Mythic’s Paul Barnett and Jeff Skalski both tweeted a link to this editorial at Kotaku, which looks at the development history of Ultima Forever, the ways in which it draws upon classical Ultima for inspiration, and what the future may hold for it, its team, and the Ultima namesake.

Forever was always meant to be a love letter to Ultima IV, the heralded fantasy RPG involving not just combat but virtues and moral quandaries (Your house is on fire… do you save your mother, your sister or the dog?) sculpted in the 1980s by Garriott, aka “Lord British.” Somewhere along the way it came to seem like an impossible creation.

Last spring, [Mythic studio GM Paul] Barnett was telling me and other reporters that the existence of Forever was “insane,” that “we’ll probably never make a game like this on the iPad again”—unless it’s a smash success, in which case, it’ll take them three years.

[Producer Carrie] Gouskos had been telling me that they’d hoped to follow it up with Ultima Fivever, Sixever and then get to the other one they really, really wanted to remake and create Ultima Sevenever.

Those of us who had the chance to visit Mythic back in 2011 and see the game were told something similar; the ideal here would be the creation of a new series of games, rather than a one-off title. Ultima Forever was intended to be a fork in the lore of the series, set after Ultima 4 (but, as noted above, paying homage to it with thematic similarities, among other things). Its sequels, should they come along, could have followed the source material rather more closely, albeit still offering their own spin on the events in each.

Of course, the game had already been in development for about a year by that time, and had already undergone some significant changes from what it had started as:

Barnett told me that, back when Mythic was BioWare Mythic, their little Ultima-remake-that-could was “BioWared.” That meant, he said, that they decided to “make it big, put a lot of story in it, be brave, make it bold.” One of the heads of BioWare loved Ultima IV. The other loves MMOs. Do the math. This was an expensive project, three years in the making.

Those of you who have been following the saga of BioWare as a label within EA will recall that about a year ago, studios which had been rebranded as “BioWare [name here]” were suddenly shedding the “BioWare” prefix. Victory Games is one example, and Mythic is another. And around the same time they reclaimed their name, their business model also transitioned rather drastically:

Some time later, Mythic was just Mythic again and another fiefdom at EA, EA Mobile, became in charge of this BioWare-size Ultima project. Too bad it broke EA Mobile’s rules of thumb.

“We break many rules on mobile,” Gouskos told me. “Too big (size-wise), too connected (they want games to have offline content), dungeons too long (we had some dungeons that were 45 minutes—but we added 100 five-minute dungeons to compromise), way too many words (too much localization cost), and not enough free-to-play mechanics. Definitely grateful to EA Mobile for being bold and letting us release this type of game given that it breaks so many rules.”

Barnett was happy that EA Mobile took the risk, too. They assume that there can be flukes on mobile, he said. Sometimes a game that shouldn’t succeed does, and, hey, most of Ultima Forever wasn’t financed by the EA Mobile division of EA, so why not? “Mobile were smart enough to go, ‘As we didn’t pay for it—because it’s come to us [nearly] finished—yeah, we’ll release it. Sure. Because it might be an outlier,'” Barnett said. “They basically get an enormous RPG for free.”

And yes, the free-to-play mechanics come up for discussion…albeit not in the same way that some reviews have dwelt on. Rather like the reviewers at Cult of Mac, Kotaku here takes a fairly amiable stance:

Gouskos said that the game is even getting some “flak” from free-to-play experts about being “too free.” There’s no energy mechanic. There’s gear to repair, but you don’t have to repair it and can just get new stuff. “We’ve even done a bunch of stuff recently to show players why they don’t have to spend real money (like try to make it very obvious that you can repair with silver keys, changed fast travel from silver to bronze, etc.) It was never our goal to make a huge cash grab off this game. We really just like making games and want to make enough money to keep doing it.”

To that end, in the first week of release, Ultima Forever’s had an in-app-purchase sale of 400 keys for $20, down from $50, with the intent, Mythic says, to let people who want to just throw down a lump of money to pay for the whole game to get pretty much anything they’d need in terms of inventory expansion, adding some abilities and being able to have a great time.

I’ve excerpted a lot here, but I want to call out one more paragraph too…the one that concludes the editorial:

Both Barnett and Gouskos gave off the feeling that they’d survived some accidents to get Ultima Forever made, that they’d navigated a maze of EA needs and wants and somehow wound up with a game that broke some rules while making the most of EA’s mighty resources. They made their game sound like magic. Or a miracle. Something that shouldn’t be—but is. It’s hard not to be rooting for them.

This is a game which was nearly cancelled at least twice; which existed as a spare-time, shoestring-budget project for much of its development; which jumped between platforms at least almost as many times as Ultima 9 jumped through major plot revisions; and which has seen its development characterized and shaped by a team that demonstrates genuine passion for Ultima and its fandom. It has survived shakeups at Mythic, EA’s recent downturn in the market, and the withering commentary of some of Ultima’s most devoted fans.

And on top of that, it is actually a pretty fun game that, in particular, shows a lot of love for the Eight Virtues, and tries to explore their applicability to the lives of workaday Britannians. The combat and story are quite decent, as well.

I quite agree: it’s hard not to root for that.