The Minstrel’s Fable is — was — an “Ultima-like sandbox and massively multiplayer online role-playing game” that came to light in the latter half of 2019. At the time, a browser-based playable demo was available, and the game strove for a very “old school” aesthetic (e.g. the keyboard was the primary control interface, the game was tile-based, etc.). The demo was to be available for only a little while, as the team behind the game prepared to bring their effort to Kickstarter in order to fund its completion.

One notable planned feature of The Minstrel’s Fable, by the way, was the scale of its world:

12 Billion Locations!

The world map is a whopping 10000 x 10000 tiles. Each tile can be explored which opens another 11 x 11 tiled location – it’s like zooming in and getting a closer look! Dungeons, towns and keeps, special locations, and combat utilize this “zoomed-in” view. Yes, much like the Ultima games from the 80s! Only in TMF, EVERY single tile can be zoomed-in and explored, all 100000000 world map tiles! Again, a zoomed-in location is represented by an 11 x 11 tiled area. That’s 10000 x 10000 x 11 x 11 = 12.1 billion actual locations! And, that doesn’t include the underworld locations!

However, development on the project was halted due to a variety of roadblocks; the planned crowdfunding campaign never materialized.

Over the past six months, however, development on the game has resumed. Improvements have been made to its look and feel, and a new UI has been implemented. Music has been added to enhance the gameplay experience, and the command set — still keyboard-centric — has seen some overhaul as well. The most significant change, though, is the addition of what the developer is calling “Structures” to the overland map. Essentially, these are larger, tile-based representations of points of interests (towns, castles, etc.), which are scaled up based on the size of the “internal” area. So if a location is represented by an 11×11 tiled area, its structure will be a 1×1 tile on the map. A location represented by a 22×22 tiled area will take up 2×2 tiles on the map, and so on. In this way, the size of points of interest on the overland give a quick visual indication of the scale of the area they offer for the player to explore when entered.

Most importantly, though: The Minstrel’s Fable is no more. The game has been rebranded to Ultimax, and sports a new website to match. Best of all, the playable demo is once again live; you can sign up to play it today! Also available at the site are wallpaper-sized images of the logo graphic (above), and PDF copies of build documentation (for those curious to peek behind the curtain at the development process).

Stay tuned for more details; Ultimax will be coming to Kickstarter as well in the near(ish) future!