Lord of Ultima Shutting Down
My fellow Shroud of the Avatar moderator, Miv, brought the latest addition to EA’s Online Service Updates page to my attention this morning. But before we get to the latest entry on the page, let’s look at the pre-amble text on the page in question:
The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy. The development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into these games almost as much as the customers playing them and it is hard to see one retired. But as games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level — typically fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles — where it’s no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running. We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.
So…this page is the page on which EA lists game-related online services that they will be shutting down. Shutdown dates are also included on the page. Bearing that in mind, here is the most recent entry on the page:
May 12th, 2014 — Online Services Shutdown
- Lord of Ultima
Lord of Ultima was never all that well-received in Ultima fan circles, and indeed it really didn’t have any significant relation to the lore and mythos of the main series. Mostly, it just borrowed the names of the Ultima games (and locations from same) to serve as labels within what was ultimate a very Evony-like game. (Not that it was a bad game, taken independent of its name. Amongst the Evony clones, it was easily one of the more engaging and well-implemented.)
So four years and a month (give or take a day) after its open beta, Lord of Ultima will be no more. That’s not a bad run, and certainly the game had the (dubious) distinction of outliving its parent studio. Nor, I suspect, will it be much missed by Ultima fans.
Nevertheless, I find myself concerned by this turn of events. And I’ll address that more in a bit here.
Even though it was barely related to Ultima, it’s sad seeing this game go. I doubt they will give us the server code or anything so we can play offline like happened with some facebook dragon age game, but I really hope they do or at least archive it so that we can get our hands on it in the future.
This is the reason why I don’t like online games that much, they have an expiration date, and I really take my time to play through some games, and really like to play them again years from now.
Open sourcing the code would generate some nice goodwill amongst fans.
I didn’t care for the game at all, but it does have some fans.
I wish EA would just sell the rights to Richard Garriot. Same with Wing Commander, sell it to Chris Roberts. They [EA] clearly don’t know how to handle either property. I’m not saying Ultima Forever is bad (I wouldn’t know), but if it doesn’t go any further than an F2P iOS game, well let’s just say that the name “Forever” probably won’t be all that applicable.
Thanks for the tip! I’ll look into it, and will likely post something about it soon.