Might and Magic IX

Might and Magic IX leaves behind the Enroth-Xeen mythology of the previous installments and moves players to the new kingdom of Vori, inspired more by an antique and Mediterranean setting than classic fantasy. The player again assembles a party of adventurers, travels through an open world from a first-person perspective, completes quests for local factions, and gradually resolves a dispute between humans and the Umber race that grows into a wider conflict over the kingdom's fate. The engine was reworked compared to previous entries, and the combat system switched purely to real time - the turn-based option offered by earlier games in the series is absent here.

The ninth installment from 2002 is also the most controversial entry in the classic series. Publisher 3DO was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy at the time and forced the game to ship unfinished - without thorough testing, with a number of missing animations, an unbalanced combat system, and major bugs that could make it impossible to finish quests or get the story stuck. New World Computing collapsed shortly after release, and no further installment in a similar style was ever made, so the ninth game became an unplanned final entry in the series' classic era rather than a planned bridge to another sequel. The community later patched the game with unofficial fixes that removed the worst crashes and unblocked stuck quests, making it more playable today than it was at launch - yet it remains evidence of how publisher pressure and financial distress can mar even a work-in-progress game with an interesting world. Because of the circumstances of its creation, the ninth installment tends to be seen by fans as a sad final note for the studio that built the series over two decades, rather than as a fully-fledged sequel to the sixth and seventh games.

Why play it: Might and Magic IX mainly makes sense for series fans who want to see how the classic Might and Magic era ended, ideally with unofficial fix patches on hand.