah, the pause is a well-known problem. I'm not sure if the original patches ever improved this - but I seem to recall geting used to it.

Something you may not be aware of:

There's an "option" menu that you can access by pressing something like alt-O or ctrl-O. Can't quite remember it, but it certainly wasn't clear that this existed even back then.

You can then flick pages in a book for various settings - but I'm not sure about keymapping. It's been too long.
 
Is anyone else put off by the fact you are playing a different nameless hero? Or did I read that wrong or something? This already doesn't sound like a proper Gothic game, more like a "fast food" rpg.
 
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After success of Oblivion so many developers try to copy-paste that game :|
 
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