Well, imagine how happy I was to see this when I opened up the App Store app on my iPhone this morning:

Why yes, I shall update.

This update has been in the pipeline for a while now, and has been much-anticipated by those playing the game. Here’s the official description of changes that was posted to the App Store:

Take your hero to new heights – and increase their popularity with the locals – in our first update.

Check out these new features:

• Economy Balance – Item repair costs have been reduced and chest prices updated to reflect the quality and quantity of items received
• New Reputation Levels – See how you rank in 50 reputation levels per town! Existing players will automatically scale to the new curve
• Fast Travel – Quickly make your way across Britannia with bronze keys
• Improved Balance – Level curves have been improved, making higher levels more accessible
• Interface Improvements – New item color coding system makes it easier to identify superior items

We’ve also made some behind-the-scenes improvements to server and game stability, memory issues, client performance, and load times. Plus, we’ve addressed the content blocking issues which prevented players from progressing, and fixed the “Repair All” function.

Thank you for playing Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar!

The most significant part of this update, the one that has been much-anticipated by those playing the game, is the changes to its freemium model. Until this point, as I noted previously, repairing gear in Ultima Forever has been prohibitively expensive, costing a considerable number of silver or gold keys (repairing individual pieces of gear is done via silver keys; the “Repair All” feature charges gold keys instead). Post-update, the repair features of the game have become significantly cheaper.

To illustrate, here’s a screenshot I took just prior to updating the game. I have some damaged gear, and the “Repair All” cost can be seen toward the top of the inventory UI:

Ye Olde Repair Costs

And here’s a screenshot I took after updating the game; note the vastly reduced repair cost for the same damaged gear:

The colour-coding of gear according to tier is also a nice improvement.

This is going to be a significant improvement to the playability of the game. I’m also looking forward to the adjusted balance and level curves; at present, Level 8 in the game is kind of a plateau, and something of a tedious grind to actually get through. But get through it one must, as the plot cannot progress unless one reaches Level 9.

Oh, and of course, a new set of preview images were attached to the app for its update, and as has become normal for the App Store, these were made available in both iPhone and iPad aspect ratios.

For the record, the character portraits that grace each image are, in order: 1) a necromancer, 2) Katrina, 3) Geoffrey, 4) Mariah, and 5) the Gypsy.

At present, Ultima Forever is still available only in Canada, although getting the game on a non-Canadian iOS device isn’t exactly hard. If you’re curious to give it a try, hit up the Apple website to find an iTunes link for it.