Infinitron Dragon was browsing various pages at TVTropes — as one does — when he stumbled upon the following on the Video Games / Common Knowledge page thereat:

Ultima has the persistent rumor that there was going to be an Ultima VIII: Part 2. This was never the case, as work on Ultima IX began almost immediately after Ultima VIII was released. (Strangely enough no one seems to remember Forge of Virtue 2, a standalone RPG which had Arcadion the daemon as either a protagonist or antagonist, which was real but ended up on indefinite hold when other projects (like Bio Forge) took priority.)

Forge of Virtue 2?

For those unfamiliar with the title, Forge of Virtue was an expansion to Ultima 7: The Black Gate; it was not a standalone game, and required The Black Gate in order to install and play it. In modern terms, we would think of it as DLC, albeit Forge of Virtue was released on diskettes.

And as far as I’ve heard, there was never a planned follow-up to Forge of Virtue, especially not a standalone game bearing the same name. The daemon Arcadion did go on to serve as a recurring character in Ultima 7 Part 2: Serpent Isle and Ultima 8: Pagan, but not in a way that made him the focus of either game.

Now, it is a known thing that many projects were embarked upon at Origin Systems only to later be shuttered; some never made it that far past the proposal stage, some never made it past the design stage, and some were shuttered just shy of (or just after) going gold. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a game which followed up on the events of Forge of Virtue was one such project, but…well, has anyone ever heard anything about this before?