Late last night, a new update for Ultima Forever went live on Apple’s iOS App Store. As detailed on both Mythic’s Ultima Forever forums and on the game’s App Store page proper, the main focus of this update to the game was performance optimization:

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar’s latest update features significant performance optimizations. The changes made will improve gameplay experience on all currently supported devices, but will be most noticeable on the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, iPad (3rd generation) and iPad mini. Highlights include:

Graphics optimizations:

• Improved frame rate and performance while navigating the game world
• Better camera handling for more fluid character movement
• Optimized user interface (UI) elements to improve responsiveness (particularly with inventory)
• Smoother in-game cinematics, notably during the airship sequence

Audio optimizations:

• Added HDR Audio and tweaked settings for headphones
• Lowered resources needed for audio to improve game performance overall while still providing same high fidelity audio experience.

As always, thank you for playing Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar!

Those of you who are playing the game on previous-generation iOS devices will have to let us know whether this update has significantly improved the performance of the game for you.