Adam Rosenberg writes, at Joystiq, about his recent preview of Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar, and expresses his doubts about the game.

I walked away from a recent preview of Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar feeling anxious. It’s not that Dark Age of Camelot dev Mythic Entertainment has a bad game on its hands, I just don’t understand how it’s supposed to speak to me as a longtime Ultima fan.

Over the last decade, the legendary Ultima series has only yielded two new titles, both free-to-play endeavors: Lord of Ultima and the upcoming Quest for the Avatar. Unlike 2010’s browser-based Lord of Ultima MMORTS, Quest for the Avatar is a story-driven action RPG for tablets and PCs. At least with the latest game, we’re off to a more familiar start.

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Gameplay in Quest for the Avatar is straightforward enough: Your top-down view of the world offers different points of interaction depending on where you are. In towns and other social locations, you’re helping people in need resolve various Quandaries (capital Q), with your dialogue selections feeding into boosts to your virtue ratings.

Though Ultima Forever is not entirely without a familiar franchise vibe, I felt the game was somewhat generic. Paint-by-numbers Ultima, if you will. The thing that dazzled me about the original games was the feeling of openness and freedom. You weren’t just exploring the world, you were writing your own story within it.

That’s what’s lacking in Ultima Forever. You’ve got your virtues, you’ve got tarot cards, you’ve got a Lady British presiding over the land. There’s a story that ties to the fan-favorite Ultima 4. Yet there’s still this anxiety. The world feels empty and lifeless. You’re not exploring, you’re picking destinations off of an overworld map.

Having played the game myself, I can’t say I entirely disagree. Oh, sure, exploring the world of Ultima Forever isn’t the same as, say, wandering along the coastline in Ultima 7 looking for pirate hideouts, but then…wandering around the overland in Ultima 4 also fails to deliver that kind of experience. And Mythic have been very up front about the fact that they are building a game that is attempting to deliver more “stimulation” than “simulation”, because the latter is incredibly expensive to implement and Ultima Forever has been developed on a shoestring budget…Paul Barnett’s proverbial “chicken and spoon”, if you will.

That’s not to say that Rosenberg is right…nor is it to say he’s wrong. The problem, really, is akin to Luther’s paradox, to wit: there are as many definitions of what feels like an Ultima as there are Ultima fans. And what doesn’t feel very Ultima-like to one fan, or what isn’t considered necessary to the Ultima experience by another, may to a third fan be a key component of Ultima gameplay, something not to be missed.

Of course, given that the series ran for a good two decades, through era after era of tectonic shifts in technology and computational power, this in turn means that not every Ultima game actually delivers what each fan considers to be an authentic Ultima experience! For me, the standard is Ultima 6; the first few games in the series feel strange and even a tad foreign to me, whereas most of the later games (Ultima 8 excepted, somewhat) feel familiar. For others, the standard may be Ultima 4, or Ultima 7, or even Ultima Online, and everything else pales in comparison thereto.

Frighteningly, we’re all right, because the Ultima games were, ultimately (heh), about our experience of them. So naturally, the best Ultima is the one that most sharply and concretely defines our experience of the series. And everything that isn’t that Ultima feels strange by comparison.

That, and I’d rather take Richard Garriott’s word for it.

I should really write up my own thoughts on Ultima Forever’s gameplay, having spent a good number of hours tooling around with development builds of it fairly recently. If I can find time next week, maybe I’ll do that.