Ultima Forever: Post-Launch Issues, Hotfix Released

Mythic have posted an update to both the Ultima Forever Facebook page and forums, addressing some of the issues and questions that have come up in the first 24 hours since the game’s worldwide launch:

Happy Friday, everyone!

As we come to the end of our first 24-hour period of worldwide launch, there are just a few items we wanted to address, in response to feedback we’ve received from folks here, and other social media outlets:

A – We’ve heard from some of you regarding crashing issues that you’re experiencing. Certainly, we understand how frustrating this can be; it’s definitely not something that we want to mar our players’ experience with the game. For those of you who are having issues with persistent crashes: If possible, it would help us out a great deal if you could visit the following thread on our internal forums, and provide the requested information, so that we can try to isolate the problem(s):

http://forums.ultimaforever.com/index.php?topic=112.msg411#msg411

(You can also feel free to Message us here with the information!)

Our engineers and development team are actively looking into possible causes and fixes. (In fact, I’m hearing we may have a hotfix in the not-too-distant future that will hopefully address some issues!)

B – Several of you have (passionately!) inquired about non-iOS platforms for the game. We’ve definitely heard you! We are currently evaluating the market and what is needed for conversion, and have been working on an Android version for a few months. There have been discussions about release on a few different platforms, in fact. As we monitor the overall success of Ultima Forever on the iOS platform, those discussions will continue.

In order to keep abreast of the latest updates about our game (and the most current status of other platforms), if you haven’t yet done so, you might consider registering at our internal forums (forums.ultimaforever.com), in addition to following our posts here on Facebook and Twitter (@UltimaForever).

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

If you’ve been experiencing crashes in the game — I know I have — please report them to Mythic! Personally, I suspect the issue is at least partially tied to the vastly increased population on the server:

Lots of people in-game

Lots of people in-game

Not that it’s a bad thing that there are way more people in-game.

Additionally, Mythic have issued a new hotfix to temporarily alleviate some of the more severe issues:

A few fixes have gone Live this afternoon, in an attempt to address some of the crash, lag and performance issues that have come to our attention since yesterday’s launch. This likely won’t fix all the scenarios that have been reported, but it’s our hope that several of them will be addressed with these fixes:

  • We’ve reduced the population cap for social instances to reduce client lag/latency, hopefully reducing some crashing.
  • We’ve implemented a few fixes for some players who were getting stuck in the Tutorial
  • We’ve identified an issue where players would sometimes get a black screen upon zoning, becoming stuck in the process. This has been addressed with this hotfix.

There’s one more fix that should be going live tomorrow morning:

  • Regarding the Folly at Folley quest (where it is necessary to interact with the Battered Keg): previously, it was not possible to advance this portion of the Quest for the Avatar line until your character reached level 5. Once the fix goes live, it will now be possible to interact with the keg at level 4.

So if the game world doesn’t look quite as densely packed as in the screenshot above, don’t worry; it’s just a stopgap measure to reduce crashes related to the population of the non-instanced areas of servers.