Ultima IX: Ascension is a 1999 role-playing video game developed by Origin Systems and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows.

It takes place after the Avatar's escape from Pagan, where he is transported back to Britannia for one final battle with the Guardian, who is increasingly ruining the physical and moral fabric of that land by the use of eight columns.

Most areas of Britannia are blocked off until specific tasks are completed, reducing the amount of initial exploration available to the player.

In the beginning of Ultima IX, the Avatar had somehow returned to Earth for an unspecified amount of time before getting back to Britannia.

The Avatar is transported to Stonegate by Hawkwind the Seer (from Ultima IV), who informs him that great columns have appeared throughout the land, and their malignant influence has caused plagues, famine, and other natural disasters.

As the quest progresses, the Avatar learns that the Guardian has stolen the Runes of the Virtues and twisted them into the glyphs that form the heart of each of the columns.

The player is able to accomplish this via an Armageddon spell cast behind a Barrier of Life, which takes the Avatar and the Guardian to a higher plane out of Britannia.

These screenshots and clips pointed to a totally different plot from the released version, which many longtime fans of the Ultima saga agreed was unsatisfying and unrewarding.

With the help of his longtime friends Shamino and Iolo and Samhayne's protégé Raven, they uncover that Lord Blackthorn is secretly advising members of the council and goading them to war.

The Avatar and Lord British then travel to Stonegate for the final confrontation with the Guardian, but after it appears that they had successfully killed him, they are told that it is not enough.

The only way to destroy the Guardian is to extinguish the life force of Britannia itself, but the people may be saved by evacuating them to the island of Skara Brae and using the power of the Runes of Virtue to protect them.

This plot specifically compares the destruction of Britannia and the island of Skara Brae flying off into space with the Roger Dean paintings from the album Yessongs.

According to Garriott, this camera perspective was chosen because it limited rendering to the strip of the game world that was coming into view, allowing the team to include the sort of detailed objects that were standard for the Ultima series without making the frame rate unreasonably low.

The Ultima IX team experimented with different camera angles in the now hardware-accelerated 3D engine and decided that a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective, similar to that used in Tomb Raider, made for the best view of the graphics and could run well even when rendering the full 16-bit textures.

By the middle of 1998, del Castillo resigned due to "philosophical differences", Garriott took a more active role in the production of the game, and Seth Mendelsohn joined the team as lead designer.

Some elements of the previous storyline were kept, presumably to make use of the existing (and expensive) pre-rendered cinematics, but most of them were either heavily edited or used in a dramatically different context than originally intended, and sometimes both.

[15] It included an extra-large box, prints of in-game artwork, tarot cards, an ankh pendant, and special versions of the game books.

[17] Years later, digital video game distributor GOG.com re-released a downloadable version of Ultima IX on August 23, 2012.

One of the chief criticisms of Ultima IX was that the story did not do justice to the continuity of earlier parts of the series, and in fact, largely ignores it.

"[32] Drew Hunt of AllGame gave it three-and-a-half stars out of five, calling it "one of the most notable examples imaginable of a game that could have been among the best ever made in its genre if only its release had been held off another half year.

They wrote, "The fact is that on a top system with bug patches applied, Ultima IX is one of the best roleplaying games of all time.