Ultima Forever Updated: Complete the Quest for the Avatar
An update for Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar went live on the Apple iOS App Store today. And while I can’t find patch notes on either the game’s official Facebook page or its forums, there is some descriptive text to be found on the iOS app page proper:
In our newest update, players can now complete the Quest for the Avatar and become the Avatar of Renown! We have also made a number behind-the-scenes optimizations to enhance your gaming experience.
Okay, so it’s not that much to go on.
I’m not quite sure what “complete the Quest for the Avatar” means, and frankly I’m a tad concerned. After all, ostensibly at least, the Quest for the Avatar is the main quest in the game (given its title); is this patch meant to usher in a premature end of new content development for Ultima Forever? Or is this merely the end of the game’s first chapter, as was described by Mythic some time ago, with new quests and areas coming up in a future update that will allow Avatars to pursue the daemon Horrath and rid Britannia of the Weep?
My hope is for the latter, of course, but I’m…no longer as optimistic as I once was that such will be the case. Hopefully the patch notes, whenever they get published, will shed some light on the matter.
I’m guessing the Android version has gone the route of Duke Nukem Forever?
I believe this is the end of the game. No one from Mythic is checking the forums, the login error is still occurring with no one at Mythic addressing it, the notes on the update were vague as compared to previous updates, and no patch notes on the forum when in the past they have been posted as soon as the patch went live. I will have to check the dungeon keeper forum for patch notes since it was updated at the same time as the U4E update was available. Mythic is so unprofessional and it is very sad how this game ultimately turned out
I checked the Dungeon Keeper forum and they posted the patch notes a couple of days ago. Gene and the team at Mythic are slacking bigtime. I hope EA gives the Ultima franchise to another division in the company because Mythic is dropping the ball and killing this game.
They need to shop around the IP altogether. Their shot in the dark wasn’t answered by “Ouch!”, but a rather deafening silence. A shame, but not unexpected. Hoarding isn’t a virtue; sell the IP to someone who truly wants it and stop poking the fans in the eye with a stick.
Couldn’t agree more! EA needs to offload Ultima and Wing Commander (probably several other IPs) to devs that actually want to do something with them.
Wow. The real shame is that only iPhone users got to ever see this after the Alpha test. Who wants to play an RPG on a phone? Android tablet users got nothing, and PC users (which every single RPG gamer is), got nothing. It was a huge, buzz-killing miscalculation to stop the PC development just because “mobile is hot”. Mobile is great for time-killers and mindless action and reflex games. Games with text? Long multi-session games? What were they thinking?
Well…me, for one. And probably a fair number of others; there are some excellent RPGs available on iOS, and a few on Android as well.
Why only target iOS? I agree, it was a big miscalculation. They should have used Unity and gone cross platform. There’s no reason not to.