Cear Dragon is Reverse-Engineering the “Ultima Forever” PC Alpha Client
Back in the early days of Ultima Forever’s development, Mythic Entertainment (which I think at the time was still called BioWare Mythic) invited a select group of people to participate in an early alpha test of the game, using what was at the time a Windows-based game client. Obviously, the game never released for PC; development shifted to target Apple iOS instead, and the game was only ever in full release for a few months. Most of the participants that I keep in contact with held on to a copy of the PC alpha’s installer. I certainly did, and while it has no update or authentication servers to connect to, I do occasionally reinstall it to see if I’ve missed posting any of the beautiful artwork that can be found within its data files. (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)
Well…last week, Cear Dragon dropped something of a bombshell on the Ultima Dragons Discord server: he has been working on reverse-engineering the PC alpha client, with the goal of figuring out a way to make the game playable again.
Thus far, Cear has managed to locally emulate a patch server for the game, and has figured out some of the authentication issues too. In fact, the image above is taken from a video he uploaded which showcases him firing up the game client, starting the game, and proceeding as far as the gypsy questions that every new player would be asked on first launch. He can’t quite get into the game world proper, which is next goal. But it’s impressive, nevertheless, to see that opening sequence again after more than a decade.
Ultima Forever was certainly greeted with some measure of controversy by the Ultima fandom, but if you’ve been following the Codex since that time you’ll know I was a staunch defender of it, and that I quite enjoyed playing it for as long as it lasted. It would be nice to wander its version of Britannia again, and I do hope Cear is able to figure out a way to make that happen.
Squeee!! This is very exciting! Hope we can play this game again soon!
Hmm…i don’t understand how this can be considered Ultima at all.
Since I wasn’t already folllowing the Code and I have never played it, can I ask you what it is that you deem worthy in this game?
The game was made by actual fans of the series who tried to make a mobile game that was faithful to concepts behind ultima.
The game had virtue systems built in, much like how it was in U IV-VI. Yes, it had some mobile game components like loot boxes and premium currency, but you could play through all of the content easily enough without spending a cent. They kept the characters familiar enough while making a few changes (Chuckles is the spy master, Lady British is Lord British’s daughter). But it all worked. It felt like i was playing an Ultima game every bit as much as playing the Runes of Virtue games on the Game Boy or Ultima VII on the SNES.
They intended to fully flesh out the world and have all 8 virtue related classes. But EA never supported the team and actively sabotaged it. They (mostly) only beta tested it on iOS and said they couldn’t do a full release on android or PC. The game had functionally no budget and EA still canceled it in favor of Dungeon Keeper Mobile that basically forced you to spend real money to play.
The game was a fun mobile arpg and i’d love to play it again.
Thanks for the info.
What Kilthan said but to add to that Ultima IV is my favorite so it was fun seeing a lot of familiar characters and have another Ultima heavily focused on Virtues.
You can poke around on the Wiki to see what the quests were like https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/forever/The_Silver_Horn
Thank you!
Very nice! I never got to play it due to the IOS exclusivity, and it stings, considering I’ve played every other official Ultima game. Hopefully I can finally play it now.
It would also be nice if someone could do the same for Lord of Ultima.
Btw, the wiki is broken. I get “Too Many Requests”. Please fix it.