MMORPG.com took another look at Ultima Forever while it was being shown off at E3, and came away with an overall positive assessment of the game. They didn’t raise significant quibbles about the game’s monetization system this time around, but they did remark that the Virtue (experience) system in the game had some drawbacks:

The end goal is to level up all the Virtues so you can access everything, which I honestly feel sort of undermines the potential for this system to create a meaningful roleplaying experience. If you’re a completionist, you’re going to want to eventually max out all of your Virtues so that you can access everything and this sort of runs counter to the notion of developing your character along a certain path, in my opinion. I was initially excited when told about this system only to feel deflated just a minute or two later into the explanation.

That said, they did like some aspects of how the game handles Virtue:

There are some neat aspects of the Virtue system, however. For example, you’ll earn Compassion points simply for playing with your friends. If you’re higher level than the friend you’re playing with, you’ll earn Sacrifice points for sparing your time to help them, while they will earn Humility points for being humble enough to ask for your help. The Honesty Box is probably the most amusing example of the system at work, though. Basically, you can find Honesty Boxes in the game that either have loot in them or they don’t. If there’s loot in the box, the person who opens it can take all of the loot for themselves, but they gain no Honesty for doing this. They can split the loot with their group, which means they get less loot, but they also earn some Honesty for doing this. There’s a little twist that should help point out some more shady players, too. Taking the loot for yourself will often give you a black helm and so if you find other players walking around with black helmets on you may want to think twice about trusting them.

Click on through and read the whole thing; they cover some other aspects of the game’s play experience as well.