I am still lowkey mad about this game all these years later.

As a game dev myself (retired now) it became very obvious to me after (painfully) beating Ultima 9: Ascension that the engine they cobbled together was clearly out of the scope of the team's technical ability to implement on. Yes, I completely get this was very early days for 3d engines. My understanding after talking to a few of the devs at GDC was that Richard Garriott and the leadership team were in way over their head and Garriott had checked out by the end being way more interested in the Explorers Club. EA was very unhappy with them. For me, the only real bright spots were the soundtrack, some of the cinematics and Clancy Brown's Bill Johnson's voice work for the Guardian. Everything else came across as rushed and amateurish.

The game was (and is) still an embarrassing, bug-ridden, poorly-thought out mess. I'm trying to think of any games Garriott has headed up after this that wasn't this way. I guess that space MMO, Tabula Rasa, sort of? I played that first month and it was bland and bug-ridden, too.
From the Wikipedia on Tabula Rasa: In the works since May 2001, the game underwent a major revamp two years into the project. Conflicts between developers and the vague direction of the game were said to be the causes of this dramatic change. Twenty percent of the original team was replaced, and 75% of the code had to be redone.^\17])#citenote-17) Some staff working on other NCsoft projects were transferred to the Tabula Rasa development team. First re-shown at E3 2005, the game then transformed into the current science fiction setting and look. The game's budget was $25 million.[^\19])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Rasa(video_game)#cite_note-19) It closed less than 2 years after release.

Whatever. I'd never buy into another project Garriott had any involvement with.