Spam Spam Spam Humbug 21 – Ultima Not So Forever

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One of my favourite apocalyptic images — if you can call it that — was written by columnist John Zmirak in an article entitled Lust for the Suburbs. Commenting on a variety of social issues that threatened to upset the social fabric of the West, Zmirak concluded the article thusly: “If it turns out that the geniuses running our banks and bureaucracies really have plunged our continent back to the status quo of, say, 1492, I will make my final pilgrimage back to the Holy City [New York; Zmirak has an affinity for the city – WtFD]. I’ll climb the stairs of the Chrysler Building, bring along my laptop, and I’ll keep on watching YouTube till the Wi-Fi flickers out.”

It was this passage I was echoing when I wrote the last line of this post from August 26, 2014: “…if the game gets shut down on the 28th…well, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to be in the middle of something in-game when the signal flickers out. We can hope, at least.”

I was speaking about Ultima Forever, Mythic Entertainment’s short-lived resurrection of the Ultima namesake. Initially pitched as a PC game, it was ultimately reworked and released on iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system. Android and PC versions were touted, but never materialized; the game’s servers were shut down at 9:08 AM (Mountain Time) on August 29th, 2014. The game had been released globally on August 8, 2013, after an extended period of beta testing in a handful of regional iOS App Stores…and so the definition of “forever” turned out, in this case, to be one year and twenty-one days.

It’s difficult to find a way to start talking about Ultima Forever, I find. I was really heavily invested in the game — personally, emotionally — and even now I still feel kind of impacted by the loss of it. Of course, what I’m feeling (and, to be fair, my level of involvement and investment in the game) no doubt pales in comparison to what the Ultima Forever team at Mythic must have felt when the studio was shut down on May 29th, 2014. I don’t want to try and put myself above that, and it has been with considerable relief that I’ve seen various people from Ultima Forever’s development team end up on different game design teams…some within EA, some at other companies.

Still…Ultima Forever was something I contributed to, in my own way. And I stuck my neck out for it, vocally supporting it to the Ultima community. Not that I’m not used to being a contrarian therein; I’m also a staunch defender of Ultima 9, after all. But reactions to Ultima Forever were…mixed, I suppose you could say. Some people despised the game, and even went so far as to label it a desecration of the Ultima IP. (I’m not exaggerating; Eurogamer’s review used that exact term: desecration.) Others greatly enjoyed the game, or at least the gameplay and story. The freemium layer — Ultima Forever was a free to play title, after all — was almost universally hated, and it deserved a lot of the criticism it got. We’ll talk about that more in a bit. But in reviews such as this one at at Massively, Ultima Forever was labeled a “joy”, and praised for being an excellent example of an RPG on a mobile platform.

Which it was, truly. Leaving aside the freemium aspects, Ultima Forever was an excellent game, in spite of being unfinished. I liken it to Galaxy on Fire 2 in some respects; it might be a bit light, content-wise, when compared to the PC games that very obviously inspired it, but within the context of mobile gaming it stands out as a truly excellent example of just what the mobile platform is capable of, and of the excellent gaming experience the platform can deliver when a game really pushes its boundaries.

In the Beginning: My involvement with Ultima Forever began in July of 2010, when Paul Barnett (who had spearheaded the Ultima Forever project and eventually became the GM of the Mythic studio) began reaching out to members of the Ultima fan community…I was evidently one of a few people he had contacted, and possibly the only one who responded affirmatively. (I seem to recall Dino the Dark Dragon mentioning that he’d been contacted as well, and that he’d declined Barnett at the time…but my memory of such things is muddy, as the song says.)

By September of that same year, after I had helped Barnett pull together a list of people who would be willing to serve as sounding boards for Mythic’s ideas and concepts for bringing back the Ultima franchise. That was always Barnett’s ultimate goal, what he considered to be his job: find ways to revitalize Ultima. Initially, his idea was a three-pronged approach:

1. Find a way to release the original Ultima games, DRM-free and for free, to the community (e.g. through GOG).
2. Find a way to release the original Ultima games on new platforms (e.g. mobile, console).
   1. Accompany this with an officially-supported History of Ultima website.
3. Develop and release a new Ultima game.
   1. At first, to test the vitality of Ultima in the modern market, a small-budget, online game was to be created.
   2. Further down the road, a larger-budget, single-player RPG would be considered…as would other projects to carry Ultima into other markets.

The first goal did come to fruition, more or less. All of the Ultima games are available on GOG, and on EA’s own Origin storefront as well. Not all of them were released for free, sadly, although at GOG you can get Akalabeth, Ultima 4, Savage Empire, and Martian Dreams for free, which isn’t too shabby. There’s a bit of a story about the process of actually getting the games up on GOG, and that might be fodder for another podcast. We won’t go into it just now, I don’t think.

The second goal didn’t really go anywhere, and this is something I’ve mentioned before. I’d love to see the Ultima games ported to mobile in much the same manner that the Final Fantasy games have been making their way to the platform. Not that it’s not possible to run most of the series on a mobile device anyway; we discussed that back in Episode 13. Still, it would be nice to have officially-supported ports to turn to.

The third goal…well, let’s talk a bit more about that.

The Initial Pitch: Barnett’s initial codename for what became Ultima Forever was, fittingly, Avatar, a game which he described thusly:

“In Avatar you are from the planet Earth, and you are drawn through the internet to the world of Ultima. There you are seen as a possible savior to the land, a possible Avatar. Your quest (if you decide to take it on) takes you through the world on a journey of self awareness and personal growth. You embark on a mission to build up your personal virtues. This is a world where the enemy is all inside you, it’s a mission to do the ‘right thing’ as you strive to show true, courage and love. On your quest you visit the eight towns, help the citizens, discover and best the eight dungeons, and meditate at the eight shrines. Your journey takes you across the oceans, into conflict with pirates, to the lost islands and ultimately to the Stygian Abyss. It’s a mission that takes you on the traditional heroes’ journey.

Avatar acts as a way to talk about the real and digital world we live in, how you can affect things far away from you in ways that may not always be obvious (much like carbon offsetting or recycling your trash, or communication through Facebook and Twitter). The virtual you is measurable, your digital dream avatar has a digital soul, an imprint that is as valid as anything you do in real life. There are no save points, no practice runs. Avatar is a metaphor for 21st century morals.

The intent was always to produce a re-imagining of Ultima 4 rather than a straight-up port; the focus was to be on choices and consequences, and the big baddie of the game was meant to be you. As much as was possible, it was supposed to be “the game your dad played”; an Ultima worthy of the label rather than an appropriation of the namesake. It was meant to have the tarot cards, the gypsy, the Eight Virtues, and the classical Britannian setting. At the same time, it was supposed to be something new; it was about Lady British instead of Lord British, it was more simple in its architecture (missing e.g. the world simulation features of Ultima 6 and Ultima 7), and it was being built (at the time) as a browser-based game.

Out of Saudi Arabia, And Into Fairfax: Let’s skip ahead.

In May of 2011, whilst still employed with Honeywell’s Industrial Cyber Security Solutions group, I was sent to Saudi Arabia, for a two-week project with Saudi Aramco. (If you’re curious, I left Canada on May 5th, and returned on May 19th). Then, only a week after my return to Canada, I hopped on a plane again, this time bound for Fairfax, Virginia. Of course, I didn’t say where I was going at the time, nor did I follow up on the promise to post pictures from the trip. (One commenter at the Codex did guess where I was headed, though.)

And so, for a couple of days at the end of May, a handful of Ultima Dragons got an advance look at the development of Ultima Forever.

I’m having a hard time recalling all the details of the weekend to mind. I remember that we met in a pub in Alexandria on the evening I flew out, and as I recall that went until pretty late. And then afterward, some of us — Dragons and Mythic developers alike — ended up in Joe Garrity’s basement, wherein we got a first-hand look at the Origin Museum. Joe had gone all-out, too; he had three (I think) computers set up running different ports of Ultima 4, and there was mead to drink.

The next day, we all met at Mythic. Therein, in a back room past a large, open space full of people frantically working on level design for Star Wars: The Old Republic, we found the Ultima Forever team — just a handful of them, really — who were waiting to show us their good work. It was a full day; we got to see a few presentations, discuss Ultima and the design of Ultima Forever with the Mythic team, and we got to play the game. It was still web-based then, although the graphical look and feel had largely been established. That went on until…pretty late. And then dinner with the Mythic people went on still yet later.

We only had the one day to preview the game, of course, before we all parted ways and returned to our respective homes. But it was an exciting opportunity even so. Of course, it was also only the beginning. The game was in for a number of changes.

A PC Client Appears: In late 2011, Paul Barnett reached out to me again, this time asking for a longer list of volunteers, who would serve as alpha and beta testers for the Ultima Forever PC client. That’s right: somewhere between May and October of 2011, the decision was made to move away from making a web-based game, and instead to package the game as a standalone PC title. I submitted a list of about sixty names in total, most of whom were in on the eventual alpha test.

We’ll talk about that in a bit. What I want to draw out here is that it was at about this point that I started seeing indications of the freemium pricing model creeping in to how Barnett spoke about the game. His idea for rewarding the beta testers, in particular, was to give them a huge bank of in-game credit, as well as a big pool of free items…and then never withdraw these when the game went live, of course, meaning (in his words) that upon launch, they’d be “playing for free, forever”.

Barnett and I also discussed how a special, in-game item for backers might be styled. I remember suggesting that the Silver Serpent symbol be used for this, since the ankh symbol was already fairly apparent on a lot of gear in the game. The other option that we discussed was the pointed ankh that graces some UDIC branding. It proved to be moot, in the end; no such gear was ever created, and indeed the planned rewards for the beta testers never materialized either…probably because the PC beta test never went ahead.

There was an alpha test; I still actually have the alpha client installed on my PC at home, and I think I have a copy of the installer saved somewhere. According to my email history, the download link for the first alpha client was sent out on July 12th, 2012 — the same day, coincidentally, that the game was formally announced for PC and iPad — and it ran for a few days. I didn’t actually get to play it all that much, although I was able to grab a few screenshots.

Now, it’s worth mentioning a word on the plot of the game to this point. Still intended as more of a straight-up reboot of Ultima beginning with the story of Ultima 4, Ultima Forever’s story at this time involved being enlisted to solve the theft of the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.

In some respects, there was nothing wrong with this, but as Sergorn and others pointed out (I gather Shadow of Light Dragon sent in a novel’s worth of commentary), this maybe wasn’t the best idea for the story…especially if it meant that the point of the game was to once again recover the Codex from the Abyss.

Sergorn’s take on things was that one of the Crown Jewels — perhaps Lord British’s crown itself — should have been what was stolen. In Ultima Forever, the power of the Codex was being used to keep the Gazer Mimirro and his daemon hordes at bay; the Crown would easily have fit into the same role, with its theft thus imperiling the realm. And it might have given Mythic some room to add depth to the Lady British character, since it would have introduced the opportunity for some introspection and doubt on her part about her fitness to rule.

And Then to Mobile: In October of 2012, it was announced that Mythic was being transitioned from an MMORPG studio to a mobile-focused studio. Ultima Forever was still being touted for PC at that point, however; German and Australian PC gaming magazines ran articles about it in November of 2012. The testing focus of the game, however, certainly shifted toward mobile at that time, and in February of 2013 the game was re-announced (as it were) for iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad.

This was also when it became apparent that the story of the game had changed. No longer was the Avatar to be tasked with recovering the stolen Codex; players would now have to unravel the mystery of the Black Weep, a deadly plague spreading throughout Britannia, consuming all in its path.

I happened to be out in New Jersey — on another two-week work trip — at the time this announcement came out, so I took the opportunity to drive down to Fairfax over the weekend. That was a good trip: I spent most of Saturday at Mythic’s studio playing build after build of Ultima Forever on the test iPads there…when I wasn’t chatting with Paul Barnett or Kate Flack, or taking pictures of Ultima Online and Ultima Forever development history. I also helped name a few items in the game, and stayed up way too late playing board games with the associate producer and some of his friends. (I also crashed on his couch.) And then, as if that weren’t cool enough, I was able to meet up with the good Mr. Ian Frazier for dinner in Baltimore; Mythic gave me an Ultima Forever cloth map to pass along to him.

Freemium Problems: Ultima Forever was soft-launched on the Canadian iOS App Store (and in a few other App Stores around the world) in May of 2013, with a global release slated for July. Richard Garriott gave it his best wishes (and later seemed to be quite enjoying the game; he even got a tour of the Mythic studios), and people around the world (because really, it’s not that hard to install an app from an App Store that isn’t your own country’s) began testing the game. And the feedback began to pour in. And a lot of that feedback was, sadly, negative…and most of it was centered on the freemium model used by the game.

When Paul Barnett first explained the freemium model in the game to me, I was a bit dubious…and at the time, all he was proposing was that players would have to open chests with keys. The game would either top you up with a small number of keys daily, or would possibly have lower-quality keys drop off of monsters as loot, and would of course also make keys available for purchase. But the idea was basically that you’d only have to spend keys to open the chests that would appear at the completion of dungeons.

I felt…hesitant about even this modest proposal, although in hindsight it probably would have worked. Sadly, apparently because EA wanted the game to be more monetized (or so I suspect, I should hasten to add), Ultima Forever as released also featured gear decay. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the cost (in keys, natch) to repair gear was really, really high…you could lose half of your kit in a single dungeon run, and it might take four or five dungeon runs to accumulate sufficient replacement gear.

And trying to run a dungeon without gear was…suicide, really. Gear really mattered in the game; you felt it, and hard, when your armour gave out.

So even before the game went global, Mythic began to adjust (downward) the cost of repairing gear. And not just once, but twice. They also adjusted (upward) the daily allowance of keys, started running key sales (and then not just one), and even delayed the worldwide release of the game in order to smooth out the economy issues still yet further.

They never really did get it right, unfortunately; even after the worldwide release, it was still something that Mythic tried to fix and make work; they finally just removed equipment damage from the game (mostly; if you died in a dungeon, your gear would still take damage). But it was, I think, too late.

(I still maintain that if they had just added the option to pay a one-time fee — even $10, which is high for a mobile game — to remove the key requirements entirely, Ultima Forever could have worked.)

An Ignoble End: As noted previously, Ultima Forever was released worldwide on August 8, 2013, culminating three years of tumultuous development. The game wasn’t finished; only two character classes (out of a planned eight) had been included in the game. Ship travel, present in the alpha, had been removed for the time being, and was slated to be re-added later on. Some of the towns and dungeons were just plain inaccessible; there was no way to reach e.g. Serpent’s Hold or the Isle of the Avatar. And even in the areas of the game you could explore, you’d occasionally spot a missing texture or a blank NPC portrait.

And just over a year later, of course, the game was shut down. And really, the writing was kind of on the wall by about February of 2014. That was when a new update for the game allowed all players to “complete the Quest of the Avatar”; I and many others took this (correctly, I think) as a sign that new content development had ceased. This update was followed, in late May, by a quick fix for the chat system in the game, and not even a week thereafter, Mythic was shuttered. Ultima Forever lingered for a couple more months, its status uncertain…but at the end of July, its fate was sealed with a formal announcement that its online services would be closed down.

A Great Mobile RPG: For all that we can criticize its freemium model, we shouldn’t lose sight of something important: Ultima Forever was a great example of a mobile RPG. And that’s something of a rarity these days; the RPG space on mobile is cluttered with…well, with games like Game of War: Fire Age, which isn’t really an RPG at all (it’s more of a light strategy game), for one, and with JRPGs as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with JRPGs; they’re fine and many people enjoy them. But there aren’t a lot of great Western-style RPGs on mobile, and the few examples that really stand out are either straight-up action titles with correspondingly shallow plots (e.g. Dungeon Hunter), or more in-depth titles with wonky controls (e.g. Ravensword, The Shadow Sun).

Ultima Forever offered a particularly rare blend of solid, easy-to-control gameplay and an engaging story and plot. Granted, it was a story that took a little while to get going, but I remember digesting much of it on what I dubbed Play Ultima Forever Day — August 28th, 2014 — and thinking to myself just how great it was. Of course, it was just as much fun to go ripping through dungeons alongside Fenyx, but…as we went, we found a story that just kept getting deeper, albeit one that was ultimately unfinished.

I really do wish Mythic had been given the chance to fully implement the plot of the game, which would have dealt not just with solving the threat of the Black Weep, but would have also looked forward to the corruption of Lord Blackthorn. (Blackthorn was alluded to in the game, as being somehow involved with a group of nobles who were fomenting unrest against the rule of Lady British, but his character was never actually added to the game. His castle was on the map, and when I was playing the game at Mythic’s studio it was open to be explored…but some of its scenes hadn’t been added to the game, so going through the wrong door would result in a crash to desktop).

One of Ultima Forever’s strengths was the way it handled group play. Grouping was totally ad-hoc; there weren’t guilds (at least not in a formally supported sense) or anything of that nature. Players would simply group up before heading into a dungeon or other area, and would share in the rewards of the instance. There was no PVP, which was frowned upon by some players…but adding PVP to the game would really have gone against Mythic’s design goal, which was to foster and encourage players to cooperate and help each other. Indeed, more experienced players could gain in certain Virtues by helping lower-level players get through dungeons.

The design of the dungeons, by the way, was pretty great. The plot-critical dungeons had fixed layouts, which took time to explore, and which were full of little secrets for more clever players to uncover. The side dungeons featured randomly-generated layouts, which I’ll grant isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, though it did serve to make them excellent locales for grinding (since it didn’t really feel like you were wandering through the same cave each time).

The Mage class was a bit overpowered; it was pretty easy to kite through battles flinging magic at enemies. In a neat touch, if you listened closely, you could hear Mages intone the Words of Power for the spells they were flinging at enemies (it wasn’t always easy to hear these over the soundtrack and the sounds of pitched battles, but the incantations were there).

And the artwork of the game was just gorgeous…and I don’t just mean the in-game graphics. The Virtue Cards (and the Major and Minor Arcana cards, for that matter) that were created for the game (and which were also used in-game) are excellent pieces of art in their own right, and some of them quite poignantly depict their associated Virtue (the Compassion card, for example).

What Remains: The artwork for Ultima Forever has slowly been finding its way into Ultima Online; the Vice vs. Virtue event they ushered in last year makes use of the Major Arcana, and I’ve been seeing NPC portraits pop up on the Ultima Online website now and again.

And, of course, the soundtrack is available on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play. It’s a pretty good soundtrack, though it tends toward a heavier style overall.

Finally, I do still have the PC alpha client installed, and I’ve been able to extract a number of things from the data files. I’ve also got various other bits and pieces of artwork kicking around in various cloud storage accounts; I’m going to attempt to collect those into one place, and then I’ll probably share them on the Codex.

Community & Patronage

We have a couple new patrons on Patreon this week: Chris Hopkins and Johnny Wood are our newest backers. Thank you, Chris and Johnny; your support will help keep the Ultima Codex going, and helps bring us closer to being able to upgrade its hosting. And upgraded hosting means more RAM, more processing power, and more storage space to host files for all of the awesome Ultima fan projects that are out there.

The newest Ultima Dragons are Phoenix Dragon, who signed up on September 9th, and Summer Dragon, who signed up on the 17th.

As well, there several new members have joined the Ultima Dragons Facebook group since our last episode: Frank, Randy, Tracy Hickman, Mathias, Scott, David, and Beau. Additionally, on the Google+ Ultima Dragons group, Alexandre has joined. Welcome and SPLUT! to all.

As always, this episode of Spam Spam Spam Humbug is brought to you by our Patreon backers; thank you to everyone who supports Spam Spam Spam Humbug and the Ultima Codex by that means. And, as always, a hearty thank you to our co-producers: Seth, Goldenflame, Chris, Dominik, Violation, Helgraf, Gronkh, Pascal, and Thorwan.

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Linguistic – Ultima Journeys

Music

Come With Me, Stranger, from the Ultima Forever soundtrack

Lifted Upward in Spirit (Skara Brae), from the Ultima Forever soundtrack