Game:

Ultima IX: Ascension (1999)

Duration: 7:01

44 views

1

Description on how to access the unused maps, thanks to Hacki Dragon:
http://hacki.bootstrike.com/english/articles_orig_maps.htm

Judging from the boss music, this might would have been involved in the ending.
The music actually starts only when we get near this mysterious orb area. Otherwise most of the map is simple blackness, then there's a place with textureless pitch black mountains, cloud as floor and some teleports. Also with a piranha.

The actual puzzle is either unfinished or just I didn't know how to handle it. It by all means starts with placing an orb on the free pedestal, but then getting the newer orb doesn't seem to do anything, the force field is not removed from the other pedestals, so I needed to use the fly cheat and camera tricks to place the additional ones. Maybe the central force field is removed when all normal pedestals are handled, but I don't see what to do with the oversized orb.

Studying the Bob White plot might lead to indications in these situations. This looks like it was some "corrupted void" and would have lead to the end, but in the original plot, the end is at Stonegate. Maybe when the plans were cut to rabbit tail size, this Anti-Void was still among them, just then there were even more cuts, leading to the finished Terfin.

Also, there's an empty room with big holes on this map somewhere.


NOTE:
See, this map is mostly black, I only insisted on finding something because the title hinted that there would be something grand. So, maybe there are more maps where one can find something interesting, just I haven't. There are more maps with huge blackness where one can't even calculate altitude and the rooms to see hang in the air at various independent locations, like at Stonegate Underground.
Some maps crash too often. Like there's a "Britain Sewers old" map which looked like an early Hythloth (I mean Britain Sewers), but it crashes for me after a bit of exploration, no matter where I go. There are also cities with obvious content, but they crash when I get close to the middle point and even the camera doesn't want to pan there. Furthermore, there are maps with an Avatar shadow on the ground (the one that is created when one activates the flying cheat), looking at it from up close crashes the map. (Maybe it's an invisible Avatar model.)
So, there's obviously much more to find than what I phisically can.

Cid made me aware of the u9tools that existed to extract information from the game files. While those don't work now, similar method (like, what the patch makers use to create their wonderful additions/fixes) could be used to check the contents of maps that can't be visually explored.

Other Statistics