If you aren’t already participating in the official Ultima Forever forums (which I would encourage you to do, even if you aren’t at present able to play the game; the devs interact with the forum members a fair bit, and are fairly forthcoming), here’s what you need to know: initial feedback from people playing the Ultima Forever soft launch (myself included) has been positive in many respects, but negative in one key respect. That would be the issue surrounding equipment breakage in the game, and the attendant costs of repairing gear that gets damaged. At present, repairing gear is 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).

Which means that this is good news:

producer Carrie Gouskos says the biggest change – besides performance adjustments – has been to the cost of things.
In the free-to-play RPG, your character has items that will break over time. You’ll need to spend keys of various qualities (that can be earned in game, or purchased with real money) to repair those items.

Gouskos says player feedback made it clear that repair costs were too high, and repairs for the highest quality items have been lowered from about 60 keys to around 8 or 10. Additionally, the cost to increase storage space in your stash was lowered, as the team found it was a mistake to charge people an increasing cost for simply wanting to collect more of the game’s items.

There is, of course, one catch:

One price went up: The cost to loot the highest quality chests was raised a bit to make up for the decreased costs elsewhere. Gouskos also says that once players had good items on their characters, they tended not to loot as much as when they first started playing.

Having played the game a bit, I’ll just note that I agree with her observation in general. I’ve run through some dungeons four or five times now, and I tend to just ignore most/all chests when I do so. There’s really no need, after one has gained all the needed quest items that may be contained therein. And while it’s nice to try one’s hand at scoring another piece of epic gear, the reality on the ground is that it is really only nice to do so because the current repair costs are exorbitantly high. When those drop, when equipment repair becomes viable…scoring still yet more epic gear won’t be as much of a priority.

One of the things I’ve observed about Mythic, with respect to this project at least, is that they actually do take player feedback to heart fairly readily. Probably because they realize that they have some big shoes to fill by taking on the Ultima name, they’ve been fairly consistently open to fan feedback about the game…even about issues therewith.

Producer Carrie Gouskos said that the changes were necessary to keep from souring players’ experiences. “You’ve got to get people to love your game first,” she said, going on to remark that when player loyalty is established, revenue will follow.

The suggested “one time fee” to remove some or all of the freemium systems from the game is something I hope makes it into a future update.

And for those of you waiting to try the game on your home computer or Android device, well…consider this: you’re going to be getting your hands/thumbs on a much more polished game than us iOS users are playing at present. You’ll probably also see more character classes and in-game areas at your respective platforms’ launches than we are. Silver lining!