Mythic have also posted the third and final portion of their “Ask the Devs” responses to the Ultima Forever forums. This time around, the developers get to have their say about a few things:

What has been your most challenging part of the development process for U4E?

Graham Bennett, Lead Designer:
“How much of Ultima IV to copy, and how much to change the bits that we didn’t want to copy. We wanted to stay true to the spirit of Ultima IV, without just being a remake of it.”

Carrie Gouskos, Senior Producer:
“The biggest challenge I faced was maintaining the integrity of Ultima and trying to find some way that people will actually look at the game and say, ‘This game deserves a certain amount of money’.

In this free-to-play environment, there is a bit of an entitlement out there that people don’t want to have to spend any money…which is fine, as long as we can keep doing what we’re doing.”

John Thornhill, Designer:
“The most challenging part of the process has been designing and sometimes re-designing for mobile. Besides the obvious control scheme change going from PC to mobile, mobile users have different tastes, play styles, and attention spans. It was hard sometimes shortening and simplifying some of the content to make it more accessible to mobile users while still maintaining the fun, the huge story, and the depth/breadth of the game. Fortunately, I think we succeeded in that: this game is HUGE compared to every other mobile game I’ve seen and yet it is very easy to pick up and play for a quick session if you’re short on time.”

Justin Lyle, Designer:
“Being tasked with overseeing localization of over 100,000 lines of text into five other languages (French, German, Russian, Korean, and Japanese) was definitely the most challenging part for me. I really wanted to make sure that we had full coverage on this. Originally this wasn’t a game that we even intended to translate. So catching up and cataloging everything we’ve done over the last couple of years of development and bringing it all together and translated accurately was a monumental task.”

Jason Mohr, Designer:
“Adapting the things that make MMO’s and RPG’s fun and worthwhile to the mobile platform. Being mobile affects every aspect of the game and in ways you can’t predict. The obvious challenges are controls, combat and interface, but some of the things that were harder to overcome as designers are telling the stories we want in limited text space, creating compelling dungeons that better match typical mobile play times, and trying to capture the spirit of Ultima games.”

As always, click on through to read the rest!