The Weep prevails:

Strangers, Seekers and Avatars all,

While the past year has certainly been quite the adventure – in Britannia and beyond! – that adventure is now drawing to a close, as the time has come for us to say goodbye. As of Aug 29th 2014 (11:00 AM EDT), Ultima Forever will be shutting down its online services, and will no longer be available to play.

This was a very difficult decision for us to make. We’ve seen the game through ups and downs, and hope that you’ve enjoyed playing it every bit as much as we had making it! Through it all, it’s been players like you who’ve made it all worthwhile.

To thank everyone for their loyalty and support, for our last month of live operations, the following changes will be made to the game:

• Significantly boosted Virtue and Reputation rewards
• Equipment degradation to be disabled (no damage to worn/equipped items)
• Increased drop rate of Gold keys
• The in-game store will no longer sell premium currency (Silver and Gold keys)

We invite you to visit our Facebook page to share your favorite game memories with us. We’d love to hear from you:

https://www.facebook.com/UltimaForever

From Lady British, the Gypsy, and all the other citizens of Ultima Forever’s Britannia: Thank you for your time spent in our world; we’re going to miss you very much!

Remember and uphold the Virtues, always!
– The Ultima Forever Team

This is…profoundly disappointing news. Not wholly unexpected; Ultima Forever has not seen significant maintenance since February, apart from a fix for the game’s chat system. And the February update wasn’t particularly significant either; it basically unlocked a series of “infinite” dungeons and unlocked the ability to attain Avatarhood, a move which some took to mean that the game was being put out to pasture. Those sentiments have been vindicated today, unfortunately.

The official FAQ that Electronic Arts published concerning Ultima Forever’s impending shutdown is about as boilerplate as such things come:

1. What is happening to Ultima Forever? Is it being retired?
On August 29, 2014, EA will be retiring Ultima Forever on iOS devices, which means that the game will no longer be available for play.

Please see our official sunset announcement here on the forums.

2. Why is Ultima Forever being retired?
EA is focusing its efforts on developing new and exciting titles, as well as bringing new content and updates to existing popular games. As such, we had to make the difficult decision to reallocate development resources to other social and mobile games to ensure a continuation of the best game-play experience possible. EA deeply values all of its players and is dedicated to offering the most fun and engaging experiences across all of our current and future titles.

3. What can I play now?
EA offers a variety of other fun mobile and social games for you to try. Feel free to check these out on your device’s app store.

http://www.ea.com/iphone

or

http://www.ea.com/android

or

http://www.ea.com/kindle

4. What if I have an existing balance of Gold, Silver and/or Bronze Keys in Ultima Forever?
We encourage any player who has a remaining balance of currency to spend them prior to the game being retired on August 29, 2014. Any remaining currency left on players’ accounts at that point will automatically become invalid.

But of course this doesn’t tell the whole story, does it? Recall that not all that long ago, EA Mobile head Frank Gibeau had this to say about the mobile re-imagining of Dungeon Keeper:

“…when you bring in a group of people to Dungeon Keeper and you serve them, create a live service, a relationship and a connection, you just can’t pull the rug out from under them. That’s just not fair. We can sustain the Dungeon Keeper business at its level for a very long time. We have a committed group of people who are playing the game and enjoying it. So our view is going to be that we’ll keep Dungeon Keeper going as long as there’s a committed and connected audience to that game. Are we going to sequel it? Probably not. [Laughs] But we don’t want to just shut stuff off and walk away. You can’t do that in a live service environment.”

Now, I observed, in remarking on Gibeau’s remarks, that Ultima Forever probably didn’t even do as well — financially — as Dungeon Keeper did, and Gibeau interview stated rather plainly that Dungeon Keeper was no success in and of itself. But I took Gibeau’s comments about not wanting to “just shut stuff off and walk away” when there was still “a committed and connected audience to that game” as a potentially — if perhaps vanishingly — hopeful sign that Ultima Forever might also continue to be supported, or at least have its online services maintained, as long as the game kept its players and kept bringing in money.

And I know it still had players; I saw them every time I logged in.

But what it probably didn’t have was much in the way of was paying players. Like as not, the game fell victim not to its freemium, microtransaction-based monetization model directly, but rather (I suspect) to the gradual neutering of that model in response to fan outcry. Not that the original monetization scheme of the game was great; it wasn’t. Gear broke too often, and cost too much to repair. Loot (in the form of keys, the in-game currency) was rather more scarce, and the exchange ratio between Bronze and Silver keys was too unbalanced. And the key bundles cost quite a lot for what little they allowed you to do. And fans reacted to all this…rightly so.

Mythic, to their credit, made a number of changes over the course of the first few weeks and months of the game’s soft launch, as well as after its global release. But if anything, they were too gradual about it, and too unfocused at first. Simply dropping repair costs on items helped, for example, as did overhauling the item damage rate some months later. The thing is, those changes should have been made in tandem. Ultimately, it was the gear breakage rate that was the issue; as long as it remained high, gear repair was always going to be significant currency sink, even with lower repair prices. This, in turn, had the effect of making gear too disposable; players just wore out gear as they went, replacing it with whatever could be scrounged from chests in dungeons along the way.

What Mythic probably should have done was roll out the game’s vanity item store in tandem with the above changes, and then much earlier on. Granted, they probably didn’t have the development staff or budget to pull this off…but I suspect it might have helped the game’s bottom line.

I would suggest, as required reading for added context, Rock, Paper, Shotgun!’s examination of just how far $20 would go in Cryptic’s free-to-play Neverwinter MMORPG. The answer, surprisingly, was “quite far”; indeed, RPS found that they really didn’t need to spend the $20 at all; in-game currency doesn’t have to be spent on needs…only, really, on wants. Now, arguably, a desktop MMORPG is quite a different thing from a mobile MMORPG in many respects, but the point is that Mythic eventually set themselves up a somewhat similar freemium model that could have worked for Ultima Forever. It just took too long to get to that point, because they got too bogged down in dealing with the moment-to-moment issues with the game’s monetization instead.

Or so I suspect.

Could the game have been saved? There’s no way to know that, of course. But I think it could have had a chance. And its shutdown really is a significant loss for the mobile space; there are only a handful of decent RPGs in any mobile app ecosystem these days, and even less that actually have a well-enough-told story and a body of lore that players will desire to connect with. The current trend in mobile RPGs seems to be…card games, basically, that have a thin veneer of RPGness to them. How many engaging, open-world RPGs are there for mobiles? Very few. And now, one less.

Anyhow, there’s a lot of content that had been planned for inclusion in Ultima Forever that we now just won’t ever get to see. Whither Serpent’s Hold? What of the Abyss? What of the supposedly pacifist Druid character class, or the boats that could be sailed across the waves of Britannia’s oceans?

Well, as it happens, I’ve got a few pieces of Ultima Forever artwork sitting in a folder on my hard drive…things which never saw the light of day, and now will not see inclusion in the game. And since they won’t ever feature in the game, they really don’t count as spoilers anymore…so I think I’ll release them over the next little while. Here’s three pieces to begin with. Up first are a pair of rather silly images, showing off some of the outfits that had at one point been planned and built for Fighters and Mages:

These are older images; you’ll note the presence of the BioWare logo, for example. And I’m not sure whether Mythic were entirely serious about all of the outfits depicted, although I suppose two of the Fighter outfits could have been Easter and Thanksgiving vanity items.

This next image, though, may impress somewhat more:

This is a part — a small part, at that — of the Stygian Abyss. Specifically, this is the quarters of the demon Horrath, who accosts the player in the opening sequence of the game and seems to be responsible for the Weep infestation that is consuming Britannia. This would have been the site of one of the final battles of the game’s plot…or, at least, the part of it that pertained to solving the Weep crisis.

I have more Stygian Abyss artwork to share, and was able to see even more of it during my visits to Mythic. It would have been a massive dungeon, genuinely worthy of its name rather than being just a little ten-minute romp through a cave-looking area. If there’s a part of Ultima Forever’s failure that I regret more than anything else, it’s that we won’t get to see the Abyss in-game. And, of course, that PC and Android gamers won’t get to experience the game.

That’s enough for tonight, I think. If you want to further discuss things, feel free to chip in a comment below…or, if you’re on Facebook, join in the discussion already taking place the Ultima Dragons group.