Paul Izod, who has produced several excellent Ultima retrospectives in recent months (which I think most of you have enjoyed reading), has published a review of Mythic’s Ultima Forever. And — perhaps not surprisingly — he’s of two minds about the game:

All in all, as a MMORPG optimised for mobile devices (primarily tablets) Ultima Forever is an excellent game. It really is. finding a group is quick and simple, the visuals are distinctive and the action simple enough to be manageable on touch screens, while containing enough variety to remain interesting. Taken on its own, Ultima Forever is a great little mobile game.

But, there’s a “but”:

As an Ultima game, I found the game experience an immensely frustrating one…the use of the virtues as a simplified experience point system, as mentioned before, is the biggest issue. While not inherently wrong, the feeling is one of cheapening the once sacrosanct and idealised values the virtues previously represented. This may sound melodramatic, but bear in mind that the purpose of the original Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was to become the embodiment of the virtues. To now quantify the amount of humility your character has through slashing through dungeons doesn’t really seem appropriate somehow.

His singling out of the use of gaining in each of the Eight Virtues as an abstraction of experience points is a curious one, since some other reviews (not all, mind you) have pointed to the free-to-play mechanics as the biggest problem with the game. Izod barely mentions these, instead focusing on the game’s approach to the philosophical system that has formed the core of much of the Ultima series.

Which is fair. Personally, I quite like how Mythic have woven the Eight Virtues into the game, but it can be a bit on the nose at times, and the connection between Virtue and experience in other Ultima titles has never been so explicit (even in Ultima 6, where you had to level up at a shrine).

Still, if I might be permitted to cite something here:

In #U4E, the Spirituality Mantra Quest begins the moment the player starts playing the game.

— The Ultima Codex (@UltimaCodex) June 13, 2013

That tweet was pulled almost verbatim from a sheet of Ultima Forever-related trivia that Mythic supplied, and it kind of implies that the game tracks your character’s progress, as pertains to the Virtue of Spirituality, from the moment you start playing it. Which, in turn, suggests that even if there isn’t an overt UI element that displays your level in each Virtue, the game is nevertheless tracking you as you level up in each of them.

What Mythic might do with that information as the plot of the game progresses, I have no idea. But since there seems to be reason to suspect that it’s there, there’s reason to suspect they have plans in mind to use it.