Ultima Forever Went Offline at 9:08 AM (Mountain Time)
Many thoughts on this, and what it means for the future of Ultima. Maybe later this evening, time permitting.
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Anthony Salter says:
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Infinitron says: -
carademono says:
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Slashie says:
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“Ultima Online: New Legacy” Has Launched – The Ultima Codex says:
I hate how this means that there’s a official Ultima I’ll never have played. I played all others, even LoU and the GB games, but UF’s damn iOS exclusivity made it impossible for me to try it.
As for Ultima’s future, I guess the series will go on the way it has been these decades. As a forgotten game series whose IP holder doesn’t give two flying fucks about. If they had been serious about reviving the franchise, they would have produced a full-blown modern RPG, not a mediocre casual phone game that holds a score of about 61% at GameRankings.
From what I’ve seen, the only draw about this game seems to be nostalgia. The only way the series could regain some of its former glory is by producing a breathtaking game capable of attracting today’s gamers, not by appealing to nostalgia. Thanks to the series’ age and EA’s abandonment of it, the number of people that care about Ultima is extremely limited these days.
That’s part of it, but it would be unfair to say it’s the only thing that U4E had going for it. Like as not, it was the best RPG going for iOS, and not just because it was an Ultima. It was a genuinely solid game, well-designed for its platform, and really pretty fun to play. It certainly didn’t have all the RPG trappings one might expect from its namesake series, but it was still head and shoulders above just about any other iOS RPG you could name.
Apart, of course, from its freemium implementation. I’ve nothing against the concept of freemium personally, but it’s the one area where Mythic quite consistently dropped the ball with their mobile titles. And like as not, this contributed to the game’s under-performance and eventual failure.
The story in U4E — or, at least, the part of it that was completed — was actually pretty good, easily worthy of the Ultima label. And had Mythic been able to continue working on the game, had it been popular and profitable…oh, there was some good stuff coming. And I maintain the belief that had the game succeeded, it could have paved the way for a proper Ultima revival, especially now that the Dragon Age series is coming to an end.
But I suppose I’ll just have to be content with dreaming about that alternate future.
Meh,
i wanted to play it, i actually cared when they announced it but then it came for IOs wich i dont care about at all. Ea must be brilliant, they found the only way to not reach the fans.
It should have been on PC then: >Consoles>Macs>Androids>IOs.
I played it & I liked it, even when I’d ran through the same dungeons dozens and dozens of times.. but I also spent a lot of time running around very frustrated thinking, “well they COULD have done…”
Yeah, there was some of that, to be sure.
It’s a pity they took out boating, too. The system they had in the alpha was rudimentary, but still…woulda even nice to be able to sail about.
It had some pretty good graphics and gameplay. It enabled people around the world to play simultaneously with each other. What killed it for me, was the pay-to-play aspects of the game. If you don’t purchase gold keys, you will not get far in the game.